Early Preview: Commit Composer

[justinrobots]

In GitLens 17.2, we're excited to share an early preview of Commit Composer, a set of AI-powered features that help you organize your Git commits into clear, logical stories. We'd love your feedback as we continue developing it!

🤔 The Problem We're Solving

Every developer faces the commit dilemma:

• Commit rarely? You end up with massive, hard-to-review changesets
• Commit frequently with quick "save point" messages? You create a noisy history full of "fix typo", "wip", and "forgot to add file" commits that don't tell a coherent story
• Carefully craft each commit as you go? This disrupts your coding flow and still can't fix the fundamental issue that Git's sequential nature makes it hard to organize changes logically after the fact.

The reality is that during development, you often discover that a change you just made conceptually belongs with a commit from three commits ago, or that your recent commits would make more sense if they were reorganized completely. But reorganizing commit history manually requires complex Git operations like interactive rebasing, cherry-picking, and amending commits—operations that most of us don't want to spend our time doing.

What if you could commit however feels natural during development, then let AI organize your changes into a clean, logical story when you're ready for review?

✨ What Commit Composer Will Do

Commit Composer will analyze your code changes and use AI to:

• Organize related changes across files into logical, cohesive commits
• Generate meaningful commit messages that clearly describe what each commit accomplishes
• Create commit descriptions that provide helpful context for reviewers

The result? A clean commit history that tells the story of your development work—without the manual effort of complex Git operations.

🛠️ How to Use the Preview

There are two main ways to try Commit Composer in 17.2:

1. Generate Commits from Working Directory Changes

Perfect for when you have a bunch of uncommitted changes that you want to organize into meaningful commits.

How to access:
Initiate the Generate Commits with AI (Preview) command throughout GitLens:

• From the ... menu on the current branch card in the Home View
• By right-clicking the WIP row at the top of the GitLens Commit Graph
• By typing the command into the command palette

This will analyze your working directory changes and create a series of organized commits with clear titles and descriptions. For safety, your original changes are automatically saved in a stash.

2. Generate New Commits from Existing Changes on a Branch

Great for cleaning up existing commits on a branch before creating a PR.

How to use:

1. Ensure you're on the branch you want to re-generate commits for
2. In the Commit Graph, right-click the last commit you want to keep (this could be where your branch originated if you want to reorganize all commits)
3. Select AI Rebase Current Branch onto Commit (Preview)...

This will create a new branch (a safety feature for now) with newly-generated commits that describe all changes you've included from your current branch.

🔄 Undoing AI-Generated Commits

We're working on streamlined undo functionality, but for now you can easily revert these auto-generated commits using the GitLens Commit Graph:

Option 1: Reset and Keep Working Directory Changes

1. Right-click the commit you want to reset to → "Reset Current Branch to Commit..."
2. Select "Reset" or "Soft Reset" (depending on your preference)
3. Auto-generated commits are removed, but all changes remain in your working directory
4. Delete the backup stash if desired

Option 2: Hard Reset and Restore from Stash

1. Right-click the commit you want to reset to → "Reset Current Branch to Commit..."
2. Select "Hard Reset" ⚠️ (This permanently deletes changes—ensure you have the backup stash!)
3. Right-click the stash → "Apply Stash..." → Choose "Apply" or "Pop"
4. You're back to your original state

⚠️ Preview Limitations & Caveats

This is an early preview, so please keep these limitations in mind:

• AI accuracy varies - The quality of commit generation depends on the complexity and nature of your changes, and the provider/model you are using
• Current granularity is at the hunk level - We're working to get this down to line level changes
• Performance varies with repository size - Larger repos or complex changes may take longer to process
• Preview feature - Expect rough edges and potential bugs

Safety note: GitLens automatically verifies that no code is lost during the process and will error if any discrepancies are detected.

🗣️ We Want Your Feedback!

As this is a preview feature, your feedback is crucial for making Commit Composer better. We're particularly interested in:

• What types of projects/changes work well? Share examples of successful commit organization
• Where does it struggle? Tell us about cases where the AI didn't organize commits as you'd expect
• Workflow feedback: How does this fit into your development process?
• Feature requests: What would make this more useful for your team?
• Performance experiences: How does it handle your typical changesets?

🚀 What's Next?

This preview is just the beginning. We're exploring features like:

• More streamlined undo/redo workflows
• PR title and description generation based on organized commits
• Integration with issue tracking for more context in commits
• Interactive adjustment of AI suggestions

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Try it out and let us know what you think! Your feedback will help shape the future of how developers work with Git commits.

Have questions, suggestions, or want to share your experience? Comment below!