ChatGPT Prompts for Git Commits: Conventional Commits Made Easy
ChatGPT prompts for writing clear git commit messages. Conventional commits format, atomic commit strategies, and changelog generation from git history.
The Prompt
Act as a software engineer who enforces clean git history practices on high-velocity engineering teams.
Write git commit messages for:
Changes made: {describe or paste the diff summary}
Repository context: {what this codebase is — helps calibrate scope}
Commit convention: {Conventional Commits / Semantic / free-form}
PR/ticket reference: {ticket or PR number — or "none"}
Scope of change: {feature / bug fix / refactor / docs / test / chore / performance}
Output:
1. Subject line (under 72 characters — format: type(scope): description)
2. Commit body (optional — when and why, not what — under 72 chars per line):
- Motivation: why this change was made
- Context: what would a reviewer need to know that's not obvious from the code
- Side effects: any non-obvious consequences of this change
3. Footer (Breaking changes, closes issue references)
4. 3 alternative subject lines (different phrasings for the same change)
For CHANGELOG generation — if given a list of commits, format as:
## [version] - date
### Added | Changed | Deprecated | Removed | Fixed | Security
- Change description (commit reference)
Constraints:
- Subject line must use imperative mood ("add feature" not "added feature" or "adds feature")
- Body must explain WHY, not WHAT (the code shows what — the commit message explains why)
- Breaking changes must be flagged with BREAKING CHANGE in the footer
- No emoji in the subject line (breaks some tooling and changelog parsers)
- Avoid: "fix bug", "update code", "misc changes" — be specific
Variables to fill in
-
{changes made}Description or diff summary of what changed -
{commit convention}Conventional Commits, Semantic, or free-form -
{scope of change}Feature, bug fix, refactor, docs, test, chore, or performance -
{ticket reference}Jira/GitHub ticket or PR number
How to use this prompt
- Paste your git diff summary to generate the subject line and body
- Use the changelog generation format at release time to produce release notes automatically
- Share the conventions section with your team as your commit message style guide
- Set up a commit-msg git hook to validate the format before commits are accepted
Commit messages are letters to your future self
A commit message written at 11pm on a deadline makes perfect sense in that moment. Six months later, when you’re bisecting git history to find when a regression was introduced, ‘fix stuff’ tells you nothing. The prompt’s constraint — body explains WHY, not WHAT — is the discipline that makes git history a useful debugging tool.
Imperative mood is a convention with a functional reason
Conventional Commits specifies imperative mood (‘add’, not ‘added’ or ‘adds’) because it matches how Git itself describes changes: ‘Merge branch X’, ‘Revert commit Y’. A commit log that mixes imperative and past tense is harder to parse programmatically — which matters for tools that auto-generate changelogs.
BREAKING CHANGE flags are how your users learn about API changes
For libraries and APIs, a BREAKING CHANGE footer in a commit message is the signal that downstream tooling (semantic-release, conventional-changelog) uses to bump major version numbers and generate migration notes. A breaking change that ships without this flag causes silent breakage for every consumer of your package.
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