[mcny]

At $work, I noticed someone was regularly committing with just a dot . as a commit message. The problem was that this repo does not have automatic scss => css for whatever reason and there's a designated person who untangles the mess and fixes people's bad scss and regenerates the css files (among other duties). After about a few dozen times, they just started putting a dot as a commit message.

Point is bad commit messages are sometimes a symptom to a larger problem and as with this vendor it is often a process problem, not an individual developer problem. In my opinion, the main problem here is that management simply doesn't care she it doesn't empower leads and developers who should care.

[ZealousIdeal]

I agree such patterns are indicative of systemic issues. In my experiences, those process issues emit their own structured behavioral patterns. In your example, the "." commit is now a convention that indicates a specific process happened. I am not certain what the costs of fixing the root problem are, though I'd anticipate they could be expensive and difficult at this point given the time commitment to restructure the repo and automate the scss=>css. Whereas the expense of an esoteric "." commit appears relatively cheap given the need of a human to untangle the mess which cannot be automated away (without a redesign).