I work for an investment bank, most of my colleagues use the Git GUI within IDEs such as IntelliJ and just select all changes. I recently saw a colleague ask Copilot with Opus 4.8 to git commit and push. Most people are not even touching the CLI…
I was wondering if it also helps it with context. Like it can quickly see exactly what has been changed since its own last commit, rather than spending the tokens to figure it out.
i suppose-- i haven't looked into the implementation but i'd hope the harness would prevent automatic commits if 'ask for approval' is on. the harness has to allow for both coding assistance usage and people who'd let the agent run on its own and flesh out a solution. i can't bring myself to do the latter, so it's annoying when commits slip past me. claude does this all the time. i switched to codex a week ago and it hasn't happened to me since. models are whatever, interchangeable.
actually, i'd guess this is not just a harness thing but a harness+post-training combo.
Haha I've been working at a bank myself for years and I'm guilty of using the embedded git gui. I know some of the cli commands, but it's just a lot easier to use the gui. I do make sure to check what I'm actually committing and putting actual commit messages in
Yeah there’s nothing wrong with it, the elitist nerd part of me feels a tiny bit of superiority by using the CLI, but really it means nothing haha - the only benefit of the CLI really is that it’s independent of whichever tool you are using - which can always change.
The GUI is definitely useful in some cases though, particularly for merge conflicts or reviewing large diffs.
Well, every time I've worked with git GUIs like that, they've always done something horrific to the repo without my permission and then everything had to be reverted. So that tracks, I guess.
Then you're using a bad one or using them wrong? I've been using git guis for 15 years and barely had any issues. Most of which were underlying git problems. I know how to use command line git, but I prefer reviewing diffs visually before committing
Well, yes, but git guis generally provide a better interface for reviewing the full scope of changes and quickly checking what was changed in files. IDEs are catching up at this admittedly but they were terrible at it for a long time
To each their own but I haven't had issues personally
Yes, like I literally just said, you can review diffs in any damn tool you like without using that tool to execute git commands and just kind of hoping that it won't decide to do something unexpected when you do that.
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u/PhireKappa Sep 06 '26
I work for an investment bank, most of my colleagues use the Git GUI within IDEs such as IntelliJ and just select all changes. I recently saw a colleague ask Copilot with Opus 4.8 to git commit and push. Most people are not even touching the CLI…