commit-message

A guide for writing a commit message, the short explanation attached to a saved set of code changes. It emphasizes a concise subject and a body explaining the reason for the change.

In plain words
What is it for?
Reading staged changes, separating unrelated work, and writing an imperative subject under 50 characters with an optional explanation of why the change was made.
Why use it?
It preserves the context behind a change, which may not be obvious from the code later.

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/skilletmd/skillet/commit-message
Any agent
npx skills add skilletmd/skillet --skill commit-message
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/skilletmd/skillet

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 554 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 $0.00042 $0.00554
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.00277
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00111
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00055

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2160c5c12d01, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

commit-message 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.

skills/commit-message/SKILL.md · 64 lines

What it actually says

commit-message

The diff shows what changed. The commit message exists to say why — the context that isn't in the code and won't be in anyone's head in six months. This skill writes that.

When to use

Any commit worth more than git commit -m "fix". Especially before committing a change whose reason isn't obvious from the diff.

Read what you're committing

git diff --staged

Commit one logical change at a time. If the staged diff does two unrelated things, that's two commits — git restore --staged <file> to split them.

The format

<type>: <subject, imperative, under 50 chars>

<body: why this change, what it affects, wrapped at 72 chars>

Subject line:

  • Imperative mood: "add", "fix", "remove" — not "added" or "fixes". It completes the sentence "If applied, this commit will ___."
  • Under 50 characters. If it won't fit, the commit is probably too big.
  • No trailing period.

Type (conventional commits — optional, but be consistent): feat, fix, refactor, docs, test, chore, perf.

Body (skip it only when the subject is genuinely complete on its own):

  • Explain why, not what — the diff already shows what.
  • Note side effects, migrations, or anything a future reader would be surprised by.
  • Reference the issue: Closes #123.

Example

fix: stop double-charging on retried checkout

The payment client retried on a 504 without checking whether the
first request had already succeeded, charging some customers twice.
Make the charge idempotent, keyed on the order ID.

Closes #482

The diff alone would show a reviewer a new idempotency_key parameter. The message is where the why lives.

What to avoid

  • "fix bug", "update", "wip", "changes" — these cost a future engineer a git blame and a guess.
  • Restating the diff: "changed line 42 in auth.js" — they can see that.
  • Bundling unrelated changes so the subject has to list three things with "and".
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 · 64 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 2160c5c12d01

Subscribe to this mod's changes

commit-message is a skill published in the GitHub repository skilletmd/skillet (3 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 554 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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