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Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

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Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#161

Post by BeetleB »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #143
steveklabnik wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does the former by default, and the latter if you configure it.

I have heard of jj. I have tried jj, I love jj but I couldn't get myself towards using it. This itself seems to me the thing which will make me push towards jj. So if I am correct, you are telling me that I can have jj where I can then write anything in the project and it can sort of automatically record it to jj and afterwards by just learning some more about jj, I can then use that history to create a sane method f…

> I can then use that history to create a sane method for me to create git commits and do other thing without having to worry too much.

It's easier than that. Your jj commits are the commits that will be pushed - not all the individual git commits.

Conceptually, think of two types of commits: jj and git. When you do `jj new`, you are creating a jj commit.[1] While working on this, every time you run a command like `jj status`, it will make a git commit, without changing the jj commit. When you're done with the feature and type `jj new` again, you now have two jj commits, and many, many git commits.[2] When you do a `jj git push`, it will send the jj commits, without all the messiness of the git commits.

Technically, the above is inaccurate. It's all git commits anyway. However, jj lets you distinguish between the two types of commits: I call them coarse and fine grained commits. Or you can think hierarchically: Each jj commit has its own git repository to track the changes while you worked on the feature.[2]

So no, you don't need to intentionally use that history to create git commits. jj should handle it all for you.

I think you should go back to it and play some more :-)

[1] changeset, whatever you want to call it.

[2] Again - inaccurate, but useful.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#162

Post by hn_acc1 »

bgwalter wrote: post #106
wseqyrku wrote: post #66

"Who needs git when [..]" No matter how that sentence ends, I weep for our industry.

That's nothing. Compare https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1956583412203958733 : "The phone/computer will just become an edge node for AI, directly rendering pixels with no real operating system or apps in the traditional sense ."

I usually stay off X. The number of sycophants in that thread is alarming.

I don't want "apps on demand" that change when the AI training gets updated, and now the AI infers differently than yesterday - I want an app the bank vetted and verified.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#163

Post by sshine »

Using LLMs as an extra backup buffer sounds really neat.

But I was trained with editing files in telnet over shaky connections, before Vim had auto-backup. You learn to hit save very frequently. After 3 decades I still reflexively hit save when I don’t need to.

I don’t forget to stage/commit in git between my prompts.

The new checkpoint and rollback features seem neat for people who don’t have those already. But they’re standard tools.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#164

Post by nevertoolate »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #126
voidnap wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want lessons learned put it in a wiki or a special branch. You already have the information in a commit. Moving that to another database like a wiki or markdown file is work and it is lossy. If you create branches to archive history you end up with branches that stick around indefinitely which I think most would feel is worse. > Main should be a clear, concise log of changes. No, that's what a changelog is f…

Commits aren't necessarily messy, but they're also not supposed to be necessarily clean. There's clearly two different work flows here. It seems some people treat every commit like it's its own little tidy PR, when others do not. For me, a commit is a place to save my WIP when I'm context switching, or to create a save point when I know my code works so that I can revert back to that if something goes awry during ref…

it is not a philosophical debate against the auto-squash. It is just auto-squash deletes potentially useful data automatically and provides zero benefit? Or what is the benefit?

1. pr message doesn't contain _all_ intent behind each change while the commit did cover the intent behind a technical decision. would you put everything in the pr message? why? it will just be a misleading messy comment for unrelated architectural components.

2. you branch from a wip branch - why? just. - now when the original branch is merged you can't rebase as github/lab messed up the parents.

3. interactive rebase before merge works fine for the wip wip wip style coding. But honestly wip wip wip style happens on bad days, not on days where you are executing a plan.

4. most importantly: you can read the pr message stuff if you filter on merge commits, but if you auto-squash you lose information.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#165

Post by nevertoolate »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #148
0xffff2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have literally never met a developer who does this (including myself). 99% of all PRs I have ever created or reviewed consist of a single commit that "does the thing" and N commits that fix issues with/debug failure modes of the initial commit.

Yeah, make it work. Commit. Build unit test. Commit. Fix bugs. Commit. Make pretty. Commit and raise a PR.

You never design a solution which needs multiple architectural components which _support_ the feature? I do, and would make little sense to merge them as separate PRs most of the time as that would mean sometimes tests written on the inappropriate level, also a lot more coordination and needs a lot more elaborate description then just explain how the set of components work in tandem to provide the user value.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#166

Post by NordSteve »

shepardrtc wrote: post #96
waffletower wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a colleague back in the day who would force push to main and just leave a "YOLO" comment in the commit.

At my last job, whenever a commit wouldn't build, we would blast it into a slack channel with an alert that included the comment and the name of the developer.

At one job, we had a garish chicken hat that lived in your office if you were the last one to break the build.

This was in the days before automated CI, so a broken commit meant that someone wasn't running the required tests.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#167

Post by bad_username »

jdlyga wrote: post #111

This is just junior level developer thinking. There's so much that this developer doesn't know that they don't know.

> I refactored all the sketchy code into a clean Python package, added tests, formatted everything nicely, added type hints, and got it ready for production.

The fact that type hints are the last in the list, not first, suggests the level of experience with the language

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#168

Post by fragmede »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #128
bgwalter wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nothing. Compare https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1956583412203958733 : "The phone/computer will just become an edge node for AI, directly rendering pixels with no real operating system or apps in the traditional sense ."

What's ridiculous is that second paragraph: "There isn’t enough bandwidth to transmit video to all devices from the servers and there won’t always be good connectivity, so there still needs to be significant client-side AI compute." So no real operating system, except an AI which operates the whole computer including all inputs and outputs? I feel like there's a word for that.

https://www.hypori.com/virtual-workspace-byod

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#169

Post by Cr8 »

red2awn wrote: post #154
kristjansson wrote: post #50

If it’s in the context window … it’s sitting around as plain text. I guess asking is easier than scrollback?

Technically it doesn't have to be since that part of the context window would have been in the KV cache and the inference provider could have thrown away the textual input.

possible - but KV caches are generally _much_ bigger than the source text and can be reproduced from the source text so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to throw it out
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