A pattern I stole from a teammate at Linear that I now can't stop using.
My teammate Karri at Linear had a habit of writing commit messages that read like haiku. Subject, verb, consequence — three short lines, no more.
I thought it was a joke for the first month. Then I caught myself reading old commits and understanding them in a single glance, which had never happened to me before with any codebase.
The rule, as best I can reconstruct it: the first line is what changed in the world (not the code). The second line is the smallest reason. The third line is what the reader needs to know to read the diff.
It is slower to write and faster to read. The trade is good.