[jrockway]

I'm a big anti-fan of this convention, but I'll quibble on some of the points. "what" is a good item for the first line of the commit. Not everyone has the luxury of shipping to prod from master; many people need to maintain backport branches, prepare releases, etc. Therefore, being able to quickly identify the commit you're looking to backport can be important. If one line of text can do that, then that's faster than reading the diff.

This doesn't mean a "why" shouldn't also be required.

Finally, I really dislike the specifics of conventional commits. "feat", "fix", and "docs" are not particularly interesting distinctions. Just put whatever you were going to put in parens and save yourself 6 bytes.