VisualJJ – Jujutsu in Visual Studio Code

VisualJJ lands in VS Code promising a clean, clickable view of your code history so you can ship faster without wrestling with Git. It sits on top of Jujutsu (a modern rival to Git) and Git itself, aiming to keep engineers “in flow.” The community? Absolutely buzzing. One commenter crowned the cheeky tagline “Git‑out‑of‑the‑way source control” as the perfect pun—and yes, the joy was real.

But the honeymoon didn’t last. Instantly, the open‑source alarms started blaring. Fans flagged not one but two free alternatives: jjk and open‑jj. That poured gasoline on a spicy debate: is it cool to make money from a polished interface built on an open project? One voice asked if it “sits well” to monetize “mostly off” Jujutsu’s core, even floating a revenue share to the original JJ creator. Cue the ethics thread.

Meanwhile, a reality check from the trenches: a dev who lived with JJ for six months loved it—until daily life intervened. Missing features like “pre‑commit hooks” (automated checks before saving changes) and quirks with “worktrees” (multiple working folders) reportedly broke AI helpers like Claude Desktop. Translation: cool new toy, but some workflows and AI tools trip over it.

So today’s vibe: pun lovers rejoice, open‑source purists circle the wagons, and pragmatists ask, “Will it work with my stack?”