I wager that "describe only what the code change does" was someone's attempt to invert "don't add the extra crap you often try to write", not some 4d chess instruction that makes claude larp like a human writing a crappy commit message.
Yes, this is a trend I've noticed strongly with Claude code—it really struggles to explain why. Especially in PR descriptions, it has a strong bias to just summarize the commits and not explain at all why the PR exists.
No, I think a lot of humans can explain why they're adding a new button to the checkout page, or why they're removing a line from the revenue reconciliation job. There's always a reason a change gets made, or else nobody would be working on it at all :)
> Write commit messages as a human developer would — describe only what the code change does.
That's not what a commit message is for, that's what the diff is for. The commit message should explain WHY.
Sadly not doing that likely does indeed make it appear more human...