Ask Claude to Write Your Commit Message from the Staged Diff

Writing good commit messages is important but tedious — especially after a long coding session when you just want to ship. Claude can read your actual changes and write a message that captures what changed and why.

> read the staged diff and write a commit message

Claude runs git diff --cached, reads every change, understands the intent — not just "changed line 42" but "added validation to prevent duplicate email registrations" — and writes a concise, meaningful commit message.

You can guide the style to match your team's conventions:

> write a commit message for the staged changes using conventional commits format

> write a commit message — keep it under 72 characters for the subject line
> and add a body explaining the motivation

If your team uses conventional commits, Claude picks the right prefix based on what it sees:

feat: add email uniqueness validation to registration form
fix: prevent race condition in order processing queue
refactor: extract payment logic into dedicated service class
docs: add API authentication examples to README

You can also have Claude commit directly:

> read the staged changes, write a good commit message, and commit

Claude writes the message, shows it to you for approval, and creates the commit — one prompt, done.

For even more automation, create a custom command at .claude/commands/commit.md:

Read the staged git diff and write a commit message following
conventional commits format. Keep the subject under 72 characters.
Add a body only if the changes need explanation beyond the subject.
Then create the commit.

Now /project:commit generates and commits in one step.

Let Claude write the commit message — it's read every line of the diff and remembers the context better than you do at 6 PM on a Friday.

via Claude Code