Commit messages contain information about decisions taken and their underlying rationale, which can be valuable for solution reuse. However, effectively leveraging this information remains challenging as we lack a detailed understanding of developers’ specific needs. Our work-in-progress addresses this challenge through a survey of developers’ experiences seeking rationale information in commit messages. Here, we report preliminary analyses focused on needing and finding similar rationale information, suggesting that finding previous commits with similar rationale information (decisions and rationale) is important for completing development tasks, yet difficult and time-consuming in the current practice, which highlights the need for dedicated tool support. These insights can guide the design of future rationale-aware development tools.