Would be nice if AI just created a message based on the changes and the developer could override if needed. 

Strong idea—this would genuinely improve team discipline and traceability.

Additional improvements you could suggest:

Mandatory message enforcement (per environment/team)

Allow admins to enforce “publish with message only” via environment settings.

Auto-generated AI message (with diff summary)

Generate a commit-style message based on detected changes (e.g., screens, logic, entities modified), with option to edit before publishing.

Message history & templates

Dropdown with recent messages + reusable templates like:

“Bug fix – [module]”

“Feature – [description]”

“Hotfix – urgent issue”

Integration with versioning / pipelines

Messages should sync with deployment logs, Service Center history, or external tools (like Azure DevOps/Jira).

Validation rules

Enforce minimum length or keywords (e.g., must include ticket ID).

Preview of changes

Show a quick diff/summary before publishing so the message matches actual changes.

This would essentially bring OutSystems closer to a Git-like commit workflow, which is a huge win for professional teams.

For me, that would soooo not work.  I typically publish about every 10 minutes when developing something new, and all i could put in there is 'still not done with feature x, but just want to test what i have so far'.

a forced publish message on each of them would render the value of it almost zero, or people would start making blanket comments.  

I do see the value when touching existing code with small improvements or fixes, but even then, only if i want to 'tag' a specific version for later retracing my steps, or going back to the version before i messed things up.  

Other than that, all the value is in actually comparing versions and seeing what really changed, not what the developer felt like / remembered to mention.

This should of course be configurable, forcing this on everyone would definitely not work.
Unfortunately, my company is trying to enforce having a story/bug ticket number in the comment for auditing purposes (yes, the arguments have been had :)). Which is easy to forget, I publish a lot as well.

This should definitely be at least a user configuration option - whether the big green button defaults to "1-Click Publish" or "1-Click Publish with Message".

Some users will not want it, but hey, thats what options are for. Personally, I would like being able to default to having to put a small comment in every publish. Its on me to have the discipline to not just put useless comments.