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If You Think YOUR Commit Messages Are Bad, Just Wait…

Sylwia Laskowska on November 23, 2025

Lately it’s been all conferences, front-end celebrities, and very serious topics. And honestly? I’m tired… Tired of ambitious topics - not of blogg...
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Adam - The Developer • Edited

Or my favorite is the messages when they first push something:

  • “ initial commit “
  • “ initial “
  • “ init “
  • “ first commit “

🤣🤣

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uratmangun

this is me before ai lol now im just generate it with emoji

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david duymelinck • Edited

I'm guilty.

You could write a book worth of a text to express that initial commit. I should start using 'See the README.md'

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Sylwia Laskowska

No worries, we’re all guilty 😂
Honestly, ‘See the README.md’ might be the cleanest initial commit message I’ve ever heard.

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xwero profile image
david duymelinck

If it contains enough information, it is valid. But we are not the best at documenting our code.

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Sylwia Laskowska

Agreed! Enough information is definitely the goal - but let’s be honest, documenting code isn’t exactly our strongest hobby 😅

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Rich Jeffries

Succinct and Accurate?! Guilty lol

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Sylwia Laskowska

If being succinct and accurate is wrong, I don’t wanna be right 😂

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Sylwia Laskowska

Hahaha yes, especially when it’s the first and the last commit in the whole repo xD

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Ashley Childress • Edited

Mine were always something like

  • "welp! THAT didn't work"
  • "scroll up. there's more"
  • "guess we'll try it this way"
  • "nope!"
  • "last one..."
  • "and I lied"

🤣🤣 I claimed the worst committer award years ago!

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sylwia-lask profile image
Sylwia Laskowska

OMG I’m crying 😂
These are elite commit messages - especially ‘last one…’ followed by ‘and I lied’.
That’s basically the universal developer cycle 😭💛

Honestly, I think you and I could easily co-own the ‘worst committer’ trophy 😂🔥

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Torsten Brieskorn • Edited

now it is a good day 😄

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Ingo Steinke, web developer

I remember using a f****ng swear word in a commit message once, and only once, to find out there was an automated bot service quoting that kind of commits on social media with random images of toilets. 😲🚽🤣

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Sylwia Laskowska

HAHA no way 😂🚽
A single swear in a commit and suddenly you’re featured in ‘Toilets Weekly’ thanks to an automated bot.
That’s legendary!

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Ali Farhat

😂😂

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Pascal CESCATO

initial commit and some minor fixes are by far my favorites… some kind of TL;DR for code.

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Sylwia Laskowska

Absolutely! Those two are the ultimate TL;DR of coding 😂
And as always - love seeing your comments, Pascal!

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Jason C. McDonald • Edited

My favorite from the repository at work...

i will kill you

That's it. That's the commit message.

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Sylwia Laskowska

OMG 😂 the truest expression of a dev losing an argument with their code.

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Louis Liu

I usually follow conventional commit rules, but sometimes I'll write some beautiful meaningless messages like:

fix: cannot upload file issue
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

I hope I won't have to spend time revisiting this commit again.

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Sylwia Laskowska

Haha I 100% feel this - we all try to follow the rules, but those ‘beautifully meaningless’ commits sneak in every now and then 😄
And yes, fingers crossed that future-you never has to debug that one again 😂

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shemith mohanan

These are painfully relatable 😂
My personal favorites from past projects were:
“why does this even work??” and “I’ll fix this later” (never fixed).
Funny how commit history becomes the real documentary of a developer’s mental state. Great post!

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Sylwia Laskowska

Hahaha yes, exactly! ‘Why does this even work??’ is such a universal dev scream 😅
And ‘I’ll fix this later’… the most famous lie in our entire profession 😂

You’re so right - commit history really is a documentary of our mental state.
Thanks for the kind words! 💛

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uratmangun

im using gitbutler and suddenly all the commit message is beautiful also really easy for newbie to git

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Luca Bennett

Good to know everything is now fully compatible with the M1 architecture. I’ve been holding off on updating Dreamweaver because of extension issues, so this is really helpful. Also appreciate the heads-up about reinstalling everything for the 2021 version, saves a lot of confusion. Wappler sounds interesting too, might give it a try.

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Jeremiah Smith

I've been there - like what more can you say "hotfix", "make it work", etc...

Recently I've been using Gitmoji recently for all my commits.
And - I actually think my commit messages are better now!

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Sylwia Laskowska

Haha totally! At some point all commits become ‘pls work’ variations 😅
And yes - Gitmoji is SUCH an upgrade. It makes everything clearer and way more fun!

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Sylwia Laskowska

Tiny update for everyone who enjoyed the chaos in this post 😅💛
I actually ended up building a small LLM in the browser that writes commit messages for you - fully local, no API, just pure JS + Transformers.js.

It’s very much a POC, but honestly? It was a super fun experiment.
If you want to try it: dev.to/sylwia-lask/i-put-an-llm-in...
🤖✨

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Fabrizio La Rosa

git commit -m "Your commit message" 🦥

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Sylwia Laskowska

Hahaha the most universal commit command ever 😂❤️

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Tayyaba Ameen

These are hilarious 😂

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Willie Harris

This article made me feel way better about my own chaotic commit messages.

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Benjamin Nguyen

It is so true! You need to program an AI to help there :). Voila, you can relax.

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Sylwia Laskowska

You’re right! Once AI starts writing my commit messages, I’ll finally have time to actually write code 😄

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Benjamin Nguyen

hahaha. It is so true.

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Thomas Broyer

"rollback the rollback"

At Google (at least), they call it a "rollforward"

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Sylwia Laskowska

Absolutely love it!!! Rollforward is honestly the best PR spin for ‘we messed up twice’ I’ve ever heard 😂🔥

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csm
  1. rust init
  2. rewrite in go
  3. rewrite in c++
  4. rewrite in python
  5. rewrite in rust
  6. complete!
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Sylwia Laskowska

HAHA this is the full developer spiritual journey 😭
Start in Rust, escape to Go, suffer in C++, recover in Python… and then return to Rust like nothing happened 😂🔥
Absolute masterpiece.

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Dan Jones

This is why I've been letting my coding agents write my commit messages. It always does a better job than I do.

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Sylwia Laskowska

Totally! AI writes commits, I write confessions 😂