I am a CTO and I actually have very little patience for people that obsess over minor formatting issues (use a linter if you care), commit messages, and other fringe issues. If that's the biggest issue you have in a team, amazing. You are doing great. But you probably have bigger issues. The focus of the CTO is on the big picture stuff. Like staying on top of technical debt and correcting people when they keep on adding more of it. And making sure people learn from their mistakes, focus on the important things first, etc.
The thing with commit messages is that they are mostly never going to get a lot of scrutiny. But there are exceptions to this; especially if there are audits involved or external contributors. And of course when making a pull request to an OSS project, it is good form to make a bit of an effort. It depends on the context. I tend to focus more on diffs and pull requests. Not on the cryptic one liners that may or may not describe some of the changes. The right unit of change is a pull request, not individual commits.
And all this of course was when I was still able to keep on top of the massive volume of change. With AI that's simply no longer the case and the volume of change is only going to increase over time. Human reviews are now the main bottleneck to getting code merged. AIs probably should be doing a lot of the reviewing, gatekeeping testing, vetting, etc. Especially when AIs also produce most of the change. It's likely a lot of things will slip through unless you get your house in order on guard rails and process that your AI agents need to follow. As a CTO, guarding quality without becoming a human bottleneck is now the main challenge and removing bottlenecks responsibly is part of the job.
BTW. making AI tools write good commit messages is actually be a bit expensive. Many AI tools default to just summarizing the first message of a chat session under the assumption that just one thing changed over the course of a session. Making the AI look at the actual diff is of course possible and not that hard (just ask). And it definitely yields better descriptions when you do that. But it also takes more time and the token cost goes up as well. I'm not sure that's actually worth the expense in tokens. I tend to not bother with this. But again; depends on the context.
I am a CTO and I actually have very little patience for people that obsess over minor formatting issues (use a linter if you care), commit messages, and other fringe issues. If that's the biggest issue you have in a team, amazing. You are doing great. But you probably have bigger issues. The focus of the CTO is on the big picture stuff. Like staying on top of technical debt and correcting people when they keep on adding more of it. And making sure people learn from their mistakes, focus on the important things first, etc.
The thing with commit messages is that they are mostly never going to get a lot of scrutiny. But there are exceptions to this; especially if there are audits involved or external contributors. And of course when making a pull request to an OSS project, it is good form to make a bit of an effort. It depends on the context. I tend to focus more on diffs and pull requests. Not on the cryptic one liners that may or may not describe some of the changes. The right unit of change is a pull request, not individual commits.
And all this of course was when I was still able to keep on top of the massive volume of change. With AI that's simply no longer the case and the volume of change is only going to increase over time. Human reviews are now the main bottleneck to getting code merged. AIs probably should be doing a lot of the reviewing, gatekeeping testing, vetting, etc. Especially when AIs also produce most of the change. It's likely a lot of things will slip through unless you get your house in order on guard rails and process that your AI agents need to follow. As a CTO, guarding quality without becoming a human bottleneck is now the main challenge and removing bottlenecks responsibly is part of the job.
BTW. making AI tools write good commit messages is actually be a bit expensive. Many AI tools default to just summarizing the first message of a chat session under the assumption that just one thing changed over the course of a session. Making the AI look at the actual diff is of course possible and not that hard (just ask). And it definitely yields better descriptions when you do that. But it also takes more time and the token cost goes up as well. I'm not sure that's actually worth the expense in tokens. I tend to not bother with this. But again; depends on the context.