Pijul lets you describe your edits after you’ve made them, instead of beforehand.
Pardon my French, but about fuckin time.
On a big product, forensics matter. Not day to day, but often enough and if your metadata is rotten then you’re left with the oral history of the project as your only guide. And even that may not exist, depending on project structure.
Git has something similar called git-notes, but at the time I tried using it, it was really early-days. No idea how support is working for that now. You could also make an annotated tag, which has it's own "commit message", but it will show up with all other tags.
Standalone, that sounds like a commit message - which you make after editing the code anyway. (And possibly tweak/update with git rebase before pushing)
In that section's context, it sounds like naming a branch after having already started on it. In which case, that seems to me the tiniest bit less useful than git's ability to rename branches (git branch -m oldname newname).
On a big product, forensics matter. Not day to day, but often enough and if your metadata is rotten then you’re left with the oral history of the project as your only guide. And even that may not exist, depending on project structure.