I think we’re talking past each other. My point isn’t that jj is bad. It’s that it’s solving problems that are rapidly becoming irrelevant.
Tools like git and jj exist to help humans manage state: branches, commits, rebases, conflicts, history curation. That whole model assumes a human is directly manipulating and reasoning about the codebase.
With LLMs in the loop, that assumption breaks. I don’t need to think in terms of branches or commits. I describe intent, and the model handles the mechanics of editing, reconciling, and producing a coherent result. Source control becomes an implementation detail of the toolchain, not something I actively operate.
jj is an improvement over git for humans, but that’s exactly why it feels like a local maximum. It refines a workflow that is already being abstracted away.
I’m not saying version control disappears. I’m saying it moves down a layer, the same way memory management or instruction scheduling did. When that happens, optimizing the human interface to it matters a lot less.
Tools like git and jj exist to help humans manage state: branches, commits, rebases, conflicts, history curation. That whole model assumes a human is directly manipulating and reasoning about the codebase.
With LLMs in the loop, that assumption breaks. I don’t need to think in terms of branches or commits. I describe intent, and the model handles the mechanics of editing, reconciling, and producing a coherent result. Source control becomes an implementation detail of the toolchain, not something I actively operate.
jj is an improvement over git for humans, but that’s exactly why it feels like a local maximum. It refines a workflow that is already being abstracted away.
I’m not saying version control disappears. I’m saying it moves down a layer, the same way memory management or instruction scheduling did. When that happens, optimizing the human interface to it matters a lot less.