Changes have been submitted vs the changes have been submitted

Question

I was chatting today about one task with my colleague, so the dialog was:

C: you have it committed to the branch?

Me: Yes, there will be a new branch, i will ping you when my changes committed;

C: ok

Me: changes have been committed

From my understanding article 'the' should be used to express specificity. Let's say that i & my colleague are working on a task. This task is a context of our conversation. My colleague mentions "branch" with definite article "the". I know the rule that a noun mentioned for first time goes with indefinite article "a", but because "branch" belongs to task context it is used with 'the'. Is that correct to say that any noun that belongs to the known context gets 'the' article instead of 'a' always? Should I say

"the changes have been committed" instead of "changes have been commited"

? If this task had a specification, should i say

"the specification of the task is added"

? If this task had estimate, should i say

"the estimate of the task"

?

Answer 1

You should say:

the changes were committed

because they are specific changes that ideally you would have documented with your commit.

If you told me "changes were committed," I might feel the need to go to the repository and review your commit comments to see exactly what you committed.