feat: add experiment type

[shiraz]

Add experiment Commit Type

Problem

Developers frequently create POCs and experimental features deployed to preview environments (Vercel Preview, Netlify Deploy Previews, etc.) for stakeholder testing. These commits may never be merged to master or released to production, but are currently labeled with feat: or chore:, which can be misleading.

Solution

Add experiment: as a recommended commit type to clearly distinguish experimental work, POCs, and testing implementations from production-ready features.

Use Cases

• POCs: Experimental features deployed to preview environments for stakeholder evaluation
• Testing & Analysis: Commits for testing purposes, performance analysis, or A/B testing
• Stakeholder Review: Features deployed to preview environments where stakeholders can test before production decisions

Benefits

• Clear intent: immediately identifies experimental vs production-ready work
• Better tooling: enables automated tools to filter/handle experimental commits differently
• Improved workflow: helps teams distinguish experimental work in commit history
• Semantic clarity: "experiment" clearly stands out from other types

Example

experiment: try new caching strategy for API responses

experiment(ui): test new dashboard layout for stakeholder review

Notes

This is my first contribution to this repository. Happy to make any adjustments as needed!

[shiraz]

@bcoe Hello. Can you please review this PR?

[bcoe]

Hello @shiraz thanks for the PR.

I'm a bit mixed on the semantics though.

On one hand, I think you should be able to use whatever prefix you'd like and works well for your team (this is meant to be a loose spec!).

However, to me it seems like an experiment can be attached to any type of prefix. You could have an experimental refactor, where you're trying out a new framework; you could have an experimental feature, where you're adding a dialog to your application that works differently than others, etc., etc.

I wonder if we could suggest a semantic for indicating that these are experimental in the commit message, without the experimental prefix.

Of the top of my head, feat(dashboard): add fancy new widget framework (experiment).

We could document this suggestion of labeling experiments like this.