Merge Commits are Back (and Better than Ever)
After a long hiatus, we’re linking to merge commits again. We truncated merge commits months ago, because they didn’t provide any information beyond the shas of the parents, but now…
After a long hiatus, we’re linking to merge commits again. We truncated merge commits months ago, because they didn’t provide any information beyond the shas of the parents, but now we’re exposing the diff between them as an overview of what changed in the branch.
Essentially, what we’re doing behind the scenes is: git diff parent1…parent2
This page will become the basis for a more extensive code review system that, coupled with our current code commenting, will really provide a lot of value for large projects.
(If older merge commits aren’t showing diffs, it’s most likely that it got cached without the additional data)
Written by
Related posts

Racing into 2025 with new GitHub Innovation Graph data
Discover the latest trends and insights on public software development activity on GitHub with the quarterly release of data for the Innovation Graph, updated through December 2024.

GitHub Availability Report: March 2025
In March, we experienced one incident that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.

Vibe coding with GitHub Copilot: Agent mode and MCP support rolling out to all VS Code users
In celebration of MSFT’s 50th anniversary, we’re rolling out Agent Mode with MCP support to all VS Code users. We are also announcing the new GitHub Copilot Pro+ plan w/ premium requests, the general availability of models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, next edit suggestions for code completions & the Copilot code review agent.