June 5, 2026
Commit crimes, not commit formats
Stop Using Conventional Commits
Programmers are fighting over commit labels, and the comments are absolutely feral
TLDR: A programmer declared war on a popular way of labeling code updates, saying it highlights the wrong details and wastes space. The comments instantly split into camps: some called it useless bureaucracy, while others said those labels are vital breadcrumbs when old decisions come back to haunt you.
A spicy coding rant titled "Stop Using Conventional Commits" has turned a niche formatting rule into full-on comment-section theater. The author’s big complaint is simple: these rigid little labels at the start of code updates — things like "fix" or "feat" — put the least useful information first. In plain English, they argue developers care more about what part of the project changed than whether it was a bug fix, cleanup, or new feature. Their hottest line? Making the “scope” optional is like writing a sentence with no subject. Ouch.
But the crowd did not line up quietly. One camp basically said, “Nice rant, but this helps me remember why I did something months later,” with one solo developer arguing these labels become more valuable as projects get bigger. Another wave of commenters rolled in with “the real world is messy” energy: if companies are already shipping boring update notes like “Bug Fixes & Performance Improvements,” then an automatic changelog is still better than nothing. And then came the practical defenders, waving the bright red breaking change flag — one person said that little exclamation mark is exactly what makes dangerous updates stand out in their tools.
The funniest mini-drag? A commenter flat-out said the author’s example was wrong, suggesting the whole anti-label tirade might be built on a bad example. So now the internet’s split between “these labels are useless busywork” and “please stop touching my safety rails.” Classic developer drama: tiny punctuation, enormous feelings.
Key Points
- •The article argues that Conventional Commits is a flawed commit-message standard despite its use in many open source projects.
- •It says the format prioritizes change type over scope by placing type first and making scope optional.
- •The article claims scope is more useful than type for contributors reviewing history, debuggers investigating bugs, and incident responders handling outages.
- •It argues that bugs can be introduced by any kind of change, making labels such as fix, feat, or refactor less useful for log scanning.
- •The article states that commit type is often redundant because the description usually already indicates the nature of the change.