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Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

In today's version of "LLM's allow a person to write thousands of lines of code to replace built-in Unix tools":

  inotifywait -mr -e modify,create,delete /your/dir |
  while read _; do
    cd /your/dir && git add -A && git commit -m "auto-$(date +%s)" --allow-empty
  done

There are +8 billion people on the planet, computing has beed around a while now and some REALLY smart people have published tools for computers. Ask yourself, "am I the first person to try to solve this problem?"

Odds are, one or more people have had this problem in the past and there's probably a nifty solution that does what you want.

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OP Here, hard to attempt to read and respond to this in good faith.

I think it would be dishonest if I didn't share that your approach to discourse here isn't a productive way of asking what insights I'm bringing.

If that's your concern, I agree I can't claim that nothing exists to solve pieces of the puzzle in different ways. I did my research and was happy that I could get a domain that explained the struggle -- namely unfucked.ai/unfudged.io -- moreover I do feel there are many pieces and nuances to the experience which give pause to folks who create versioning tools.

I'm open to engaging if you have a question or comment that doesn't diminish my motives, assumes I must operate in your world view "problems can only be solved once", and discourages people to try new things and learn.

Look, I'm grateful that you stopped by and hope you'll recognize I'm doing my best to manage my own sadness that my children have to exist in a world where folks think this is how we should address strangers.

  > assumes I must operate in your world view "problems can only be solved once"

I never claimed anyone else has to agree with this. That's why people are allowed different opinions.

Nobody ought to give a damn what I think, the only opinion that matters about you is your own.

But just like I won't ask you adopt my view, I also won't go around patting people on the back for TODO apps.

My opinion: people ought to spend more time contributing to solving genuine problems. The world needs more of that, and less "I built a TODO app" or "Here's my bespoke curl wrapper".

Only works in a git directory, and one might want to use git only for manual version control and another tool for automatic.

Then replace git with "rsync" or "borg. But I don't see how running "git init" in a directory you have "days of work" accumulated in is a sticking point.

Git is a convenient implementation detail.

The core loop of "watch a directory for changes, create a delta-only/patch-based snapshot" has been a solved few-liner in bash for a long time...

Something something Dropbox

There are a huge number of people coming into agentic coding with no real background in software dev, no real understanding of git, and even devs with years of experience will readily reach for convenience and polish even when they could otherwise implement it themselves, see: Vercel's popularity.

Create a branch, squash the branch manually when you want and merge things.

or `git reset --soft main` and then deal with the commits

or have 2 .git directories. Just add to the git commit `--git-dir=.git-backups` or whatever you want to name it.

This is happening so frequently I just wrote a blog about it to vent my frustration:

https://gavinray97.github.io/blog/llm-build-cheaper-than-sea...

My comment is not meant as a shallow dismissal of the authors work but rather what seems to be a growing, systemic issue

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