Git Will Change Your Coding Life And You Only Need Two Commands

If you aren’t using git, stop developing and invest 30 minutes in learning the basics today. I guarantee you’ll see a full ROI within a few days.

Git might sound complicated, but the thing is, to ‘glide code’ you only really need to know two commands: commit and reset your code.

1. Committing Code

‘Committing’ code essentially saves your codebase at a certain point in time. So when you’re happy with your code, you create a commit with two really simple commands:

git add . // Adds all changes to the 'staging' area
git commit -m "Message describing the commit"

2. Resetting Code

‘Resetting’ your code instantly drops all the code that you’ve written or generated but haven’t yet committed. In the long run, this command is going to save you countless hours of your time.

git reset --hard

You might not believe me just yet, but you soon will. Here’s why:

• Agents are prone to getting into error loops - when this happens, it makes it difficult to get back because as more wonky code is generated, it becomes part of the prompt. A lot of the time, from observing these loops you get a much better idea of what’s going on. Resetting and giving a more detailed prompt will do the trick much faster than trying to prompt your way backwards
• You can experiment risk-free. You think a transition will look good, you prompt to add a transition, it’s not great, you test it out a bit more, you’ve updated 3 files now trying to get this working and you finally get it working but it’s not as good as you thought - git reset --hard, no need to backtrack. Minimal time wasted.

Using Git

As you use these simple steps in your development workflow, the use cases will become very clear, very quickly.

Here’s a hypothetical example - you’re building a TODO list app and you want users to be able to:

‘Set an item as high priority’.

So think through that - you want to:

1. Add a ‘High Priority’ Button
2. Update the item to show it is ‘High Priority’ when the user clicks the button
3. Move ‘High Priority’ items to a new list at the top of the screen

Adds button - you’re happy

git add .
git commit -m "Add High Priority Button"

Adds list - you’re happy

git add .
git commit -m "Add High Priority List at the top of the screen"

Looks great when it’s static and you know you’re happy. But now you want to add a nice transition.

You’re not happy, it’s a bit jumpy, but you think about it and you realise how you want it to work.

It changes some code, but follows a pattern from the previous prompt but it leaves you with something that is a weird mix of the original jumpy transition and the newly requested sliding one.

So…

git reset --hard

This will reset your code back to your last commit. Now we’ve gotten rid of the code that has spiralled and gone a bit wonky and we’re back to our nice clean code that we’re happy with.

Open a new agent. Copy and paste the file for context and then prompt.

Perfect. This has a much better chance of coming out as you planned. You experimented, got a better understnading of what exactly you want and it was super simple to get back into a position to give a more detailed prompt without having to regenrate the things you were already happy with; the button, the feedback, and the list!

So finally, commit your finished feature.

git add .
git commit -m "Add transition for high priority item"

This might slow you down a little bit at first but overall you will save A LOT of time, especially when you start running into errors!

As you get further into your code it becomes more and more important as the codebase gets bigger and the generated code gets more unstable and unreliable.

My Commits For The ‘Callout’ Component

If you see the ‘Callout’ component in this article it’s used for the ‘Prompt’ box and the ‘Takeaway’ box above and the ‘Next Steps’ box at the end.

I initially created the ‘Prompt’ and ‘Takeaway’ components at different times, so they were generated as separate components even though they were essentially identical - just with different colours and icons. Here are my commits showing how I brought them together into one single ‘Callout’ component.

So this is the process, and might be a bit overkill for the article but every time I commited, it took about 5 seconds and it meant I could easily revert to a previous commit if I needed to.