Posted by tigerlily 3 days ago
I've been busy at https://ersc.io/ (and spending time with my family, and playing Marathon...)
From my knowledge there are three different takes on git being worked on which looked interesting. - JJ - GitButler - Zed
Zed version system doesn't have that much public info yet, but they wanted to build a db for storing code versions for AI agents. Not sure if this is still the direction, and I'm a bit skeptical, but interested to see what they come up with.
Even though git works well enough, I'm certain there will be another preferred way at some point in the future. There are aspects of git that are simply not intuitive, and the CLI itself is not up to standard of today's DX.
https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2025/08/jj-bookmarks.htm...
jj git init --git-repo my-repo
I think (but CANNOT PROMISE) that just removing the .jj folder will bring you back, but definitely take a backup of .git before you try this in case I’m wrong.
If you are _not_ in colocate mode, the .git folder is located _inside_ the .jj folder. So worth checking!
It isn't very hard to make a bash script to do it, but I have about six github repos, all of which frequently need to be put on a new machine. that kind of functionality would be cool to have out of the box.
for url in url1 url2 ..; do git clone $url; done
$ jj config set --user ui.paginate never
Why do this? Why can’t the very clearly smart people making things step 1/2 step outside themselves and think about it like they are the users they want?
Earlier they talk about the native format and how it isn’t ready… so that to start you need
jj git init
Early planning keys/plans imo but those rarely change so as to not accept your early adopters.
These seem like small things but to me it’s a warning.
2. The native format would be `jj init`. For precedent, see how uv dealt with its pip compatibility: `uv pip install` was obsoleted by `uv add`.
2. It’s almost like we have some established ways to denote arguments that are pretty popular… ‘jj init —-git’ for example? By using ‘jj git init’ I would expect all of the git compatible commands to be be ‘jj git xxx’ because that is a reasonable expectation.
This is a problem with the voodoo. These obscure nonsense commands only makes sense when you are accustomed to them. If there’s no reasonable expectation that you could just figure it out on your own. Go on vacation and come back and be surprised when you forget the voodoo. Not to mention that every tool has to have its own unique voodoo.
Almost like the professional world has figured out that made by software engineers for software engineers will never be popular. And then engineers don’t understand the effects of why you might want tool to be intuitive and popular.
The bigger picture here though: `jj git` is the subcommand that prefixes all commands that are git specific, rather than being backend agnostic. There is also `jj git clone`, `jj git fetch`, `jj git push`, etc.
For a different backend, say Google's piper backend, there's `jj piper <whatever>`.
This means that backend specific features aren't polluting the interface of more general features.
If the compatibility isn’t automatic… why would I bother with jj commands here at all? “Git with extra steps”
There is no extra step between `git push` and `jj git push`, they're both one step.
The issue is pretty obvious to me. GIT is the standard and that likely won’t change for some time. So if jj makes my git life better, awesome, but it’s just a wrapper and I need to know all the git voodoo now with jj voodoo on top, I don’t quite get it.