> Imagine a commit in a patch series changes 100 lines. 99 of the lines are good, but the first round of review suggests to add a missing semicolon on one of the lines. The author does that by amending the existing commit, to avoid an unseemly "add missing semicolon" commit ending up in the project history. After a force-push (or new patch series submission), reviewers are generally presented with the full 100-line diff to review, because the tools don't understand that only one line changed since the last review.
Flirt looks interesting, but I am not sure if it would solve a real problem for me.
Urgh. This problem with git is so unforced. Essentially, people want commits to mean 2 different things at the same time:
1. Store the uncurated history of how the project was developed. 1 commit is created whenever a dev types 'git commit'.
2. Be a linear list of PRs / changes / whatever to a project. Each PR is created by squishing many commits together. It is associated with a conversation around code review, a ticket / issue and often some feature or bug.
Commits can't be both of these things at the same time, so we end up with unnecessary tooling like this.
The answer seems pretty obvious. Git just needs 2 separate mechanisms for these 2 different ideas. The obvious approach would be to leave commits as being atomic units of code change, and invent a new concept in git which represents a feature / feature branch. It would essentially just be a metadata object naming a set of commits, and it would have links to an issue tracker, CI results and code reviews.
If you haven't read the first blog post it's pretty good at explaining the concepts.
https://blog.buenzli.dev/announcing-development-on-flirt/
The demo is particularly good if you can get past ( by the authors own admission ) slow typing speed.
As with everything these days I can see this being even more useful in reviewing agent code.
For example if an agent has spat out a bunch of code that I've reviewed and then I've asked it to make changes, I definitely do not want to review all that code again in the same diff later.
How is this different than simply committing between changes? Or even asking the agent to commit changes as it edits files.
Because I don't review everything between changes, there might be 10 small commits I review and state I am happy with, then I might prompt the agent to perform some small refactors after the review, I don't want the diff to show me everything in those 10 commits again in the diff ( like the usual PR would ) I want it only to show me new stuff.
That's a really good point, at the moment I struggle to get past wanting it to create small logical changes that I can commit individually. If I could review them better such as Flirt describes, then maybe I don't care so much, and a big 'create initial implementation' commit becomes more acceptable, for example.
For those curious - Flirt is an incremental code review tool.
Excellent. Starting with the domain name :)