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commit-discipline

by harrymcdonaghSource

Use when committing work in Athena, when staged changes span more than one concern, or when writing a commit message — before running git commit.

Install

mkdir -p .claude/skills/commit-discipline-harrymcdonagh && curl -L -o skill.zip "https://agentskills.codes/api/skills/download/16875" && unzip -o skill.zip -d .claude/skills/commit-discipline-harrymcdonagh && rm skill.zip

Installs to .claude/skills/commit-discipline-harrymcdonagh

Activation

This is the description your AI agent reads to decide when to run this skill — the better it matches your request, the more reliably it fires.

Use when committing work in Athena, when staged changes span more than one concern, or when writing a commit message — before running git commit.
145 chars✓ has a “when” trigger

About this skill

Commit Discipline

Overview

House rule: one concern per commit. Do not entangle unrelated changes. Every commit in the log is one reviewable decision — an ADR acceptance, a feature increment, a fix — and later ADRs cite commits by hash as evidence (e.g. "commit 3687d8d" in ADR-0012). An entangled commit breaks that audit trail.

Message style (match the existing log)

Conventional commits, lowercase, imperative, with a scope in parentheses when one module owns the change; a one-line summary that states the decision, not the diff. Real examples:

feat(research): COMPARE mode, mocked build — cited side-by-side, no ranking (ADR-0012)
docs(adr): accept ADR-0012 — COMPARE mode, cited side-by-side over a named set
perf(find): widen FIND recall knobs for the 84-company corpus
fix(edgar): robust section bounds — pipe headings, page headers, prose citations
chore: silence alembic path_separator deprecation warning
  • Prefixes: feat fix chore docs refactor test perf
  • Common scopes: research, edgar, ingest, qa, adr, db, api, domain, retrieval, reference, repair
  • Cite the governing ADR (and section) in the summary or body when the commit implements one.
  • ADR acceptance is its own docs(adr): accept … commit, separate from the implementation commit.

Splitting entangled work

  1. git status and git diff first — know what's actually in the tree; leave other sessions' in-progress files (e.g. apps/web) alone.
  2. Stage by path for file-level splits: git add <files-for-concern-A>.
  3. Stage by hunk when one file mixes concerns: git add -p <file> (interactive -i is unavailable in Claude Code; -p works).
  4. Commit concern A; repeat for concern B. Verify each commit stands alone (git show --stat).
  5. Drive-by fixes discovered mid-task get their own commit, not a ride-along.

Red flags

  • "and" doing heavy lifting in the summary line ("add X and fix Y").
  • git add . / git add -A when the tree contains unrelated changes.
  • A feat commit that also reformats untouched files or tweaks docs.
  • Committing a migration in the same commit that accepts its ADR.

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