alt Hacker NewsTrying out jj is super low-risk--since it uses git as a backend, you can test it out and bail back to git without any drawbacks other than a detached head state.
And I hope you do. It is so much better than git in every way. It enables working with stacks and the aforementioned megamerges so easily, allowing me to continue working forward while smaller units of work are reviewed/merged.
When I first tried to use jj, I wasn't entirely committed and switched between jj and git. Finally I hit a breaking point being fed up with stacks/merges and tried jj _for real_.
I recommend to give it a serious try for a few solid days and use it exclusively to really understand it. You won't go back.
The jj Discord is a very helpful place. Thanks to everyone there. Great article Isaac!
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> Trying out jj is super low-risk--since it uses git as a backend, you can test it out and bail back to git without any drawbacks other than a detached head state.
Btw, the risk of trying out other modern version control systems is nearly as low: most of them are compatible with git and you can convert back and forth. That definitely includes mercurial etc.
As others have said before, I used Magit in emacs and thay already feels like a superpower compared to git alone.
I’ve been loving it for personal projects. But for work, some of our homebrew tooling relies heavily on hashes. So any operation that causes snapshotting to occur tends to lead to breakage that utterly confounds Claude. I tried giving it rules and instructions to make sure to sync git up to the correct commit for the current snapshot, but as soon as the signal for that is too week in the context it blows a gasket trying to figure out what has gone wrong.
I tried out with a tiny project. It is the muscle memory built up with Git that kicks in and wish that JJ does it. I went through all the raw mistakes and doing things the hard way with Git, that, my mind plays trick trying to use JJ with the Git mindset. For now, I have mapped all of my Git aliases to JJ equivalent. But I would like to learn it the right way and do it the JJ way. This is going to take time, I’ll go slow.