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Oak: Git for Agents
23 days ago
- Git requires full repository cloning before accessing files, causing delays. Oak offers lazy mounting, allowing immediate access to files without complete cloning, reducing latency.
- Oak is designed for agent workflows, featuring content-addressed storage, lazy hydration, and content-defined chunking for efficient handling of large files and parallel tasks without shared .git corruption.
- It supports branch-per-session with messageless intermediate commits and branch descriptions as commit messages, improving ergonomics for agents, and exports data to standard Git repos for portability.
The Git history command deserves more attention
13 days ago
- Git history is a new experimental feature in Git that introduces three subcommands: fixup, reword, and split.
- fixup allows staging changes and folding them into an old commit, then automatically rebasing all branches that contain that commit.
- reword updates the commit message of an old commit and automatically rebases everything on top without touching the working tree.
- split divides a single commit into two by interactively selecting hunks, rebuilding the stack on top.
- All three commands are atomic and avoid leaving the tree in a half-broken state by refusing operations that could cause conflicts.
- Unlike jj, git history does not handle conflicts as first-class yet, but the documentation suggests this may change in the future.
- git history offers many benefits of jj without requiring a full workflow switch, and it's part of the core Git distribution.
Git rebase -I is not that scary
12 days ago
- The author expresses surprise at the common fear of git rebase -i among developers, even those more experienced, and aims to demystify it.
- Running git rebase -i HEAD~4 opens a text file with a list of recent commits and commands (pick, reword, squash, fixup, drop), which is a plan for changes, not an immediate action; users can abort with git rebase --abort.
- Interactive rebasing involves editing instructions per commit (e.g., rewording messages or dropping commits), creating new commits while leaving old ones intact in git's object database until garbage collection.
- Safety measures include: git rebase --abort to bail out, the reflog to restore previous states (e.g., git reset --hard HEAD@{4}), and creating a backup branch (git branch backup-before-rebase).
- Conflicts may arise during rebasing, but they are resolved one commit at a time (similar to merge conflicts) using git add and git rebase --continue, making them easier than branch merges.
- The author advises using rebase freely on personal feature branches and pushing with git push --force-with-lease (preferable over --force for safety), while emphasizing understanding and care.
- The key takeaway is that developers should learn and use interactive rebasing to maintain clean branch histories, with the post encouraging beginners to try it and overcome fear.

Hasty Briefsbeta

version-control

Oak: Git for Agents

The Git history command deserves more attention

Git rebase -I is not that scary