Get AI assistance for VCS commits

Last modified: 28 June 2024

This functionality relies on the AI Assistant plugin that requires an additional license.

For more information about licensing and enabling AI Assistant, refer to JetBrains AI Service licensing and Enable AI Assistant plugin.

Generate commit messages

AI Assistant can send your diffs to the LLM (Large Language Model), which will generate a commit message describing your changes.

  1. Press to open the Commit tool window.

  2. Click Generate Commit Message with AI Assistant.

    IntelliJ IDEA: AI Assistant generates commit messages

  3. Edit the message if necessary.

    IntelliJ IDEA: AI-generated commit message

Customize the commit message generation prompt

  1. Press to open settings and then select Tools | AI Assistant | Prompt Library.

  2. In the Built-In Actions section, select Commit Message Generation.

    The list of default rules for commit message generation prompt

  3. In the editor field on the right, specify the rules for commit message generation, like the required number of characters or a different language.

  4. Click Apply.

Edit and improve commit messages

When you have already committed your changes, you can still edit your commit message. Use AI Assistant to help you analyze and better describe the committed changes.

  1. Click in the bottom-left corner or press to open the version control tool window.

  2. In the commits pane, right-click the commit you want to update and select Edit Commit Message in the context menu.

    Context menu of the selected commit

  3. In the dialog that opens, click Improve Commit Message with AI Assistant.

    Dialog with an old commit message and the AI Assistant icon

    AI Assistant analyzes the committed changes and generates an improved message.

  4. Edit the new message if necessary and click OK to save the changes.

  5. If the commit has already been pushed to the remote repository, press to push the updated commit message as well.

Explain commits

AI Assistant can summarize the changes made in one or several commits.

note

This option is only available if you are using Git or Mercurial for version control.

  1. Click in the bottom-left corner or press to open the version control tool window.

  2. In the commits pane, select the commit or several commits you want to summarize, right-click them and select Explain Commit with AI Assistant in the context menu.

    Explain Commit with AI Assistant option in VCS log

    AI Assistant provides the summary of the selected commits.

    AI Assistant explains commit