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nine_kyesterday at 10:47 PM8 repliesview on HN

Imagine that you use jj, while everyone else who works on the repo along with you uses regular git.

Is it easy?


Replies

Machatoday at 1:41 AM

The biggest issue is my git knowledge is atrophying while my coworkers still know me as “the git wrangler” (mostly because most devs have never actually learned git, so any knowledge looks 10x more than theirs). So when a coworker comes to me with a problem like their local main now has 2000 commits that they’ve (or rather Claude Code has…) somehow accidentally re-signed locally and then the 20 commits that actually contain their work, I’m thinking this would be easy to fix with jj rebase but the best advice I can give them for git is to reset their local main to origin/main, create a new branch and then cherry pick their 20 commits to their new branch. Since that’s too time consuming they just checked out the repo again and copied their working copy over, which is the level of avoiding actually using git that the git CLI routinely inspires.

Some later googling revealed `git rebase --onto origin/main theirbranch main` was probably what they needed. Which I’m sure would have come to me quicker if I hadn’t dropped the git cli for jj 2+ years ago.

show 1 reply
joluxyesterday at 10:58 PM

Yes, that describes me at both jobs I’ve had since learning jj. Hence why I asked for specifics: I’m genuinely curious what other people struggle with, partially because I’d like to help them if I can, and partially because it gives me a better understanding of common pitfalls which helps when teaching other people.

stousetyesterday at 11:13 PM

Yes, that is the case for almost every repo I’ve ever used jj for. It is a complete non-issue. There is virtually zero friction.

tiltowaittoday at 12:12 AM

I do this all the time at my job, without issue. I think it's honestly easier than using plain git.

rtpgyesterday at 11:31 PM

yeah nobody "has to know", especially if everyone else is also rebasing etc constantly.

Balinarestoday at 10:56 AM

Yeah, trivial. Only difference my teammates see is that my commits are much tidier and scoped in a way that's easy to review and think about.

jgtroshyesterday at 10:58 PM

I believe this is the most common scenario, yes. If you're used to actively pushing and pulling from the same branche as your colleagues, you need to learn how to manipulate diverging changes and conflicting bookmarks, but other than that all the jj magic is limited to your local activity.

LoganDarkyesterday at 10:50 PM

I use jj all the time for pull requests, in fact I don't use regular git at all anymore, and it's perfectly easy. Not only can I easily keep all my pull requests properly synced to their base branches, but I can easily and very quickly address review comments, keeping the commit stack clean without having to manually squash or amend or anything of that sort. Honestly it's a lot easier and more efficient than git for me because of how much naturally follows rather than requiring explicit imperative fixups.