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.

For the generation of AI with comment, there is also an idea created for that here - https://www.outsystems.com/ideas/15424/odc-1-click-publish-with-message-generate-automatically-by-mentor/