AI Agents · Lesson

Commit History and Diff Analysis

Walking commit history, extracting changed files, and summarizing diffs.

Why Analyze Commit History?

Commit history is a gold mine for agents: it reveals what changed, when, and by whom. Agents use commit history for changelog generation, code review summaries, developer activity reports, detecting risk (large changes close to releases), and understanding the evolution of a codebase.

from github import Github
import os

g = Github(token=os.environ['GITHUB_TOKEN'])
repo = g.get_repo('myorg/myrepo')

# Get recent commits on the default branch
commits = repo.get_commits()
print(f'Total commits: {commits.totalCount}')

# Preview the last 5
for commit in commits[:5]:
    print(f'{commit.sha[:8]} | {commit.commit.author.name}')
    print(f'  {commit.commit.message.split(chr(10))[0][:60]}')
    print(f'  {commit.commit.author.date.date()}')

Filtering Commits by Time Range

Use since and until parameters to get commits in a specific date range. Both take Python datetime objects. This is the primary tool for generating weekly/monthly activity reports.

import datetime
from github import Github
import os

g = Github(token=os.environ['GITHUB_TOKEN'])
repo = g.get_repo('myorg/myrepo')

# Last 7 days of commits
now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
last_week = now - datetime.timedelta(days=7)

recent_commits = repo.get_commits(
    since=last_week,
    until=now
)

print(f'Commits in last 7 days: {recent_commits.totalCount}')

# By specific author
author_commits = repo.get_commits(
    since=last_week,
    author='alice'  # GitHub username
)
print(f'Alice\'s commits last week: {author_commits.totalCount}')

# On a specific branch
branch_commits = repo.get_commits(
    sha='feature/new-api',
    since=last_week
)

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