https://sumnerevans.com/tags/git/Recent content in Git on Sumner EvansHugoen-usTue, 02 Jun 2026 19:25:48 -0600https://sumnerevans.com/posts/software-engineering/stop-using-conventional-commits/Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:25:00 -0600https://sumnerevans.com/posts/software-engineering/stop-using-conventional-commits/<p>You&rsquo;ve almost certainly encountered <a href="https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/" title="(opens in new tab)" rel="external" target="_blank" >Conventional Commits</a> before. It may have reared its ugly head in the changelog of an open source project you&rsquo;ve used. It may have been the enforced commit format for an open source project you contributed to. A lot of people swear by it. I swear <em>at</em> it.</p> <p>Even though it is used by <a href="https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/main/contributing-docs/commit-message-guidelines.md" title="(opens in new tab)" rel="external" target="_blank" >a</a> <a href="https://electronjs.org/docs/development/pull-requests#commit-message-guidelines" title="(opens in new tab)" rel="external" target="_blank" >large</a> <a href="https://contribute.freecodecamp.org/how-to-contribute-to-the-codebase/" title="(opens in new tab)" rel="external" target="_blank" >number</a> <a href="https://jenkins-x.io/community/code/" title="(opens in new tab)" rel="external" target="_blank" >of</a> <a href="https://github.com/conventional-changelog/commitlint/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md" title="(opens in new tab)" rel="external" target="_blank" >popular</a> <a href="https://github.com/semantic-release/semantic-release/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md" title="(opens in new tab)" rel="external" target="_blank" >open</a> <a href="https://github.com/nuxt/nuxt/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md" title="(opens in new tab)" rel="external" target="_blank" >source</a> <a href="https://github.com/vitejs/vite/blob/main/.github/commit-convention.md" title="(opens in new tab)" rel="external" target="_blank" >projects</a>, Conventional Commits is an actively bad standard which <strong><a href="#focus-failure">encourages focus on the wrong things</a> and <a href="#broken-promises">fails to deliver on its promises</a></strong>.</p>