>other than "advance the current task"

How do you expect someone to know what “the current task” was when they’re tracking down a bug 2 years down the line?

Then write that and link to the current task. That's the why. You don't need an LLM for that.

Perhaps this is about commit granularity. If keeping the history about advancing the task is not useful, then I’d merge these commits together before merging the PR; in some workflows this is set up to happen automatically too.

Maybe what we need is a pre-commit hook that prefixes every commit with the name of the branch it's being made onto