commitlint

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Guide: AI Agents ​

AI coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, and others) write a growing share of commits. Your commitlint configuration is a machine-readable contract: agents follow rules that are enforced and drift on rules that are not. This guide shows how to make agents first-class citizens of your commit convention.

Install the commitlint skill ​

For tools that support the Agent Skills format (such as Claude Code), commitlint ships a skill that teaches the agent to read your resolved configuration, write a compliant message, and self-correct when the commit-msg hook rejects:

bash
mkdir -p .claude/skills/committing-with-commitlint
curl -fLo .claude/skills/committing-with-commitlint/SKILL.md \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/conventional-changelog/commitlint/master/skills/committing-with-commitlint/SKILL.md

For other tools, consult their documentation for where skills are loaded from — the skill file itself is tool-neutral.

No skill support? ​

Add this to your AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, or equivalent agent instructions file:

markdown
## Commit convention

This repository enforces its commit convention with commitlint.

- Read the rules before committing: `npx commitlint --print-config json`
- Validate a message before using it: `printf '%s' "<message>" | npx commitlint`
  (exit 0 = valid)
- If the commit-msg hook rejects a commit, fix the rules named in brackets
  (e.g. `[subject-case]`) and retry. Never use `git commit --no-verify`.

CLI primitives for agents and automation ​

CommandPurpose
npx commitlint --print-config jsonThe resolved configuration (rules, parser preset) as JSON
printf '%s' "<msg>" | npx commitlintValidate a candidate message from stdin
npx commitlint --lastLint the last commit
npx commitlint --edit $1Lint a commit-msg file (hook usage)
npx commitlint --strictExit code 2 for warnings, 3 for errors (instead of 1 for both)

For LLMs reading these docs ​

The full documentation is available in LLM-friendly form: