On 2025-07-02 at 18:30:17, Suraj Bhadrike wrote:

Hi Git contributors,

This proposal introduces a new command git snap  designed to support
highly iterative development workflows nowdays  influenced by AI
coding assistants.

The rise of AI assistants and agentic AI workflows has changed the
pace and nature of coding. A developer might cycle through dozens of
variations of a function or component in a short period while
collaborating with an AI.

I mean, I do this too without an AI.  I frequently want to make changes
until something works, and then snapshot it and modify it to polish it
and make it more presentable.

This feature would provide a soft commit or snapshot capability,
allowing developers to save their work state frequently and create a
new commit every time as a snapshot or checkpoint without a commit
message and flag where We can provide an option for developers to
include files at the start of snap Session.

I think a lot of this is achievable with current functionality, just in
a slightly different way.  At the beginning, you could save a set of
pathspecs in a file (equivalent to your `--include` and `--exclude`
options) and create a random ID (also in a file).  You then do `git add`
with your pathspecs and do a `git commit -m "WIP: snap <random ID>"`.

For subsequent commits, you can just do the same `git add` with the
pathspecs and then do a `git commit --squash HEAD` or `git commit
--fixup HEAD`.  When you're done, you can use `git rebase --autofixup`
to squash all the commits down into one.

These are things you can create with an alias pretty easily and I have
similar functionality to make this easy.  Or you can create an external
`git-snap` command that simply does this under the hood.  I don't think
this is functionality we need in core Git because we can already achieve
most of it pretty easily with a few shell aliases.

If you do create this as an external command, then please do not accept
multiple patterns in the `--include` and `--exclude` options; take
multiple options instead.  Git LFS did what you're proposing to do and
it means that files or patterns with a comma in them can't be matched.
-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA