My Bots Made 433 of the Night's Commits

Description and use

The author found that 433 of the 463 nighttime commits were made by bots, correcting the misconception that he worked night shifts.

Problem

The author discovered that many commits in his blog repository were made by bots during nighttime hours, misleading the perception of his own work rhythm.

Outcome

The author realized that 433 of the 463 nighttime commits were made by bots, correcting the misconception that he worked night shifts.

Workflow

• 1. Run git log --all --no-merges --pretty=format:'%H%x09%ai%x09%ci%x09%ae%x09%an%x09%cn%x09%s' > commits.tsv to collect all commits.
• 2. Deduplicate commits based on (author date, subject) to remove rebase copies, yielding 3,463 commits.
• 3. Count commits per hour of day using the raw %ai timestamp, noting 473 commits between 00:00–05:59.
• 4. Inspect time zone offsets in timestamps; identify that raw timestamps are UTC while local timestamps reflect the machine’s zone.
• 5. Convert all timestamps to Istanbul time to accurately assess nighttime activity, reducing nighttime commits to 463.
• 6. Separate commits by author email to identify machine vs. human contributions; machines contributed 2,414 commits (69.7%).
• 7. Analyze nighttime buckets (00:00–05:59) per author; machines contributed 433 commits, author 30.
• 8. Review cron schedules of GitHub Actions to confirm actual run times versus commit times.
• 9. Conclude that nighttime commits are largely bot-generated, not author-generated.
• 10. Document findings and adjust perception of work rhythm.

Evidence

Merging every branch of the blog's repository gives 3,470 commits between 31 March 2026 and 8 October 2026: 192 days.

Source

The night total fell from 473 to 463 — 13.4 per cent instead of 13.7.

Source

Machines (6 addresses, 9 name signatures) 2,414 69.7%

Source

The 03:00 bucket holds 86 commits, and not one of them is mine.

Source