Commit archaeology: the red flags

History is evidence written by people who were mid-task and did not know what would matter later. Three shapes account for most wrong conclusions drawn from it, all three ordinary in a one-line log.

Before starting, search the repository's tracked prose: a project keeping a war-story document at its root has the reasoning in a form commit messages never carry, so history is the fallback.

Red flag 1 — the empty-bodied commit

Most commits have no body at all. In the repository mined here the majority do, so the one-line subject is the entire written record — and subjects both under-claim and over-claim.

The file statistics are the real abstract. Empty-bodied commits found by step 2 below: