Copilot Generates Commit Messages on .com [GA]

[Akash1134]

GitHub Copilot now offers contextual commit message suggestions for file changes made on github.com—making lightweight documentation an effortless, integrated part of every commit. This feature was previously in public preview and is now generally available to all Copilot users. 🎉

When enabled, Copilot automatically suggests a concise, relevance‑focused summary of the changes you made through the file editor on github.com.

• Deleting a file continues to use the existing default: Delete <filename>
• Adding a new file with no contents continues to use the existing default: Add <filename>

Enabling Copilot-generated commit messages

Copilot-generated commit messages are available to users on all GitHub Copilot plans (including Free, Pro/Pro+, Business, and Enterprise).

• Individuals: You can opt out at any time via the “Copilot‑generated commit messages” toggle in your Copilot settings.
• Enterprises & organizations (including GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency): Administrators can opt in through enterprise administrator settings. Enterprises already opted into public preview features are automatically enabled for Copilot-generated commit messages.
• Commit metadata rulesets: If your enterprise has rulesets enforcing commit metadata, you will still see a default commit message for commits made in organization‑related repositories where those restrictions apply.

Your Feedback Matters

Join us in the comments below to share feedback, ask questions, or suggest improvements.

Start using Copilot-generated commit messages today and keep your commit history clean, consistent, and informative—without the extra friction.

[benjaminbach-kr]

Could it be possible to also enable some sort of flagging/guidance to adopt particular commit style guide?
Or is the guidance to try to do that as part of the repo's copilot-instructions.md?

specifically
https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/

as other integrations are built on that such as,
https://github.com/googleapis/release-please

[sheenyg]

Hello @benjaminbach-kr. We have looked into this, and it's unlikely that we'll be able to support incorporating custom instructions into the feature at this time.

[kamranayub]

You don't need custom instructions ("Prompt injection!"), you just need a checkbox for "Use Conventional Commit-style messages" since, you know, it's pretty standard across many OSS repos.

[AlexProgrammerDE]

I'm also interested in conventional commit being used for the commit messages.
I follow the conventional commit name style guide. My commits are prefixed with useful prefixes such as feat: and fix: to properly generate categorized release notes and indicate to users what a commit is for.
This feature does not respect the style guide my projects commit names follow and I would like to have the option for github copilots commit name generation to have an option to use conventional commit naming.

[Neodevils]

I wish this was costing $0.00 since this runs in GitHub itself.

[sheenyg]

Hello @Neodevils, this feature is free to use and does not consume any of your Copilot quota.

[Neodevils]

Okay, then all cool. What about Visual Studio Code. Do the team think about implementing it to there?

[sheenyg]

It's already there! @Neodevils - here's a link to a demo from the Visual Studio Code Youtube channel that demonstrates how to use Copilot to generate a commit message in VSCode

[Neodevils]

I know about that but that one costs 😅

[Neodevils]

I tried both on GitHub Desktop and VSC, it took 4% of usage in total.

[guest271314]

Git rid of this.

Far too intrusive.

[guest271314]

This should be opt-in, not on by default. Not everybody is a fan of using Copilot.

[ClaudioNunes]

Is it possible to change the language being used? Or, more generally, to specify a rule to be followed?

[Marcono1234]

This is probably a useful addition because in the past commits with the generic message Update <file> where somewhat common.

Though I have two concerns with this feature:

• Especially for small changes the commit messages are too verbose
  There is really no point in Copilot providing the "Extended description". Copilot just mentions the obivous in these cases, which is pretty redundant.
• It would be good if there was a mode between "automatically enabled" and "completely disabled"
  I would like a way to manually trigger the message generation, if I really want it. Often it happens that I open the commit dialog, start thinking about the commit message, then Copilot kicks in, and then I first have to spend time removing Copilot's message (and maybe even forget the commit message I was thinking of).
  So for now I completely disabled the feature again.

Related to this: It would be nice if there was an option to disable prefilling the commit message (regardless of whether provided by Copilot, or the default Add <file>, Delete <file>, Update <file>), and requiring you to provide one. So you don't accidentally forget to provide a meaningful commit message.
That setting could be opt-in I guess, keeping the current behavior as the default.

[kamranayub]

This is actually the way it works in VS Code which I prefer. It's not automatic, I have to click the sparkles button to initiate it (and I don't, for reasons mentioned above).