Reality could also have been: the commit message wasn't as helpful. Or the message would have been but the file was moved, copied, the indentation level changed, or any number of things that destroys the connection to the original comment. The article sounds like it advocated treating the commit message as the primary means of documentation - which is hardly a good practice. Meaningful identifiers/function names, and comments for non-obvious code should come first. If someone prioritizes elaborate commit messages and a clean history before good code, the techniques outlined in the article might be useful, for sure. But it says: "A project’s history is its most valuable documentation." - which is, frankly, not true for most projects. And if it is true, it's a bug, not a feature.