I'd look to Peter Naur's 1985 paper, "Programming as Theory Building," to remind us that writing meaningful commit messages is essential insofar as it is the discipline that confirms and preserves the intellectual "theory" of our work, distinguishing it from mere text production. In Naur's view, programming is fundamentally the activity of builsing theory, which he defines as the knowledge a person must possess not only to intelligently perform tasks, but also to explain them, to answer queries about them, to argue about them, and so forth. The source code is merely an artifact, and neither machine code nor source code contains the wisdom of knowing how the program works, or more critically, why the program was written the way it was instead of some other way that would have accomplished the same task.

The act of composing a descriptive and concise commit message compels the programmer to transition from the task of "path-making" (writing code) to the intellectual work of explaining the process, which is necessary to grok the change completely.

Reviving the theory of an existing program is a difficult, cult-frustrating, and time-consuming effort. When theory-building is neglected, we lose the intellectual foundation that dictates the program's purpose and design, trapping future maintenance efforts in a costly, confusing cycle of trying to deduce intent from artifact alone