Commits and plain-English summaries

The Changes page

Changes is a timeline of everything that shipped on the branch you linked, grouped by day. Filter it with All activity, Commits or Deploys. It needs a linked repository; see Connect GitHub.

Each commit shows its summary (or its commit message while there isn’t one), the author, a link to the commit on GitHub, and how many files and lines changed.

Commit summaries

When a commit arrives, Apperio asks an AI model to describe it in two ways: one sentence anyone can follow, and a technical note for developers. Summaries are written in the background, usually within a minute; until then the card says Writing summary…. If writing one fails, the card offers a retry.

Explain this change

Explain this change, on any commit card, asks for a longer explanation of what the commit does and what it might affect. Apperio reads the commit’s diff from GitHub to write it. The answer is saved, so opening it again is instant.

What the AI sees

To write a summary, Apperio sends the model the commit message, the list of changed files and an excerpt of the diff, up to 8,000 characters per commit. These files never contribute diff content:

• lockfiles (package-lock.json, yarn.lock, pnpm-lock.yaml);
• minified files, source maps, and anything under dist/, build/ or node_modules/;
• images and fonts.

Limits

• Per push: up to 10 commits from each push get a summary.
• On first link: 50 commits are imported and the 10 newest are summarized.
• Per month: each project has a monthly allowance of AI summaries. When it runs out, the Changes page says so, new commits appear with their commit messages, and summaries resume on the 1st of the next month (UTC).