Commitsmith
Forge Conventional Commits messages from
your git diff with one click — using any OpenAI-compatible API or a fully
local Ollama model. No telemetry, no server, no code indexing.
Works in VS Code and Cursor.
Features
- ✨ One click in the Source Control title bar generates a message from your diff.
- 🔒 Local-first. Point it at Ollama and nothing leaves your machine. No API key required.
- 🧠 Grounded & truthful. The prompt is hardened against hallucination and treats the
diff as data, not instructions (prompt-injection resistant).
- 🪙 Token-budgeted. Diffs are measured in tokens (tiktoken), with more budget given
to larger files and whole hunks kept intact. Oversized diffs auto-fall back to a
two-pass summarize-then-synthesize strategy.
- 🤔 Reasoning-model aware. Handles "thinking" models (qwen3, gemma-thinking,
deepseek-r1, gpt-oss, …): disables chain-of-thought where possible, retries when a
model spends its whole budget reasoning, and strips any stray
<think>/harmony output.
- 🧹 Noise filtering. Lockfiles, generated files, maps and binaries are dropped from
the prompt (still listed in the change summary).
How it works
Click the ✨ button in the Source Control title bar. Commitsmith:
- Reads your diff (staged first, falling back to unstaged).
- Builds grounded context — a change-summary table (files, status, +/- counts) placed
before and after the code, so grounding survives any backend truncation.
- Budgets the diff in tokens, allocating more to larger files and keeping whole hunks.
- Sends one request to your configured model and writes the result into the commit
message box for you to review and commit.
It is a pure, stateless client — no server, no vector DB, no code indexing. (That
decision is backed by research; see docs/superpowers/specs/.)
Install
From a packaged .vsix:
code --install-extension commitsmith-0.1.0.vsix # VS Code
cursor --install-extension commitsmith-0.1.0.vsix # Cursor
Then reload the window.
Setup
Run Commitsmith: Select API Provider from the Command Palette (or the Source Control
⋯ menu) to choose between Ollama and an OpenAI-compatible endpoint — or set it in
Settings directly.
Ollama (local, private — no API key)
// settings.json
"commitsmith.api": "ollama",
"commitsmith.baseUrl": "http://localhost:11434",
"commitsmith.model": "qwen2.5-coder:3b" // or any model you've pulled
Commitsmith calls Ollama's /api/chat with num_ctx (default 8192) so large diffs are
not silently truncated — a common failure of the OpenAI-compat /v1 path on Ollama.
OpenAI-compatible (OpenAI, OpenRouter, LM Studio, Open WebUI, …)
"commitsmith.api": "openai",
"commitsmith.baseUrl": "https://api.openai.com/v1",
"commitsmith.model": "gpt-4o-mini"
Run Commitsmith: Set API Key to store your key securely in VS Code SecretStorage.
For Open WebUI the base URL is https://your-host/api. Local OpenAI-compatible servers
(LM Studio, etc.) need no key.
Settings
| Setting |
Default |
Purpose |
commitsmith.api |
openai |
openai (/chat/completions) or ollama (/api/chat + num_ctx) |
commitsmith.baseUrl |
https://api.openai.com/v1 |
Endpoint base URL |
commitsmith.model |
gpt-4o-mini |
Model name |
commitsmith.temperature |
0.15 |
Sampling temperature |
commitsmith.maxDiffTokens |
3500 |
Token budget for the diff context |
commitsmith.largeDiffThreshold |
7000 |
Tokens above which two-pass runs |
commitsmith.maxTokens |
200 |
Output token cap |
commitsmith.ollamaNumCtx |
8192 |
Context window for Ollama |
commitsmith.requestTimeoutMs |
90000 |
Request timeout (absorbs Ollama cold start) |
commitsmith.systemPrompt |
(built-in) |
Override the Conventional Commits prompt |
commitsmith.ignoreGlobs |
lockfiles, dist/**, … |
Files dropped from the diff body |
Commands
- Commitsmith: Generate Commit Message — also the ✨ Source Control button.
- Commitsmith: Select API Provider — pick Ollama or OpenAI-compatible (dropdown).
- Commitsmith: Set API Key / Clear API Key.
Development
npm install
npm run lint # ESLint (type-checked, strict)
npm run typecheck # tsc --noEmit
npm test # unit tests (vitest)
npm run build # bundle with esbuild → dist/extension.js
npm run package # produce a .vsix
Press F5 in VS Code to launch the Extension Development Host.
Live integration check (optional)
npm run integration drives the real pipeline against live endpoints. Everything is
env-driven, and each test is skipped (not failed) when its endpoint is unset or
unreachable:
# Ollama
OLLAMA_HOST=http://localhost:11434 OLLAMA_MODEL=llama3.2 npm run integration
# OpenAI-compatible (test runs only when OPENAI_KEY is set)
OPENAI_BASE=https://api.openai.com/v1 OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-4o-mini OPENAI_KEY=sk-... npm run integration
# Reasoning models (opt-in)
REASONING=1 REASONING_MODELS=qwen3:latest,gpt-oss:20b npm run integration
On Windows PowerShell, set the variables with $env:NAME = "value" before the command.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md.
License
Apache License 2.0 © 2026 Anatoly Lazarev. See NOTICE.
