git-commit-best-practices

A guide to writing clear Git commits that follow Conventional Commits and repository rules. It also covers reviewing commit history and spotting breaking changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating or amending commits, reviewing a range of commits, or checking changes for breaking behavior.
Why use it?
It helps keep commits understandable, focused, and compatible with tools that create releases or changelogs.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/paulbreuler/limps/git-commit-best-practices
Any agent
npx skills add paulbreuler/limps --skill git-commit-best-practices
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/paulbreuler/limps

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,490 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00041 $0.02490
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01245
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00498
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00249

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5e9df9986e55, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

git-commit-best-practices scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/skills/git-commit-best-practices/SKILL.md · 284 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 284 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Git Commit Best Practices (limps)

Purpose

Guide the creation of clear, meaningful Git commits that follow conventional commit standards and repository-specific conventions. Ensures commits are atomic, well-documented, and integrate with automated tooling (release-please, changelog generation).

Scope

  • If $ARGUMENTS is "review-commits" or a commit range (e.g., HEAD~5..HEAD, main..HEAD), review existing commits and suggest improvements.
  • If $ARGUMENTS is a scope (paths or component), provide commit guidance for those changes.
  • If no arguments provided, guide commit message creation for staged changes.

Detecting Breaking Changes

When reviewing commits, detect breaking changes by:

  1. Parse commit messages: git log --format="%H%n%s%n%b" <range> (includes full body)
  2. Search for footer: Look for BREAKING CHANGE: or BREAKING CHANGE in commit body (case-insensitive)
  3. Extract description: Everything after BREAKING CHANGE: until:
    • Next footer (e.g., Closes #123, Fixes #456)
    • End of commit message
    • Empty line followed by non-footer text
  4. Example commands:
    • Simple: git log --format=%B main..HEAD | grep -A 10 -i "BREAKING CHANGE"
    • More robust: git log --format="%H%n%s%n%b%n---" <range> then parse each commit separately
  5. Edge cases:
    • Multi-line breaking changes: Extract until next footer or end
    • Breaking change in subject: Look for ! after type/scope: feat!: breaking change
    • Merge commits: Check merge commit message for breaking changes

Conventional Commit Format

Structure

<type>(<scope>): <subject>

<body>

<footer>

Types

  • feat: New feature (triggers minor version bump)
  • fix: Bug fix (triggers patch version bump)
  • docs: Documentation changes only
  • style: Code style changes (formatting, whitespace, no logic change)
  • refactor: Code refactoring (no feature change or bug fix)
  • perf: Performance improvements
  • test: Adding or updating tests
  • chore: Maintenance tasks (deps, config, build)
  • ci: CI/CD changes
  • build: Build system changes
  • revert: Revert a previous commit

Read the full file on GitHub · 284 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 284 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 5e9df9986e55

Subscribe to this mod's changes

git-commit-best-practices is a skill published in the GitHub repository paulbreuler/limps (10 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 2,490 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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