git submodules, jj & vibe coding

The woes of VCS history management in a vibe-coding era

As I’m developing my AI assistant in Rust, I’m trying to break it into multiple useful libraries that can work (mostly) independently.

So I’m using a rust workspace for the project with a few sub-crates. I might not publish all those sub-crates at the same time to github. So I thought it would be useful to have separate git repos for each and use git submodules.

That way, in the future, each crate has a clean history and is easy to upload to github.

While this idea sounded great on paper, it has several downsides:

• It makes working with worktrees much more painful. I created an entire worktree-manager.sh script to try to mitigate this but it’s still painful.

• It makes it harder to work with jj.

The motivation for using jj comes from the fact that it seems uniquely fit to help with vibe-coding. Often, when vibe-coding, I will be iterating on a piece of code with AI over multiple iterations. I don’t always want a full git commit for every intermediate stage, but it would be nice to walk back through the different steps in case the AI is going the wrong way but I don’t want to reset to the entire beginning of the conversation.

Result: 2 mornings wasted on shell scripts

• First morning to create and finesse worktree-manager.sh

• Second morning to create a script to flatten my repo back into a monorepo.

I’ve published the shell scripts to my github in case these are useful to anyone.