Commit Conventions

Universal commit conventions derived from Conventional Commits 1.0.0 + Tim Pope + awesome-copilot/git-commit + a 200-commit empirical study. Project-specific dialect (domain proper nouns, custom trailers, workflow integrations like PDCA) lives in the project's docs/references/COMMIT.md — see §15 Dialect Loading.

TL;DR: type(scope): summary (≤100 chars, lowercase, imperative) + 1-2 line context + - bullets (avg 16 lines). No ## headers. English body by default. Atomic + leaves-repo-green + why-over-what.

0. Principles

A commit must satisfy four readers — humans and AI:

1. git log --oneline scanner — wants context from a single line (most common reader)
2. git blame <file> tracer — wants to know "why is this line here?" while debugging
3. git bisect hunter — wants to isolate the exact commit that broke production
4. AI agent — rebuilds context after /clear, reviews PRs, generates changelogs, answers natural-language history queries. Depends on grep + embedding search + consistent structure. Atomic units, domain keywords, English body, and explicit trailers are decisive.

The five principles below are the minimum that satisfies all four readers simultaneously. Return here when in doubt.