alt Hacker News> In 25 years of professional development I’ve never really had a situation where the commits on a branch would have helped me understand what was going on a year ago when the work was done.
My professional experience contrasts with yours. I've even worked at a company where commit history and PRs were so central to understand and explain changes that PRs were even used as the authoritative sources on how to implement features and use frameworks.
Maybe a slight misinterpretation of what I meant. The commit that goes with a PR is definitely useful context, but I’ve found more granular than that is seldom useful. Even big ones like “move from angular to react” - the details of someone getting something wrong in there don’t matter, it’s the scale of it that just makes me go “oh yeah, this is bound to be a mistake”.
Maybe different in other places, but after 15 years in my codebase, I’m still happy with a simple linear history.