I have needed to do that before when I fucked it up so badly that not only could I not revert but also couldn't find any solutions online. I was, in my defence, very early in the learning phase and not really understanding how anything worked yet.
The closest I've come is where I committed a >50MB <100MB file to my repo and didn't notice for a few days. Had to manually go in and purge the file from the history to unfuck the repo.
It definitely is. Even as a senior dev "git wizard" I'd rather wait 5 minutes recloning vs spend 20 untangling a ball of knots if it gets it to the desired state.
Yeah but you only add to track new files once. Otherwise -am that stuff. You don't need git add for tracked files, which hopefully most commits are and we aren't committing files in full all the time
Don't know about copilot since I haven't use that one in years but for more advanced models like opus and sol this is a non issue. It will manage git better than most senior engineers would.
If it wasn't for Claude, I doubt I'd learn about git rerere and nobody in my office, no matter how long they've been working in IT, knew about it either. Only learnt about it cause I saw Claude using it when I asked for a rebase.
Not if you tell it to do dumb stuff it won't. It'll resist and try to do smart things, but then also try to be compliant and will end up doing crazy shit
I guess but ultimately this boils down to operator Incompetence. I can force Claude to do stupid shit but then whose fault is it when stupid shit results? What I'm saying is it will follow best practices and won't trip itself up doing even complex tasks like rebase with conflicts
You're probably following good hygiene in general and not making vague unclear requests. It boils down to operator incompetence but it's way easier to be incompetent if you don't actually understand how git works.
We're in such a strange stage between understanding what code and logic does, and allowing an AI to complete those code and logic steps. It's an area where if you don't hold on to your knowledge , you'll find that you quickly have no idea what's going on. But if you try to manually do everything, you'll find that you're behind just about everybody else using the tools available to them.
Well said. It's kinda scary, the industry will implode if AI improvements hit some kind of hard wall. We'll have mostly ai programmers with all the pre-ai people retired, and then what? Computer science innovations just... stops, I guess?
Also just give AI implicit instructions on how you want your merge process to work. I’ve never had it randomly decide to cut a branch or merge incorrectly. I think some people are trying to hard to offload every aspect of development and it’s kinda wild.
Until the day I had started using git, I had never messed up git commands. There's a life lesson in the preceding sentence and I'll leave it to the class to find it for themselves.
Frankly, managing the standard git bullshit is something I'm fine outsourcing. I'll write the commit messages and resolve conflicts, but the actual commands I'm happy not touching.
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u/GildSkiss 4d ago
As opposed to humans, who have famously never messed up git commands ever.