Re: Feature Request git snap, Lightweight Commit Workflow for Iterative Development

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Jul 2, 2025, 21:55 UTC
Message-ID: <aGWq7vBSYuuKW69o@fruit.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAPGv+4ZT774b-LGMFpyv3cJYUrpWPMpkCGn25AfwD7MHskbV=g@mail.gmail.com>

On 2025-07-02 at 18:30:17, Suraj Bhadrike wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Hi Git contributors,
> 
> This proposal introduces a new command git snap  designed to support
> highly iterative development workflows nowdays  influenced by AI
> coding assistants.
> 
> The rise of AI assistants and agentic AI workflows has changed the
> pace and nature of coding. A developer might cycle through dozens of
> variations of a function or component in a short period while
> collaborating with an AI.

I mean, I do this too without an AI. I frequently want to make changes until something works, and then snapshot it and modify it to polish it and make it more presentable.

Show 5 quoted lines

> This feature would provide a soft commit or snapshot capability,
> allowing developers to save their work state frequently and create a
> new commit every time as a snapshot or checkpoint without a commit
> message and flag where We can provide an option for developers to
> include files at the start of snap Session.

I think a lot of this is achievable with current functionality, just in a slightly different way. At the beginning, you could save a set of pathspecs in a file (equivalent to your `--include` and `--exclude` options) and create a random ID (also in a file). You then do `git add` with your pathspecs and do a `git commit -m "WIP: snap <random ID>"`.

For subsequent commits, you can just do the same `git add` with the pathspecs and then do a `git commit --squash HEAD` or `git commit --fixup HEAD`. When you're done, you can use `git rebase --autofixup` to squash all the commits down into one.

These are things you can create with an alias pretty easily and I have similar functionality to make this easy. Or you can create an external `git-snap` command that simply does this under the hood. I don't think this is functionality we need in core Git because we can already achieve most of it pretty easily with a few shell aliases.

If you do create this as an external command, then please do not accept multiple patterns in the `--include` and `--exclude` options; take multiple options instead. Git LFS did what you're proposing to do and it means that files or patterns with a comma in them can't be matched.

-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA