The Chat Approved It. Git Still Has No Receipt

Description and use

AI‑driven code changes often bypass human review, leading to undocumented commits, secret leaks, and policy violations. Explicit commit documentation, prompt redaction, lockfile ACKs, and code‑based policy checks restore auditability and security.

Problem

Cheap AI inference leads to missing human review gates, causing undocumented changes, secret leaks, lockfile tampering, and policy bypasses in Git workflows.

Outcome

Adopting explicit commit documentation, prompt redaction, lockfile ACKs, and code‑based policy enforcement restores auditability, prevents secret leakage, and ensures human review in AI‑augmented Git workflows.

Workflow

• 1. Draft commit message with trade‑off and decision text. 2. Append chat transcript as appendix only. 3. Redact and hash prompt files before sending to LLM. 4. Run lockfile ACK script to ensure any lockfile changes are reviewed. 5. Enforce policy checks in code (e.g., denylist hostnames) before executing tools.

Evidence

I put the tradeoff in the commit body. I link the chat only as appendix, never as proof.

Source

I redact the raw prompt first, without exceptions. I hash the cleaned prompt file second.

Source

I require an explicit ACK file in the pull request. No ACK means the CI job fails closed.

Source