AI Killed Git Commits: So I Stopped Publishing Them
Today I shipped contenox 1.0.0. Not by pushing a tag on top of a thousand commits, but as a single commit into an empty repository: the whole tree, one signed tag, binaries built from that tag by CI. The 957 commits that got me there are still public, in the old repository, as history. They are no longer how the project is published. This post is about why, and about what went wrong before I had finished reading the result back. What a commit used to mean GitHub's workflow rests on four assumptions so old that nobody states them any more: A commit is a unit of human intent. Someone decided something and typed it. A pull request is a unit of review. A human reads the diff, because a human wrote it. History is provenance. Who changed what, when, and — through the message — why. Timestamps are labor. The contribution graph on your profile is a diary. All four were true in 2008. For a tree that agents write, none of them survive contact. What my repository actually looked like Some numbers from a tree you can inspect yourself: 957 commits in just over a year, most of them named Checkpoint , Fix tests , Snapshot WiP . Dozens on a busy day. The production Go grew from 17,267 hand-written lines to 134,040 agent-assisted ones. Measured, not estimated. The median file stayed the same size; the number of files and packages did not. At one point 530 uncommitted paths sat in a single working tree. Inside that blob, the file that carried the repository's own conventions had been deleted. Nobody noticed for days, because nobody reviews a 530-file diff. A commit stream like that is not history. It is a log. Reading it tells you nothing about what a human decided — the decisions happened in prompts, in agent declarations, in a policy file — and it tells you one thing with great precision: when the work happened. If you also do client work, a public commit stream is a timesheet you never agreed to publish. Review had quietly inverted, too. I was no longer reviewing commits. I was re