But commit messages can also be too fine-grained, at least if you are not into the squashing game. And a level of conciseness that is valuable in commits might

But commit messages can also be too fine-grained, at least if you are not into the squashing game. And a level of conciseness that is valuable in commits might be a little too short for truly meaningful context years later. My preferred pattern is some "why" in the message, as a soft "should", and a external reference to some potentially longer and perhaps not so fine-grained ticket/story/bugtracker-id as a much stronger "should". That's where longer form prose has its place, or some media, and most importantly after the fact amendments without the hassle of history rewriting. And once that pattern is 80% established, even the emotional outlet of an occasional "whoopsie" message can be totally worth the cost, if it's actually "whoopsie (WHYJIRA-12345)" Anything occasionally gets lost. (some languages have surprisingly useful decompiles..) It's probably best if all approaches are taken in parallel. And taken reasonably well (as opposed to gold plating), enough to be workable alone in a pinch but decidedly not fully redundant. Comments, commits and out-of-band tickets all have their place and neither is a good substitute for the others. Allow them to complement each other, and strive for just enough overlap to make losses somewhat tolerable.