The value of the space is whatever the user/team finds valuable.
You almost had the right idea there: the value of what this emits is really in the summary of diffs. I'm certainly not going to go through each commit and read the diff each time I look at the log, but I still want to understand what happened and be able to find individual commits. If extra information about the author's thoughts is just not available, I'd much rather have summaries than a blank log of "WIP" comments.
It's absurd to gatekeep commit messages to only "the thoughts of the author", even if that's what usually goes in there. A good diff summary might even be more useful than a ramble that doesn't mention important changes.
You almost had the right idea there: the value of what this emits is really in the summary of diffs. I'm certainly not going to go through each commit and read the diff each time I look at the log, but I still want to understand what happened and be able to find individual commits. If extra information about the author's thoughts is just not available, I'd much rather have summaries than a blank log of "WIP" comments.
It's absurd to gatekeep commit messages to only "the thoughts of the author", even if that's what usually goes in there. A good diff summary might even be more useful than a ramble that doesn't mention important changes.