May 24, 2026
Commitment issues, but make it drama
Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu
One coder’s cleanup trick sparked a “why not just use Git?” pile-on
TLDR: A developer proposed a way to let code changes get messy first and clean them up at the end using Jujutsu, hoping to reduce the stress of staying organized while working. Commenters immediately split between “neat trick” and “this is just old Git with extra steps,” turning the real story into a debate over whether the new tool is actually easier.
A programmer showed off a new way to clean up messy work in Jujutsu, a lesser-known code tracking tool meant to rival Git, and the crowd response was basically: “Cool idea… but why does this sound like extra homework?” The post argues that making neat, review-friendly save points while building a big feature is exhausting, so instead of staying perfectly organized from the start, you can dump everything into a big messy bundle and sort it out at the end—like separating laundry after it’s all on the bed. The author even jokes about naming the method exactly that.
But in the comments, the real fireworks started. One camp was instantly skeptical, with people asking the brutal question: isn’t this just Git’s old interactive cleanup trick with a fresh coat of paint? One commenter hit with the devastatingly short “So... git rebase -i?”, which is programmer-speak for “didn’t we already have this?” Another said the commands didn’t look any easier for beginners, which is not exactly the glowing endorsement fans of a “simpler” tool want.
Then came the deeper gripes: some users said Jujutsu still makes basic shared-workflow stuff feel clunky compared to Git, especially when lots of people are working together. Others nitpicked the article’s claims about one helper command, arguing the tool is smarter than the author gave it credit for. So while the post pitched a clever end-of-project cleanup hack, the comment section turned it into a classic tech food fight: promising new tool or just the same pain in trendier packaging?
Key Points
- •The article presents a Jujutsu workflow for reorganizing messy feature-development commits into a cleaner final history after most coding is finished.
- •It identifies drawbacks in using `jj absorb` and `jj squash -i` during development, including imperfect change assignment and potential merge conflicts.
- •The proposed method creates the desired commit structure first, then squashes all real work into one combined commit before interactively distributing hunks into the target commits.
- •The author argues this approach reduces the need to maintain strict commit discipline during active development and makes it easier to tidy up temporary or debugging changes in one pass.
- •The article notes a tradeoff that the resulting intermediate commits are not guaranteed to compile, which can make debugging workflows such as `git bisect` less effective.