Show HN: Gitgpt – Natural Language Git (github.com)

Understanding what you can tell gitgpt to do is extremely adjacent to knowing actual git commands.

> But with a command line tool like Gitgpt I guess one could just do:

>> gitpgt "revert commit without commiting"

This is a classic post-hoc curse of knowledge fallacy. I don’t blame you, this is something that people with really analytically strong minds struggle with, such as the fine folks who made voice assistants for Google, Apple and Amazon.

Asking someone who is trying to be overly helpful to do something you don’t know if they can do is at best meaningless (if it can’t do any harm) and at worst a really bad idea (if it can eg screw up your git repo). In your friend’s mind, it’s very possible that git can’t do this, and then who knows what the GPT will try to do instead to please you? This is the main crux of the problem.

Even if they think it’s possible but they don’t know the command, they don’t know if “revert without committing” is a meaningful sentence, perhaps git has another abstraction model and uses different terms. This is the spirit behind the expression “asking the right question takes as much skill as giving the right answers”.

GPT can certainly help explaining, summarizing etc, but it has a very limited ability to say no, and more generally pointing out when your mental model is wrong. I’ve had long complex “design reviews” with ChatGPT – it’s really good at going along with your assumptions, but it lacks the “spine” to tell you when your logic isn’t coherent, or that you have mutually exclusive goals, or that you’ve strayed “too far”, whatever that means.

Someone should write a long blog post about this paradox of helpfulness, I assure you it’s a real thing!

> add .gitignore commit with msg adding ignore and push

That's not very compelling. The main selling point of AI is using simple inputs to achieve advanced outputs that match what the user wanted.

If I can say "Commit my .gitignore file," and then it runs

git add .gitignore

git commit -m "Adding .gitignore"

git push [y/N] y

Then that's one thing.

But this looks like you still have to specify the exact message you want, and be pretty deliberate about what it is you're after. At that point, why not just learn, and write, the commands yourself?

Should we really trust Google's search AI, which is also always under attack by SEO spam, to give reliable results?

I have about as much trust in Google's result page as in ChatGPT responses. I don't trust Google to give me exactly what I'm really looking for, so I force myself to look for a number of sources which corroborate a claim.

I am increasingly considering self-hosting a YaCy instance configured with a curated whitelist of allowed domains (in this case, I might add the GitHub docs and/or the Atlassian git docs pages to be certain that I'm reading valid and up-to-date instructions when searching for git-related topics).

1. text-davinci-003 is subjectively (well, and objectively) better than other models

2. for small-ish usage volume, Davinci and Curie are both pretty cheap in absolute terms that a 10x factor doesn't matter

3. GPT3 hype

https://github.com/runvnc/askleo

[0] https://github.com/danthelion/git-genie

  $ gitgpt commit files with msg cleaning repo files and push

  git commit -m msg
  git clean -fdx
  git push

Sandboxing Python can be done fairly easily with either WebAssembly or a low profile hypervisor solution like Firecracker. See the Toolformer paper for more uses of connecting LLMs to existing technical infrastructure. You might also find the ACT-1 transformer to be somewhat relevant.

Pijul looks interesting though.

I've been in two teams that spent time to evaluate revision control systems on their own merits and Mercurial came out on top both times. At that time, bitbucket supported it, as did IntelliJ. Ironically I can't vouch for whether that was the right decision at the time as the network effect meant they went with git anyway!