Git commands I run before reading any code • Hacker News Board

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#341

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #85

pzmarzly wrote: post #3

Jujutsu equivalents, if anyone is curious: What Changes the Most jj log --no-graph -r 'ancestors(trunk()) & committer_date(after:"1 year ago")' \ -T 'self.diff().files().map(|f| f.path() ++ "\n").join("")' \ | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20 Who Built This jj log --no-graph -r 'ancestors(trunk()) & ~merges()' \ -T 'self.author().name() ++ "\n"' \ | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr Where Do Bugs Cluster jj log --no-grap…

I don’t understand how people can remember all these custom scripting languages. I can’t even remember most git flags, I’m ecstatic when I remember how to iterate over arrays in “jq”, I can’t fathom how people remember these types of syntaxes.

People naturally remember what they use frequently. For things they use infrequently, they search on-line and/or read the friendly manual.

And yes, I'm also ecstatic when I manage to iterate over anything in `jq` without giving up and reaching for online reference. For `git`, functionality I use divides neatly into "things I do at least every week or two" and "things that make me reach for the git book every single time".

I mean, that was true until ~year or so. Now, I just have an LLM on speed dial. `howto do xyz in $tool`, `wtf is git --blah`, `oneliner for frobbing the widget`, etc.

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#342

Post by cynicalsecurity » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 7:42 PM UTC

pzmarzly wrote: post #3

Jujutsu equivalents, if anyone is curious: What Changes the Most jj log --no-graph -r 'ancestors(trunk()) & committer_date(after:"1 year ago")' \ -T 'self.diff().files().map(|f| f.path() ++ "\n").join("")' \ | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20 Who Built This jj log --no-graph -r 'ancestors(trunk()) & ~merges()' \ -T 'self.author().name() ++ "\n"' \ | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr Where Do Bugs Cluster jj log --no-grap…

Not interested, thank you.

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#343

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC

dgunay wrote: post #321

moritzwarhier wrote: post #281

Interesting ideas, but some to me seem very overgeneralizef, e.g.: > How Often Is the Team Firefighting > git log --oneline --since="1 year ago" | grep -iE 'revert|hotfix|emergency|rollback > Crisis patterns are easy to read. Either they’re there or they’re not. I disagree with the last two quoted sentences, and also, they sound like an LLM.

This one was funny to me because sure, it was accurate for my particular codebase, but also anyone paying attention to the company Slack would already know how often fires happen.

[deleted]

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#344

Post by agateau » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

PUSH_AX wrote: post #246

xp84 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useless? So you never use “git annotate” or your IDE to see who wrote a line of code whose purpose puzzles you, and go to the commit message to see what they were trying to accomplish? This is invaluable to me as long as commit messages are clear. As a manager, one of the first things I do is make sure that the PR titles (the PR text becomes the commit messages in squash-merging workflows) at minimum begin with a tic…

> Useless? So you never use “git annotate” or your IDE to see who wrote a line of code whose purpose puzzles you, and go to the commit message to see what they were trying to accomplish? Personally no, the code is the "truth". If I need more I'm going to open a dialog with the author, not spend time trying to interpret a 7 word commit message, "good" or otherwise.

The code is the present truth, the commit messages can inform you about how it got turned into this truth. Interestingly, I recently wrote a short article about this: https://agateau.com/2026/on-commit-messages/

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#345

Post by cratermoon » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

This is the premise of the excellent book Your Code as a Crime Scene. The history and structure of the codebase reveals a wealth of information.

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#346

Post by ivanjermakov » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

When at work we migrated to monorepo, there was an implicit decision to drop commit history. I was the loudest one to make everyone understand how important it is.

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#347

Post by rjh29 » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 7:56 PM UTC

deno wrote: post #322

rjh29 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the dvorak of git... Maybe more efficient but incompatible with everyone else and a very loud vocal minority. You can find this pattern again and again. How many redditors say 120fps is essential for gaming or absolutely require a mechanical keyboard?

I mean let's not be hasty. Mechanical keyboards used to be just normal keyboards when computers were still computers.

That is a fair argument. I don't know why they dropped out of favour - price? Noise?

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#348

Post by joshstrange » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

kevstev wrote: post #333

Aperocky wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also - be careful of automated workflow that uses a single persons credential.. skews this by a lot.

Once word got out that a report was going up to a department head around commit frequency, a few of us started to make "backup commits" to boost our stats. Whether it be dev server config files (just in case!), local dev setups, whatever.. just something that changed enough on its own but would produce a steady stream of commits, while having some potential use case, however unlikely it was to actually be needed. Mod…

Been there. At a company where KPIs became all the rage they asked each department to come up with KPIs to report on. The eng/dev department pushed back a bit saying there aren't any easy KPIs to surface and anything we did would either be trivial to game and/or would result in a bunch of extra work to track (like needing to add a ton of metadata to various tickets/processes to tie it all together). They didn't care and we settled on a bunch of BS metrics that we all knew were BS and trivial to game.

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#349

Post by perlgeek » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #147

I ran these commands on a number of codebases I work on and I have to say they paint a very different picture than the reality I know to be true. > git shortlog -sn --no-merges Is the most egregious. In one codebase there is a developer's name at the top of the list who outpaced the number 2 by almost 3x the number of commits. That developer no longer works at the company? Crisis? Nope, the opposite. The developer wa…

I think OP's context is: they get called to help troubled projects. Often the people that hired them might not know where exactly the trouble comes from.

If you look at a code base that's not really in trouble, these commands don't reveal the source of the trouble, because there might be none.

Re: Git commands I run before reading any code

#350

Post by kelnos » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

I really wanted to like this. The author presents a well-thought-out rationale for what conclusions to draw, but I'm skeptical. Commit counts aren't a great signal: yes, the person with the highest night be the person who built it or knows the most about it, but that could also be the person who is sloppy with commits (when they don't squash), or someone who makes a lot of mistakes and has to go back and fix them.

The grep for bugs is not particularly comprehensive: it will pick up some things that aren't bugs, and will miss a bunch of things too.

The "project accelerating or dying" seems odd to me. By definition, the bulk of commits/changes will be at the very beginning of history. And regardless, "stability" doesn't mean "dying".