Products · Product
Jujutsu (jj)
Raised as a usability problem by 48 people on Hacker News over 4 years (2023–2026), in 32 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Automatically adds untracked files to the current commitUnreviewed
20232026- Automatically adds every untracked non-ignored file to the current commit, which is annoying2025-07-22
- Must repeatedly remove local changes to committed files before every push2024-07-02
- New untracked artefact files get committed automatically before being added to .gitignore2023-08-02
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Takes many hours or months before the tool becomes basically useful2026-09-29
- Working with raw SHA1 hashes is tedious and hard to use daily2026-09-23
- Manually moving branch names around all the time is a pain2026-09-02
- Its esoteric symbol syntax like @-- and :: must be relearned2026-09-01
- Git interop relies on convention, making it easy to mess up the remote2026-07-14
- Needs a 'tug' alias because bookmarks replace familiar named branches, which is awkward2026-06-18
- Adding commits needs several manual steps: move bookmark, rebase megamerge branch2026-05-25
- Its command set is full of arcane commands, as hard to learn as git2026-05-04
- Simple operations need generated IDs and complicated revset command input, taking up mental bandwidth2026-04-29
- No clear underlying model, so the commenter finds it unintuitive to use2026-04-22
- Bookmark tracking behaves unpredictably, sometimes tracking on all remotes, and feels incomplete2026-04-21
- Finds the jj interface more confusing than git, despite long git experience2026-04-20
- Edits silently pollute the last commit when switching repos, forcing defensive status checks first2026-04-14
- Sharing working state requires a painful multi-step tag-and-push process, losing Jujutsu's features2026-01-12
- Hard to trust jj commands at face value, so experienced git users must scrutinize what they do2025-12-05
- Confusing departures from Mercurial, like no default bookmark and an extra command for staging2025-12-01
- Gets into states the user cannot figure out how to recover from, costing hours2025-10-30
- Command-line workflow needs repeated typing and loses visible state, unlike a GUI2025-10-23
- Conflicts appear that seem to have no diff, so user can't understand them2025-10-22
- Security key is prompted on every status or log command after local changes2025-10-13
- Creating a named branch requires an obtuse command like 'jj bookmark set -r@ XYX'2025-09-01
- Has to remember what has been pushed, since state isn't clear2025-08-31
- Sharing a branch with a co-worker by piling commits is tedious without named branches2025-08-31
- Can't easily pick specific file parts to stage as in VS Code's Git2025-08-14
- Spent four hours learning it and found the gains too small, so went back to git2025-07-23
- Documentation assumes a lot of inherent knowledge, making it hard to follow2025-07-22
- Automatically adds every untracked non-ignored file to the current commit, which is annoying2025-07-22
- Has to copy-paste commit ids from log output constantly2025-07-22
- Adds a layer to learn on top of Git, with more complicated log output and automatic staging2025-07-22
- Log rendering is cluttered, with noisy bolding, username placement and neon colors2025-07-22
- Splitting changes into separate commits feels cumbersome2025-05-29
- Forgetting to start a new revision makes it painful to split changes afterward2025-05-26
- Syncing work between machines by copying .jj is brittle and easy to mess up2025-05-26
- Learning new interfaces and abstraction layers is burdensome when things go wrong2025-05-03
- Undo fails with 'cannot undo a merge' and can overwrite changes the user cannot find2025-02-12
- Every working state becomes a change, making constant commit-like objects annoying and confusing to manage2025-02-12
- Makes spurious changes and commits on NTFS because it mishandles executable bits2025-02-12
- Couldn't figure out how to merge; ended up on old master, deleting gitignored files2025-02-05
- Multiple separate places (working directory, stash, index, commit) confuse people and add mental load2024-12-25
- Got stuck for 30 minutes unable to push, and couldn't work out how to fix it from the docs2024-10-21
- Looks more complicated and verbose than regular Git for everyday work2024-10-20
- Can't figure out how to update a PR branch after rebasing, despite day spent searching2024-09-10
- Making git commits in colocated repo was confusing; user wasn't on the branch they thought2024-07-02
- Must repeatedly remove local changes to committed files before every push2024-07-02
- Found it really hard to get going with, so abandoned it2024-07-01
- Selectively committing individual lines is painful, with no visual tooling to help2024-04-06
- The jj log output is confusing and not intuitive at first to read2024-02-03
- Splitting commits defaults everything to go first, forcing users to remove hunks for the second commit2024-02-03
- Can't work out how to undo accidental commits and other git operations2023-08-02
- New untracked artefact files get committed automatically before being added to .gitignore2023-08-02