I Analyzed 10,000 Git Commits — 23% Had Useless Messages

I ran a script across 50 open-source repos and analyzed 10,000 commit messages. The results were worse than I expected. The Numbers Quality Count Percentage Good messages 5,840 58.4% Vague messages 2,310 23.1% Bad messages 1,850 18.5% Almost 1 in 4 commits had a message that told you nothing useful. What Makes a Bad Commit Message? The Hall of Shame These were the most common offenders: fix update wip . changes stuff misc asdf Real examples from real repos: "fix" — fix what? Where? Why? "update stuff" — what stuff? What changed? "." — this is a real commit message. In a repo with 2,000 stars. "asdf" — someone was testing their keyboard The "Almost Good" Category These messages try harder but still fail: fix bug update readme add feature change config They tell you WHAT but not WHY. There's a big difference between: "fix bug" vs "fix: prevent null pointer when user has no email" "update readme" vs "docs: add API rate limits to README" What Good Messages Look Like The best repos consiste