I see a future in jj

Glad to hear you enjoyed it :)

> do I get any benefit from the change id if I push to GitHub for PR review?

As of right now? Not really. The details are more complicated, but basically, if your project doesn't like the behavior of github when it comes to comments + editing commits, and wants you to tack on new commits instead, we can't change that behavior. However, https://github.com/LucioFranco/jj-spr can, in some situations, give you some of this experience. If your project is okay with editing commits, then it can help you locally, sure.

However. In an interesting turn of developments, GitHub's new SVP just tweeted that he's likes jj and is interested in adding stacked diffs to github. I don't know how this squares with their "no new features for 18 months" thing, but we'll see!

> But what I’m also really yearning for is having a distributed asynchronous/offline-first code review flow built right in.

It's not code review, it's issue tracking, but I've been using https://github.com/steveyegge/beads this week, and I think it might be the first "put your issues in your repo" system I actually enjoy. It says it's built for AI stuff, but like, you don't have to use AI with it.

Gerrit also maps really nicely to jj concepts, and there is an accepted RfC to add support for Jujutsu change IDs to Gerrit.

I think 'jjhub' is a decent immediate first approximation, and is often how I've started out talking about it with people. At the same time, we have to offer real value here, as you can already use jj with github (and I have for a long time now), so there's more to it than that. But yes :)

There’s this as well: https://blog.tangled.org/stacking

Another reason to leave GitHub and their weekly downtime!

Thank you! I’ll try to remember that.

The intention with this is to also deprecate the Perforce fork, in my understanding.

But yeah, it's been a lot. Frankly even harder to keep track of from the outside!

Yes, that was not the goal of the post. There's some comments about this in this thread though, here's the first one of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45673808

This is an interesting idea... jj has a templating language, but it's not stateful, so you couldn't like, hide some commits based on other commits, for example. But I'll file this away...

Yeah, sapling and jj are fellow travelers, for sure :)

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git [...]. This is a neutral impersonal opinion that is virtually a fact.

I respect your opinion, but I don't think it's a fact and I couldn't disagree any further with it. I wrote a whole testimonial about why I love jj (first one there): https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/testimonials/#what-the-us...

> it's impractical for most working programmers to switch

I don't know what you mean here. I think it's quite practical to switch to jj, and people switch over all the time. Some people are going to be earlier adopters than others, but the early adopters can bring others along (as I've been lucky to do at Oxide).

> focus on something whose main appeal is more than social

Steve and I both think that Jujutsu's appeal is far more than merely some bandwagon effect. I do think that social appeal is an important part of making a project succeed, and that projects without substantial technical merit win due to social appeal all the time, but Jujutsu has both! It's amazing!

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git and it's impractical for most working programmers to switch. This is a neutral impersonal opinion that is virtually a fact.

Not a thing in here is true, especially not objectively true. As neutral as you may believe yourself, it might be a good time to step back and reexamine your priors that led you to state so confidently that there’s no usability reason to switch in particular.

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git

sounds like someone hasn't used jujutsu

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git and it's impractical for most working programmers to switch.

Not in my experience. jj is easy to pick up and a joy to use. I like git. I deeply appreciate git. But git can feel like snow shoveling sometimes, while in jj things just click into place.

jj is freeing, because things that were a hassle before are now easy, and other things that were impossible are also easy.

I know there's a lot of hype around for a lot of things, and I get grumpy from all of it. Jujutsu is one of the few things that actually deserve the praise being heaped on them.

You may disagree, of course. But I hope that some day, you'll have reason to be happy about this tool, instead of feeling... whatever touched you off like this.

This comment could have been written when people were pushing to SVN repos on SourceForge when Git was becoming the next big thing, enough for a competitor to founded.

Yet still, the status quo is not Subversion and SourceForge, both of which have been relegated to antiquity, but git and GitHub.

Will something else unseat git and GitHub in the coming years? And will it be Jujutsu or some other innovation on version control?

Who knows, but I see no need to be so dismissive of somebody’s passion in such an arrogant way.

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git

Every magit user disagrees with you.

> and it's impractical for most working programmers to switch

This very much sounds like someone who has never even tried jj. Tell us: What makes switching impractical?

> My well-intentioned recommendation to Steve, because I've been there, is: If you want to avoid feeling like you've wasted your life in a few years on code that doesn't live up to its promise and is essentially no different than the code that already exists in Git (and Hg, Pijul, Fossil, etc.),

Is Steve even a developer for jj?

I was thinking, it'll probably catch on like Omarchy did, except it's written in Rust, so... little chance of it being milkshake-ducked.

But as we say on Hackernews, there are two kinds of people with respect to jj: those who love it, and those who haven't tried it.

Doing the same thing, but with better usability, is immensely valuable. Remember, Hackernews thought Dropbox was "just" ssh+rsync, but they made a billion dollars making that easy.

Thank you for the feedback! I talk about it so much I feel like regular readers of my blog will know this stuff already, but I also don't want to leave out important context for others.

I tried to help fix this in https://github.com/steveklabnik/steveklabnik.com/pull/125/fi..., thanks again!

The full name is Jujutsu, but I think "jj" did come first. "j" is nice because on QWERTY keyboards, not only is it on the home row, it is one of the two keys that has a little tactile marker (bump) on it.

Rain’s not working at ERSC, but we won’t be naming the product jjhub, don’t worry.

I do think that GUI stuff is important, there's a lot of folks who have said "not interested unless there's a magit equivalent" which I totally understand. I'm not a big GUI person for VCS myself, so I don't feel the same pain.

For LLMs, yeah this is hard for any new project. I use Claude Code, and it does a decent job with jj, it only tries to do git stuff sometimes. I haven't asked ChatGPT about it though, I'll have to experiment with it myself.

You're kind of right about LLM knowledge but the implication is funny. We just cant be expected to learn new things without LLMs...

> LLM knowledge

Give it time. Once JJ resources enter the dragnet of future model datasets, LLMs will get better at regurgitating it.

> I ask gpt-5 about doing something in jj the other day, it didn't even recognize it at first.

Using VC commands an LLM generates for you sounds like a pretty terrible idea anyway. What if they delete your data? Why not spend 5 minutes searching for information written by a human?