Using GIT with AI
Hand your to an for a message, work through together — and never run a you haven't read.
What you'll learn
- You can get a usable message from a
- You can work through a with an and still decide yourself
- You verify before running them, and know can save you
If writing commit messages feels like a chore, hand the whole output of git diff --staged to an AI and ask for one. Reading and summarizing what changed is something these genuinely do well. Don't paste the result verbatim, though — fill in the why yourself. An AI can see what changed; it cannot know why you decided to change it.
AI helps with conflicts too. Paste the conflicted region and explain what each was trying to do, and it will point out how to combine them and what to watch for. The final call is still yours: it doesn't know your product's rules. After , run the tests — always.
Finally, the safety rule. Read what an AI-suggested command actually does before you paste it. git reset --hard, git push --force, and git clean -fd produce results you cannot undo. And if you already ran one by mistake, don't panic: git reflog keeps a record of where has been, and you can usually find the lost commit's there and recover it.
Understand it easily
Think of the AI as a careful assistant who reads your changes and drafts the message, while you are the one who signs it. Read every command it suggests before running it, especially commands that delete or rewrite.
Commands for this step
git diff --staged- The material you hand to an AI when asking for a commit message.
git log --oneline -20- Recent in brief — good to include when asking about a change.
git config --global alias.lg "log --oneline --graph --all"- Register a shortcut so
git lgprints the graph log you use every day. git reflog- Every place HEAD has been. This is what saves you after a mistaken .
Common mistake and how to fix it
Copying a suggested command such as git reset --hard or git push --force without reading it. Ask the AI what the command will change and whether it can be undone, and run git status before and after.
You mark this yourself. Nothing is graded here.
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You mark this yourself. Nothing is graded here.