[zarzavat]

Technically, nothing. But psychologically git commits represent a unit of completed work, whereas with AI agents what's needed is a kind of agent-wise undo history such that you can revert back to the state of the repo 1 minute ago before Claude did an oopsie all over your repo.

You can definitely use git as a backend for building such a system, but some extra tooling is necessary.

[gonzalohm]

Just create a new branch before you implement new features and if the agent messes up don't merge the branch.

That way you get the best of both worlds. The buggy code is still there in case it's needed but it's not in the main branch

[zarzavat]

Most of the time when I'm using Claude my working tree is already dirty because I'm mid-task. I usually try to do a throwaway commit before every interaction with Claude, but it's easy to forget, or to leave the "accept edits" mode on accidentally and my working tree gets corrupted. Also having to commit takes you out of flow because you suddenly have to deal with any new gitignores, which requires at least a glance at untracked files to make sure you're not committing anything you shouldn't be. I want to be able to undo the state of my working tree to the moment before a particular interaction with Claude, just like how I can undo a file.

[steveklabnik]

jj offers "jj undo" which will undo changes to your repo, and the "oplog", which is sort of like the reflog, but on steroids. It's one of the nicest things about it.

[skydhash]

> You can definitely use git as a backend for building such a system, but some extra tooling is necessary

Is it? There’s the stash for storing patches, the index for storing good hunks, branching for trying out different experiments. You can even use worktree if you want separate working directory especially when there will be changes in the untracked files.

Git has a lot of tooling for dealing with changes, directly or at the meta layer.

[1718627440]

git checkout @{1.minute.ago}