Glad the LLM noted this - I was worried this would reimplement git
One small example is an extension for the `gh` cli where I give it a PR number and multiple branches and it cherry-picks that PR to those branches, or lets me know if some of the branches don't work. For managing multiple release branches it's very handy, but not so handy that I would have spent a lot of time and energy doing a good job of it.
This seems like a similar sort of thing - a user friendly way to do something that most people don't need, and most people who need it probably don't need it very badly.
I haven't used claude to replace my actual skills - researching, solving problems, etc. - but I do use it to replace all the stuff which is essentially 'spend a few hours reading API docs and writing boilerplate code'.
Building the new things turned out to be a longer and way more interesting story. https://replicated.live/blog/click
P.S. I am a computer scientist and I specialize in this domain. I can reimplement git in many ways and styles and I have an opinion because I know what the options are. Thanks for the downvotes. Taken as a compliment.
1. Sometimes I do a scraping project where I want the commit dates to match when the data actually changed, reconstructed from sources like the Internet Archive or the dates on https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-pro... - for example here: https://github.com/simonw/research/commits/main/extract-syst... - or this project that attempted to reconstruct the history of Tim Berners-Lee's original browser: https://github.com/simonw/1991-WWW-NeXT-Implementation/commi...
2. Sometimes I split a Git repo into two, and I want to preserve the commit history (authors and dates) on the files that end up in the new repo - effectively replay the history of just one folder from the original to help create the new one.
3. I occasionally mess up cleaning up and merging a PR from an open source contributor such that the work is incorrectly credited to me. I'll fix the commit so that it credits the right person.
Obviously as with any “force push” situation, the usual caveats apply if this is on a branch others have checked out, but if the mess is big enough, it is sometimes worth it to send everyone a script to reset or just to have people delete and re-check-out.
Regardless, it’s better than nothing, thank you.
I'm reluctant to clone a repository and spend time on it just to find out the project looks crap and I don't want to use it. A screenshot saves other people's time :)