Simon Willison built a tool to clean up coding agents’ commit messages

Simon Willison released commit-rewriter 0.1 on September 14, a small Python web app for editing Git commit messages. He built it while preparing Datasette’s security releases, whose initial messages included coding-agent clutter and references to issues in a private repository.

The interface lets you revise messages before applying the changes. When submitted, it first saves the repository’s current state on a timestamped branch, then rewrites the commits from the earliest edited commit through the latest one. That backup gives the user a way to recover the original history.