Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things
Conventional Commits prioritizes commit type over scope, failing to serve developers' actual needs for understanding changes.
The author argues Conventional Commits, used by Angular, Electron, and Vite, misdirects focus by placing type (fix, feat, chore) before scope in commit messages. Scope—the affected component—matters most to contributors, debuggers, and incident responders navigating commit history. Type is often redundant (the description usually clarifies it) and restrictive (changes may combine multiple categories). The specification makes scope optional, inverting priority.
Conventional Commits promises automated changelogs, semantic versioning, and structured history, but these fail in practice. Reverted changes still increment versions; subtle breaking changes get misclassified; automated processes bypass code review when triggered by commit type rather than file diffs. The author advocates for scope-prefixed messages like Linux, FreeBSD, Git, and Go use: "subsystem: description." This approach, promoted at scopedcommits.com, separates changelog generation from commit logging and aligns messaging with developer workflows.
What HN community is saying
Commenters largely affirm the scope-first principle but diverge on practical utility. Top responses note that conventional commits add value through git emoji highlighting and breaking-change markers (feat!), despite the type redundancy critique. Several argue good commit messages need no type label: "Change the oil" beats "fix: change the oil."
Dissenters raise missing details in the author's argument—issue/ticket numbers barely appear, yet many teams require them for traceability and cross-linking with external tools. One commenter notes corporate change management mandates ticket IDs, making scope field replacement problematic. The thread shows consensus that scope matters more than type, but splits on whether conventional commits' structure provides enough value for automation and tooling integration to justify adoption costs.