Using GIT with AI
Hand your diff to an AI for a commit message, work through conflicts together — and never run a destructive command you haven't read.
- You can get a usable commit message from a diff
- You can work through a merge conflict with an AI and still decide yourself
- You verify destructive commands before running them, and know reflog 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 code and summarizing what changed is something these models 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 branch 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 merging, run the tests — always.
Finally, the safety rule. Read what an AI-suggested GIT 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 HEAD has been, and you can usually find the lost commit's hash there and recover it.
Don't just read them — type them into a real terminal. Your hands have to remember, not your eyes.
git diff --staged- The material you hand to an AI when asking for a commit message.
git log --oneline -20- Recent history in brief — good context to include when asking about a change.
git config --global alias.lg "log --oneline --graph --all"- Register a shortcut so `git lg` prints the graph log you use every day.
git reflog- Every place HEAD has been. This is what saves you after a mistaken reset.