Assistant commit register
- Id
- assistant-commit-register
- Status
- Active
- Severity
- medium
- Detection
- deterministic
- Evidence grade
- community-observed
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-15
Currently signals low-effort writing.
What it is
Commit messages and edit summaries written in assistant register. The message assures the reviewer that conventions were followed, names the things that were not changed, and claims a quality it never measured. What it rarely contains is the reason for the change.
Why it reads as machine-made
The register comes from a model reporting back to whoever asked for the edit. Assurance is the natural closing move in that exchange and pure noise in a repository log, where a reader wants the reason and the blast radius. vale-ai-tells is the only taxonomy that covers this surface, with a dedicated rule family for commit messages that includes rules for unquantified claims, test enumeration and trailing justification. Wikipedia records the same shapes in edit summaries, where they show up more often than in articles.
Specimens
fix(auth): tighten the session check. All existing behaviour is preserved and the change adheres to the project conventions. All tests passing.
fix(auth): reject sessions older than 12 hours. Sessions minted before the window now return 401 instead of silently refreshing, which is what let the 3 August incident run for six hours. Two integration tests cover the boundary either side of the cutoff.
The assurances go. What replaces them is the reason, the behaviour change and the incident that prompted it. Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen.
chore(api): rename the handler. Functionality remains unchanged and all tests are green.
chore(api): rename fetchUser to loadUserProfile. The old name collided with the hook added in the June refactor and cost two people an afternoon of debugging on 9 July. Callers updated in the same commit, none outside this package.
A rename still needs a reason and a blast radius, and both fit in two sentences. Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen.
How it is detected
- Pattern
- \b(?:all\s+)?(?:existing\s+)?(?:behaviou?r|functionality|logic)\s+(?:is|was|remains|has\s+been)\s+(?:preserved|unchanged|maintained|untouched)\b|\b(?:adheres?\s+to|in\s+(?:full\s+)?(?:compliance|accordance)\s+with|follows)\s+(?:the\s+)?(?:project|repository|repo|coding|style|contribution)\s+(?:guidelines|conventions|standards|rules)\b|\ball\s+tests\s+(?:are\s+)?(?:pass(?:ing|ed)|green)\b
- Flags
- i
- Scope
- document
Who writes this way legitimately
Careful committers document invariants deliberately, and several teams require a line about what was left alone, which produces the same sentence for a good reason. Regulated codebases require a compliance note in the message. Junior engineers are taught to write the summary before the reason. Repository templates generate the assurance automatically, which puts it in messages nobody typed. Read the diff before counting a hit. The tell is an assurance the diff does not support, or a quality claim with no number attached, in a message that never says why the change was needed.
Model attribution
No product owns this register. It follows from the assistant framing of the task, not from any one vendor, and it appears wherever a model is asked to write the message for an edit it just made.
Platform notes
- wikipedia
- Edit summaries are the closest public analogue to a commit message, and the same assurance shapes appear there. The signs guide files them with communication intended for the user, not with the prose tells.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Active | Active but graded community-observed, because vale-ai-tells is the only taxonomy that covers commit messages as a surface and no measurement of the register exists. Wikipedia edit summaries carry the same shapes, which is corroboration of the pattern, not of a rate. Pattern verified on 2026-08-15 against both specimens and against three ordinary commit sentences, including one that documents a legacy column left in place on purpose. |
Sources
- 01vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rulescommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 02Wikipedia: Signs of AI writingcommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells