Sometimes a comment is appropriate. Sometimes a commit message is appropriate. Sometimes I need both. Often when dealing with legacy code I find neither. I'd be

Sometimes a comment is appropriate. Sometimes a commit message is appropriate. Sometimes I need both. Often when dealing with legacy code I find neither. I'd be happy with either. A commit message lets me tell a short story about a change that touches multiple locations in the code base. Maybe no one part of the change is all that tricky. A commit message also allows me to explain why I'm making the change, whereas a comment may explain why the code is the way it is. Commit messages and comments have overlapping use cases, but the Venn diagram is not a circle. $0.02.