It continually amazes me how averse people are to just explaining why a commit exists in the body of the commit. Is all this tagging actually easier to read than written prose? You don’t even have to write it anymore if the sight of your editor opening upon `git commit` causes some instinctual revulsion.

The problem is that usually we don't write the WHY in the commits... We tend to always capture the WHAT in the form of prose. And for agents, this is just more noise, since all they need is just the diff to reconstruct the WHAT.

I've never seen someone write decisions or the intent they started with in commit messages. Even the solutions today that auto-generate commit messages just summarise the diff.

This was helpful when humans were the only ones reading the history. But for agents its useless.

Would be curious to know if it works better than writing the Why as human-friendly paragraphs in the body of the commit message.

A few examples are the ability to query historical data and using each action line as a signal for other tooling to build on top but there are many others… you can check what Conventional Commits did in the past and what they unlocked only by introducing structure to commit subjects

> an open standard for capturing the WHY in git history

Agentic coding keeps reinventing coding.

That was my first thought.

> And then it hit me - the commit body has always been there. Completely underutilised.

Wait. What? This is the standard?

> Here is an example of how a Contextual Commit looks:

The format is key-value stuff. You can already use trailers for that. The syntax here doesn’t work with that stuff.

If you have already readh the “conventional commits” (pronounce with a sneer) specification you have already seen them. They’re called footers because they also didn’t know about trailers.

> No new tools. No infrastructure. Just better commits.

Okay, let’s cut right to the point..