[benrutter]

Simple but pretty common use case: If you're ever looking at some pre-existing code and thinking "I don't really get why it's written like this?", you can get a lot out of looking through the git blame/history.

Often "weird design" is there for historic reasons around stuff like backwards compatibility. If your project has a well managed commit log, you can find the notes of whoever implemented it, possibly even with their motivation for doing so.

At the very least, you can find out who wrote that code and ask them about it.

There's a tonne of data in git histories - this article was shared a few months back and is an awesome example of some things you can do with git history: https://piechowski.io/post/git-commands-before-reading-code/

[sevenzero]

That actually is helpful, but it would require a git history that actually makes sense. I rarely encounter well thought out git histories. For me its often just dev ramblings or 10 word commit messages

[fg137]

If I can choose "badly maintained history" and "no history" I'll choose the former every time. That's even less of a problem when Claude can do a first pass for you.

[sevenzero]

Claude can smd