My Git history was a mess of 'update' and 'fix' – so I made AI clean it up
40 comments
·November 10, 2025twodave
Spivak
Yeah this project is great, it's exactly the kind of tedious work that should be automated by AI. Some weirdos are going to mythologize commit messages and MR descriptions like they aren't our industry's version of pointless paperwork.
h4ny
This feels like a step backwards and now people who never bothered to write proper, appropriate commit messages for others to start with can care even less.
I personally don't see what the use case of this is -- you shouldn't even be hired in the first place if you can't even describe the changes you made properly.
greazy
I've never seen a single character github username. I thought there was always a minimum number of characters!
fka
I've created my account ~16 years ago :)
JoshTriplett
Do you get a lot of misdirected notifications from people who write the wrong `@`?
fka
it's like, every day ;_;
andix
I know another single char user, and couldn't believe it either. I think possible options are a-z and 0-9, so only 36 people in the world got that lucky.
cube00
Perfect for [...] improving repository maintainability.
This misses the whole point of using commit messages to record intent.
At least with a bunch of "fixed it" commits I know what I'm in for. This only fools yourself and others into thinking the repository was well maintained.
nikeee
Yeah, "fixed it" doesn't provide any information that might be hallucinated.
Please don't use AI-generated commit messages blindly. Instead, use AI later when reading commit messages. It will have more context (following commits) to see what was actually happening. Having to guess whether a message was hallucinated by an AI won't help. If the message conflicts in its intention with what it isactually doing, you can spot the bug. You won't get that with AI messages.
Also, using AI commit messages will freeze it's capabilities in time, when creating the commit. When using AI at reading commit messages, you'll always get the latest options for analyzing the commits.
Just because it has more text doesn't make it a better message.
fka
Good point. The purpose of git-rewrite-commits isn’t to "polish" history or rewrite meaning, it’s more of a rescue tool for those chaotic early stages of side projects (like mine) where commits are basically "update again" for months.
In those cases, the "intent" was never recorded in the first place, so the AI is just giving some structure and readability to what’s already lost context.
It’s not about pretending the repo was well maintained, it’s about making messy histories a bit more understandable for humans (and future me) without rewriting the actual code or meaning.
cube00
> those chaotic early stages of side projects (like mine) where commits are basically "update again" for months.
I don't accept "chaotic early stages of side projects" is a justification for skipping out on writing good quality commit messages.
It wouldn't be acceptable in a well managed company so I don't understand why side projects would get a pass to become sloppy.
It's your side project and you're free to skip writing commit messages, but you need to own that decision and not blame "those chaotic early stages"
I've found taking the time to write good commit messages helps me as I can see what I've tried previously and pull out any older versions if I've found a new direction isn't working for me. It also captures my thought process in case I'm tempted to repeat the sins of the past.
milkey_mouse
> It wouldn't be acceptable in a well managed company so I don't understand why side projects would get a pass to become sloppy.
Because no one's paying you, and you owe your users nothing?
twodave
I think it’s a great justification. It’s a side project. It’s supposed to be fun. If you hate writing commit messages, though, of course you can always just commit with the amend option and force push. But in general I think side projects are better the fewer rules they have.
jghn
Not all git messages are equal. My $0.02 is that commit messages I write are for other people. Until I officially hand a branch over for other people's consumption, like a PR, if I'm committing the only reason is because I want to access my code on another machine. I'll put whatever junk I please in those commit messages. But then before I open a PR I'll collapse everything down into 1+ commits each with curated content and appropriate messages.
MangoToupe
I think that's perfectly fine on a branch. I don't see this being deploying on the main branches of any projects of note.
fka
Agreed! I've already added several warnings and disclaimers to the README :) It's really meant to be a "use it once or twice in your lifetime" kind of tool, not something to run on every project. Actually, mostly shouldn't.
acjohnson55
I'm guessing that the intent is deducible from the diff a pretty large percentage of the time.
cube00
I didn't find it too deducible when OP removed the acknowledgements section after another commenter called them out on the AI slop [1]
docs(readme): remove acknowledgments section [2]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45871258
[2]: https://github.com/f/git-rewrite-commits/commit/210ada7ec78f...
amake
Really? Almost always I feel the diff captures only the how, not the why.
UltraSane
Git commit histories should be immutable.
Smudge
only once pushed or merged to a shared branch.
mathstuf
They are. If you rewrite history, you get a different hash. You can do some shenanigans with git-replace, but those are usually for stitching history across gaps (like hooking pre-publish history to public release for internal archaeology at least.
What you actually want is a ban on rewriting tags or accepting branch updates to commits that do not have the current commit as an ancestor. These hooks do exist, but are not on by default (beyond the toilet paper protection of needing --force).
You also have to ban deleting branches because otherwise you just delete and push a new one with the same name. Maybe we should store topic branches in repos under refs/topics/ to distinguish integration branches from development/review branches?
fka
totally agree. in principle, commit histories should be treated as immutable, especially on shared or production branches.
this tool is not meant to rewrite public history or alter real project timelines. it's more of a utility for personal or experimental repos (or branches), the kind of messy ones full of "update again" commits that never had a proper history. that's exactly why I built it.
pton_xd
I think this is the beginning of the end of Github. Who has time to read through all these new vibe-coded projects and tools? The READMEs alone are basically essays. You can always get a chuckle or two if you read long enough though, so there's that...
"
Acknowledgments
- OpenAI for providing the GPT API
- The conventional commits specification
- The git community for powerful version control tools
"
The future of sharing code is probably dead. Everything is write-only now. Vibe it yourself.
ip26
Counterpoint: LLMs seem to depend on robust, stable, and easy to use libraries nearly as much as we do. Due to context limitations, vibe-coding a mega-monolithic project in one shot with zero dependencies would be a silly exercise. Therefore, there is still a use for sharing code, even if plenty of it is agentic.
ninetypercent
LLMs only "depend" on libraries because library usage is in their training set. Clearly they don't actually need to use libraries.
ip26
Using a library keeps the context window smaller than writing it all yourself. I also suspect the whole vibe-coding thing works best when most of the total running code is NOT vibe-coded, and follows carefully defined behavior the fast-and-loose parts can build on top of.
Otherwise, why bother to run your vibe-coded website on nginx? Just have the LLM spit out its own novel web server, its own novel TCP stack, its own novel OS for that matter.
cube00
Interesting that OP removed this [1] from the README and didn't explain why in their commit message or by replying to this comment.
[1]: https://github.com/f/git-rewrite-commits/commit/210ada7ec78f...
fka
honestly, I used to like writing README files before the AI (see my other repos), but I don’t like writing them anymore. GPT does it really well, it may have some mistakes but thankfully, you guys highlight them :)
cube00
> GPT does it really well, it may have some mistakes but thankfully, you guys highlight them :)
I'm disappointed in your justification that AI slop mistakes are acceptable because "thankfully" you can use other people to find them for you.
A great many stiff serious people (in my opinion) are writing very discouraging comments here. Don’t let it get you down. The whole point of hacker culture is to break rules. If that’s what you enjoy then to hell with anyone else’s opinion. I think if you’re more worried about commit history being pristine than the experience of writing code and solving problems then you’ve missed the boat that makes the profession meaningful. Similarly, though, if writing lots of high quality commit messages is your idea of a fun weekend, then go do that and don’t listen to me, either.