[gdcbe]

Not sure what value it adds though. Isn’t it easier to type the cmds then to write all that?

If there’s a good product in it I’m afraid your examples aren’t selling it :S

Was first thinking it could have value for when you forget a cmd or when learning, but I think if you can come up with those technical instructions you can also remember the cmds …

[lolinder]

The thing I'm most excited for for technology like this is making voice control more feasible for more things. If you plugged a speech to text engine in front of this it could be quite useful.

[gdcbe]

True. Very true, nice use case indeed! Thanks for pointing that out!

[kurthr]

Seems like a way to make your CMS even more terrifying.

Like, oops not add I meant push, wait remove that! or was it rebase? I'll just reflog to get back to umm... wait what?

I guess the saving grace is that it'll do the most common things people usually want to do, but for some things english language just not specific enough (like law).

[mellosouls]

Not sure what value it adds though. Isn’t it easier to type the cmds then to write all that?

It's pretty obvious it's intended use cases include memory prompts for experienced users and translations from English requirements for inexperienced users.

It's even in the OP:

use natural language to get git to do what you want.

[cowsup]

But when the prompt is:

> add .gitignore commit with msg adding ignore and push

That's not very compelling. The main selling point of AI is using simple inputs to achieve advanced outputs that match what the user wanted.

If I can say "Commit my .gitignore file," and then it runs

git add .gitignore

git commit -m "Adding .gitignore"

git push [y/N] y

Then that's one thing.

But this looks like you still have to specify the exact message you want, and be pretty deliberate about what it is you're after. At that point, why not just learn, and write, the commands yourself?

[mellosouls]

I agree the examples could be improved, I assumed they were rushed due to the "quick and dirty" note; I recommend the OP address that by writing clearer, simpler examples, eg they could look at popular questions (that don't express requirements using git commands) on StackOverflow for inspiration.

[OddMerlin]

OP here. I love this feedback. I agree this is definitely something I should work towards.

Keeping the commands as succinct as possible as well as "natural language" as possible. Even the word commit might be too git-y?

Thanks for the feedback.

[veleek]

What happens when you try to run the command you mentioned?

[ilyt]

People are bad at Git, people don't want to read the Git book to understand Git, so for long time many people's workflow was "type quesion on how to do something in git into google and copy-paste first answer" (which generally worked).

So for developer using it 8h a day, yeah, funny toy, but might actually be useful for every other git usage when users don't want to understand graph theory just to commit some changes.

[UltimateEdge]

> People are bad at Git, people don't want to read the Git book to understand Git, so for long time many people's workflow was "type quesion on how to do something in git into google and copy-paste first answer" (which generally worked).

Should we really trust Google's search AI, which is also always under attack by SEO spam, to give reliable results?

I have about as much trust in Google's result page as in ChatGPT responses. I don't trust Google to give me exactly what I'm really looking for, so I force myself to look for a number of sources which corroborate a claim.

I am increasingly considering self-hosting a YaCy instance configured with a curated whitelist of allowed domains (in this case, I might add the GitHub docs and/or the Atlassian git docs pages to be certain that I'm reading valid and up-to-date instructions when searching for git-related topics).

[onion2k]

Isn’t it easier to type the cmds then to write all that?

Obviously it is if you know them.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

"gitgpt make me a sandwich" isn't going anywhere fast.

Understanding what you can tell gitgpt to do is extremely adjacent to knowing actual git commands.

[onion2k]

Understanding what you can tell gitgpt to do is extremely adjacent to knowing actual git commands.

It's adjacent but it's not the same. Knowing that you can get git to give you a bisect of two branches starting 3 commits ago with a short log description is quite different to knowing the command to do it.

[6510]

But if it could act like the helpdesk it would help a lot.

[ipaddr]

I would expect: repo sandwich created

[danwee]

A colleague of mine didn't know that it was possible to revert a commit without commiting (so, leaving the reverted changes in the staging area). In such ocassions you either a) search in google, b) read the manual, c) ask a colleague

But with a command line tool like Gitgpt I guess one could just do:

> gitpgt "revert commit without commiting"

and the command line tool would answer "git revert --no-commit COMMIT_ID_HERE". I think that's quite handy and way faster then options a), b) and c)

[klabb3]

> A colleague of mine didn't know that it was possible to revert a commit without commiting […]

> But with a command line tool like Gitgpt I guess one could just do:

>> gitpgt "revert commit without commiting"

This is a classic post-hoc curse of knowledge fallacy. I don’t blame you, this is something that people with really analytically strong minds struggle with, such as the fine folks who made voice assistants for Google, Apple and Amazon.

Asking someone who is trying to be overly helpful to do something you don’t know if they can do is at best meaningless (if it can’t do any harm) and at worst a really bad idea (if it can eg screw up your git repo). In your friend’s mind, it’s very possible that git can’t do this, and then who knows what the GPT will try to do instead to please you? This is the main crux of the problem.

Even if they think it’s possible but they don’t know the command, they don’t know if “revert without committing” is a meaningful sentence, perhaps git has another abstraction model and uses different terms. This is the spirit behind the expression “asking the right question takes as much skill as giving the right answers”.

GPT can certainly help explaining, summarizing etc, but it has a very limited ability to say no, and more generally pointing out when your mental model is wrong. I’ve had long complex “design reviews” with ChatGPT – it’s really good at going along with your assumptions, but it lacks the “spine” to tell you when your logic isn’t coherent, or that you have mutually exclusive goals, or that you’ve strayed “too far”, whatever that means.

Someone should write a long blog post about this paradox of helpfulness, I assure you it’s a real thing!

[donio]

Or it might answer with "git reset --hard" depending on the phrasing of the natural language version and the phase of the moon.