I Stopped Using GitHub (Kind Of)

Huge shoutout to Graphite for sponsoring this video and making a tool I can't imagine life without. Check them out! graphite.dev/?...
Stacked diffs are definitely the future of git workflows, and I'm hyped I get to talk about them
ALL MY VIDEOS ARE POSTED EARLY ON PATREON / t3dotgg
Everything else (Twitch, Twitter, Discord & my blog): t3.gg/links
S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[@t3dotgg]

Been using graphite nonstop since recording this and I’m even more sold. It feels like Tailwind when it clicks. Seriously y’all, I know it seems weird and scary at first but it is so much more pleasant

[@spetz911]

Congrats on reinventing Gerrit on top of GitHub 😊

[@cristianjuarez1086]

youre always being "more sold" by products you talk about

[@Vim_Tim]

The suggestion of spending more money, and more importantly the ramp-up time of all team members, is basically a nonstarter for most teams where the current Git workflows work well and are well-understood. Still interesting to see new ideas in version control.

[@perc-ai]

nah we already switched to graphite at our company couldnt have said it better than Theo about graphite being the tailwind of css but for vc

[@Jacob-Gold]

(disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Graphite) - With the bidirectional GH sync and essentially fully featured product at the free tier, we've built this to be very easy to try out individually without needing to get your whole team bought in and invest in education up front. Our longer term hope is that this workflow gets more and more common, so that this barrier to entry eventually dissolves away!

[@chocolatemilk124]

Yeah but you literally can’t fuck this up.

[@yiannis_p]

Imagine if in tech companies didn’t improve or change just because it would take a bit of time or money…

[@StabilDEV]

@@perc-ai If TW was costing money everyone would use regular CSS just fine

[@Corard]

I've only used Graphite for a couple of days but the stack diff workflow completely changed how I think about organising changes

[@mburakerman]

this is definitely much more complicated than github flow. tell us theo how much did you get paid for this?

[@ImperiumLibertas]

Git flow is terrible anyway. Don't use git flow

[@muhwyndham]

So basically graphite is automating rebase and force push. It's already my usual flow for 3 years now.

[@alanchung]

this reminds me a lot of the gerrit workflow

[@ShayRubachOfficial]

exactly what I said ^

[@pranathiperi5051]

Inspired by it!

[@Naethdren]

My immediate thought as well.

[@andersreiche]

I mean.. Sure. But the workflows you are showcasing seems like a living hell to begin with. We should probably fix our processes so that we don't need to do stacked PR's in the first place.

[@neeeeeck9005]

I always felt like Git was just a low-level tool, prone to mistakes because of human factor. What we really lacked was high-level workflow automation thingy like this one you showed to us, which basically handles things we don't want to care about.

[@ivanjermakov]

The problem with simplicity is when you have some non-trivial case and simplicity just falls apart. It's not a big deal in case of Graphite, because you can always fallback to using Git.

[@sirnawaz]

After your `gt modify`, do you have two commits on the PR, or it just one that replaces the older one?

[@raphahardt]

What about handling conflicts?

[@Jacob-Gold]

[I work at Graphite] - When a restack hits a conflict, it puts you in the same that a git rebase would - so let's say I modify a branch which has another one stacked on it that changes the same file. The modify command under the hood would first amend the commit (or create a new one), then start the rebase. If your modification conflicts with the stacked branch, the CLI will then pause the rebase and have you resolve that conflict just like Git!

[@brandonjoaocastillo7490]

If we force push, then the commit that was replaced wouldn't be orphan now? that means that if I do a git garbage collection and prune, that commit would be lost forever? Or am I misunderstanding?

[@yyy5523]

I heard this same thing when I saw the Linus Torvals conference talk on git.

[@Nab_001]

Theo make feel like you are in a race whenever a new technology release he switches

[@TheBswan]

That's a you problem. I like being aware of new tech, but I'm not interested in adopting everything. Like I get the value of this tool, but for my preferences I don't think it's worth the cost of additional abstraction. Make your own decisions and recognize that you can have the fanciest stack but it's only worth as much as you build.

[@tapwater424]

Stop being susceptible to trends and just get good at the fundamentals. You're like a consumer drooling over Marvel merchandise. Or a moth to a lamp. Whatever you prefer. Most new things just reinvent the wheel without adding much benefit, often introducing problems that time tested solutions didn't face in the first place. We already see start-ups founded no more than 10 years ago struggle with technical debt because they chose a hype driven tech stack. Half of their choices are now deprecated whereas some 20-30 year old technologies still prevail. Graphite makes a Microsoft owned project, GitHub, a greater dependency of your workflow. It might not integrate well with different teams' workflow. It adds no extra features. It delays the day you'll eventually have to learn git (which is needed if you switch to a workplace that uses GitLab or Gitea). It seems that Graphite has forced the git usage with the worst possible GitHub experience to force reviewers to also use their product. If you want a clean commit history while having lazy commit habits just squash before merging.

[@joshuakb2]

My company doesn't know the meaning of the term pull request. We all push to the same server and there's no review process, which means force push is 100% outlawed. We always rebase local, unpushed changes, we never rebase anything that has been pushed already. Works pretty well for us

[@TheSephix57]

Hard to trust your opinion when you're sponsored

[@MakeKasprzak]

Cool. Looks like a nicer Gerrit.

[@rogerpence]

"Huge shoutout to Graphite for sponsoring this video and making a tool I can't imagine life without." C'mon, Theo. I know you have integrity and I want to trust you, but, geeze, it pains me to see my YT faves carrying on about something "sponsored." You weren't just hyped to talk about Graphite, you were paid to.

[@asimpleguy2730]

I don’t care a lot about the github notification, but having an easy way to track dependencies across PRs would be great since I’m often the bottleneck (team waiting for my review) and teammates have to remember to update everything in the correct order after approval. Problem is, convincing my team to use this :,)

[@itsbazyli]

You can do that in GH, just set your dependent PR's base branch as the other PR's branch. Once the other PR is merged, GH will automatically switch the base branch of your dependent PR to the branch the parent PR was merged to. Works great for stacking multiple PRs and keeping track of dependencies.

[@asimpleguy2730]

@@itsbazyli I didn’t know that, thank a lot! I’ll look into it to see if it covers my use case. Does it also prevents to merge the second branch if the branch it’s dependent on isn’t merged yet?

[@pawan29121991]

Is rebase concept came to have always an easy revert mechanism if anything goes wrong ?

[@Alec.Vision]

This has been my git flow for a while, even without additional tooling. I get looked at like I'm insane... Maybe now I can convince some folks to get on board, since there's finally a cargo cult to join 😂

[@BosonCollider]

I use git-stackless for a similar reason. Pairs really well with gerrit at work

[@wasaabbi]

I think you are little bit overhyped about this one.. Can be little bit more visually apealing - maybe, but if you get use to what info is where in gh not that much of a differnce. Cool shorter commands - yes - you can also achieve that having aliases in git. I do not see that big benefit for an developer to be able to save 30seconds of going through all of that shit.. to grab another coffee quicker? What would have bigger impact for my dev experience - having better diff tool and git integration inside VsCode, similar to the one IntelliJ has.

[@parsanobahari6089]

Pretty impressive. Does anyone have experience with magit?

[@portersky]

Looks like gerrit, but with nicer UI.

[@Tigregalis]

It's built on top of GitHub or it's built on top of Git?

[@Jacob-Gold]

Both!

[@darksideishere]

GitHub is built on of Git, so both.

[@lautarodapin]

mmm i don't feel the difference to using git, specially when you use all vscode commands for git

[@redenvalerio601]

I think you just need to learn git cli, feature workflow and rebasing properly. Graphite will hide away all of that and when comes to edge cases that will likely happen, users without proper git knowledge will surely stumble since they are so used to these kinds of another layer on top of basic git.

[@NicholasStein]

They should have called them layers...like photoshop.

[@benve7151]

0:04 that not centered icon triggers me

[@zotoavinaandriamanamihaga6661]

competition will be great for github

[@rafalfaro]

I gave up twice on learning git, until it finally clicked on the third attempt.

[@LeonelViera]

Pretty cool! The stack workflow seems really clean

[@iqbali4u]

No thank you I do not want to learn another repository command lines.

[@samlovescoding]

paid shill 🙂

[@CodingPhase]

so how about you pay him so he don't have to be paid from anyone else....lol dude you getting great free content and once in a blue moon a company pays him to introduce you to a new cool product... if you don't like it you just don't have to use it cost you nothing

[@t3dotgg]

@CodingPhase love you man thank you. Genuinely so lucky that I can exclusively work with sponsors making products I actually use and trust 🙏

[@wata1991]

it's getting worse these days. "Im an investor in this company but I'm genuinely hyped!!!! xDD"

[@t3dotgg]

@@wata1991 yes, why would I invest in a company I’m not hyped about? 🙃🙃

[@CollCaz-2]

​@@t3dotgg Next time start with "I'm an investor in this company because i hate it", Only way we could trust you bro. We all love you theo

[@leagueoflags]

Theo, seriously stop the shilling. This is git with very minor improvements. Do not dilude your excellent videos with nonsense such as this.

[@oso_estudioso]

and using lazygit?

[@liquidtags]

Ohh this is a shill so its sort of biased

[@steav677]

Interesting. git is too low level tools for certain ppl especially for new developers. But force-push things make conflict with old fashion guys like me. So please follow conventions in industry and build nice new tools/features/services on the top of it.

[@ivanjermakov]

I also see the problem of interop with classic git workflow. You know when something is not right when you need to check a PR comment about dependent PRs...

[@binitrupakheti4246]

Microsoft basically is selling us our own code by training copilot on it.

[@noext7001]

30$/user is a big nope

[@cornheadahh]

I just keep my code in google drive, learning to use github is too complicated

[@Sage447]

based

[@ShanyGolan]

Yeah.... no

[@zksumon847]

I use Google Drive

[@sryx]

I use src_backup_april_1st.zip :)

[@chocolatemilk124]

Yo this is already my GitHub flow. Stacking PRs, rebasing, force push for clean commit log. The one thing I hate is approving PRs one by one and having to make sure the order of my stacked PRs are approved in the right order. Also having to update a previous branch in the stack and then rebasing all the stack above it individually Seems like this fixes this nuisance Edit: After using it this morning I can fully conclude that this is the shit. I had a backlog of 9 branches that I had to stack into a PR. All I had to do was run `gt track` and choose the parent for each branch I made before using graphite. Then I ran `gt-ss` and it stacked all my branches into a stack of PRs. Amazing. It turned out I had forgot to push a branch to remote and Graphite found it and recommended for the child to to track it. Sick! Cheers to the time save in the future

[@noepion2474]

this indeed feels like a game-changer if you do a trunk-based/small PRs workflow. wow. If I start a company, I would only use this to force good behavior into people. It's just so much harder with traditional git.

[@yash1152]

this netizen language is soooo difficult. shit && sick. how am i supposed to read it?? "sick" is somewhat old & ohkayish but now u guys are using even shit to mean good? u guys must be shitsick lol. get some meds, cure ur sickness, have a shit-free belly - u will feel good. trust me.

[@brunocarvalho3361]

Sounds like 80% of this is just a couple of git commands that improve the mechanics of merging changes into remotely rebased branches

[@t3dotgg]

At least 50% yes. They did the hard git stuff so we don’t have to. The better ergonomics around reviews and notifications are a massive win though, I was using another product for that before and it was nowhere near as good 😅

[@flarebear5346]

​@@t3dotggit's honestly a symptom of git being harder to use for new people. Atleast when it comes to my classmates I had to do a lot of convincing to make them learn git properly

[@kenneth_romero]

@@flarebear5346This. A lot of people just want a GUI and for the thing to do a thing. I'm still learning Git in general, but my classmates make me more discouraged to dive deeper since they don't even know how to init a repo.

[@Jacob-Gold]

​@@flarebear5346 (disclaimer, Graphite engineer here) - Totally! My first job was at a company where tooling like this was the default, so I honestly never really learned Git well until I started mapping these concepts on top of it to build this tool. At that job, the playing field felt much more level for junior folks because there wasn't a massive amount to learn before starting to be productive. Just make a small set of atomic changes, quickly push them up and get them reviewed, and make more changes on top if you need to :)

[@scally9341]

@@flarebear5346 Still in that phase myself. It's like my peers/classmates don't believe me when I say they *need* to learn git. It's not optional for most positions. Dudes are literally passing around Zip files to each other... Atrocious

[@Nurof3n_]

I'm one dev shipping to 0 users, I'll add this to my tooling!

[@loganlandonline]

cool but 30 per dev per month is ....INSANE pricing

[@ispepsi2023]

I have a hard time using GUI git tools and automated/abstracted commands for git operations and stick to using plain git cli. It took a while getting used to, and I'm not a git guru by far, I just feel more comfortable that way, rebasing, merging, cherry-picking, bisecting, hell, even patch adding, all on the git cli

[@wata1991]

ehhhh not paying $30 a month for this LMAO

[@mmattbtw]

idk microsoft word revision history is pretty crazy

[@TheBswan]

I use Excel for version management

[@Spiker985Studios]

​@@TheBswanExcel's a database, right? /s

[@ahmadkarm-t1b]

nice lgtm

[@whywhatwherein]

too complicated.

[@ShayRubachOfficial]

That looks like a better looking Gerrit I've been using since 2017... stack diff looks very similar to Gerrit's "patch set" system

[@Naethdren]

This, only I'm not sold on the "better looking" part. :) Gerrit was a bit confusing at first, but once you get used to it... yeah, it may be a bit barebones, but it doesn't waste screen real estate with lots and lots of frames and boxes. It's... tidy. Neat.

[@Mostafaabobakr7]

No

[@binh1298ify]

To be honest I trust you (at least for now) so idc if you're getting paid or not, but this looks awfully compicated and i'm not so sure if it actually solves any problem 🤔

[@3ventic]

The review UI looks like a significant improvement over github. I'm not so sure about the local workflow; I love my git worktrees and existing shell shortcuts. I do already conduct my work in terms of changes; the initial commit for a change usually comes before its branch. I'm really curious how it handles the force pushes when you have someone else depending on your changes in their own changes and the new version you push causes a conflict with theirs. This has been the big pain point with force pushes in my experience and I don't see a clear way that Graphite could resolve that, being built on top of git still.

[@Jacob-Gold]

(eng @ Graphite) Because we track each branch as not just a pointer to a commit, but as a range of commits that can be moved around at will, we'll automatically pull down the new version of your coworkers branch and keep yours stacked on top of it - so we "restack" your changes on your coworker's!

[@3ventic]

@@Jacob-Gold it sounds like the equivalent of a rebase replaying the local commits on top of the updated remote branch, which is exactly what's caused me a lot of headaches in the past. Did I understand correctly?

[@Jacob-Gold]

​@@3ventic Oops, looks like my reply never posted! We do something likely very close to what you used to do, with one key difference. The CLI tracks the _beginning_ of each branch as well as its parent, so when we "restack", we only replay those commits actually included in the stacked branch. To be concrete, let's say my coworker has a branch A consisting of commits 1-2 and I have a stacked branch B where I added commits 3-4. If my coworker rebases that branch, of course, new comits 1'-2' will be created. Now I update my copy of A to match. Running just a `git rebase A B` will attempt to replay all commits from the merge-base of A and B onto A, which results in replaying 1-2-3-4 on top of 1'-2', so you end up being asked to resolve conflicts between two commits that did the exact same thing. Instead, what we want to do is `git rebase --onto A B`, which will only replay 3-4 on top of A. Source: git-scm.com/docs/git-rebase The Graphite CLI keeps track of that in its metadata to ensure that you only ever get sent to conflict resolution when there are truly conflicting changes to resolve. If the explanation here wasn't super clear, we have a blog post coming out soon that explains this in more detail!

[@3ventic]

@@Jacob-Gold That's sufficient detail, thanks! I'll ultimately have to give it a try to form a full opinion.

[@user-kt0jl90sfwj8cb]

1. Says that GitHub is awesome. 2. Advertises another proprietary solution. 3. Deserves dislike.

[@DeanRTaylor]

It's interesting but it doesn't seem to drastically change anything, for most companies they're not going to pay for this and like react and other frameworks businesses will just go with what works and what is popular to make sure they can hire engineers. This feels like you need to know git already and then use this which again doesn't really make it appealing since you can do pretty much all this in git.

[@Awxefgh]

in summary,grahite grahite grahite

[@okbuhmah]

So its just an abstraction of git for script kiddies. cool

[@andresgutgon]

Ineresting but not compelling enough for me

[@setoichiii]

definitely going to be checking this out.

[@WanjasBely]

It seems to be a very handy solution. I'm the person who is rebasing, force-pushing and approving PRs, but my company is quite small, so handling 2-3 peoples PRs that way is not that painful. I would try the Graphite's approach, but there some issues: * No Windows support (there is wsl and they work on native support, but right now I'm out of luck) * There is VS code extension, but no support for Intellij yet So I'll try it on Monday on my Linux machine I'm concerned how well a mix of Graphite and "normal" PRs on the same repo going to work together. Probably the only way to know is to give it a try.

[@Jacob-Gold]

(Graphite engineer here) Give it a try and let us know how it goes! We're working on better support for more surfaces like Windows and IntelliJ, I'd recommend joining our Slack community to stay up to date with that progress :) And there is actually a way to get the webview from the VSCode extension running in your browser via a CLI command that hosts the same server. With respect to your second question - lots of folks have successfully adopted Graphite individually within larger teams - we've invested a lot of time into ensuring the bidirectional sync works well from all angles.

[@sonofabippi]

Zack Freedman said it best on his diamond nozzle 3d printer video --- "This video is sponsored. I love this so much I would have made this video anyway. I'm not shilling. I'm scamming. There's a difference."

[@NicolasEmbleton]

Next week news: "Graphite announces it has Joined Microsoft and will merge with Github" Very cool tool. Thanks for sharing.

[@NicolasEmbleton]

This tool is like a Stash-on-steroids synced and mergeable. A big UX improvement on git.

[@omgCHopper]

Too many abstraction layers away from Git. I just use git cli and once you learn that, you don't need all these abstractions that hide what's going on

[@odytrice]

One feature that I think Graphite is missing that would make it an instant sell for me. Is the ability to create Stack Changes on Multiple Repos at the same time.

[@rafaelwendel1400]

50% of that git has had for years and the other 50% Gitlab has. The dashboard is really clever, though. I figure it to be rather opinionated to say you didn't use certain git commands just because you're scared. Sounds not very convincing, but I kind of get it.

[@filipmajetic1174]

GitLab already does the "diff between force-pushed versions" btw, and the rest of it is just a handful of aliases/functions... not convinced this is *that* useful

[@69k_gold]

I really only liked one video of yours that I clicked on, which was about why Facebook stopped using Git, and your presentation of Graphite sucks. So the most innovative thing a person can do in the VCS industry after Git is write a Git wrapper? Ofcourse it is! Because Git literally works with the fundamentals of change management, it's IMPOSSIBLE to find a better solution than Git. Git may or may not be a genius invention of Torvalds, but what it is is an inevitable foundation that would eventually be built by someone or the other, like the laws of physics. I really thought someone was breaking change management forever, but it seems really far from the truth I'm not trying to insult any software developer, but you should really stop exaggerating and baiting people into stuff, while being the most pretentious "How do you do, fellow kids?" developer I've seen

[@darius5979]

Theo is the tech industry's version of Karen.

[@justindoane7482]

Is this just for teams that are all usijg graphite? What happens if your using a open-source project, can you still use graphite with it and others can use regular github?

[@Jacob-Gold]

(Graphite engineer here) We don't yet support submitting cross-repo PRs, but as long as you have write perms to the repo, you can adopt Graphite as an individual due to the bi-directional sync.

[@opensourcedev22]

So we using zip archive now? Edit: 3:45 in .... we got jebaited

[@chyldstudios]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

[@IshanAditya]

Sigh... careful kids, there's no substitute to learning the hard stuff. Sure, you can hide and abstract away the hard low level internals, but like a wise man once said: "You can solve every problem with another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many levels of indirection"! (or something to that affect) ...and that was when they didn't have to pay 30$ for yet another abstraction. I'm sorry. No... NOPE!

[@AlexandreMoreauLemay]

I don’t understand the value proposition vs Gitlab MR + MR guidelines for small MR

[@wezter96]

Sponsored video for something stupidly expensive, no thanks

[@the.real.ipatch]

wow 😳

[@Treggats]

Kind of my workflow for very large changes. Though a bitch to keep up to date. So it looks very interesting, but I'm worried about the amount of PR it generates. And the review combination between Github usage and Graphite usage would probably get messy. Will try using Graphite for reviewing though.

[@hicoop]

This tool seems like a bloated git addon. I'd say half of these "oh-sh*t" features could be replicated with a free package, with no signups or credit cards required.

[@tauiin]

how fast is too fast

[@devviz]

3:36 everything is click-baity nowaways man, no worries; so basically we're just working git but with an abstraction

[@gabrielmedeiros9806]

I didn't see so much difference 🤔

[@mpoliwczak]

Looks like gerrit

[@marco_ruizv]

An ad

[@tomfancode]

Next topic: I stop using computer 😊

[@laloqf]

I feel like my workflow is similar like Graphite using only Git. I will have to test it to be sure😅

[@Jacob-Gold]

(Graphite engineer here) Let us know how it goes!

[@azeek]

Hi mom 😭

[@oliverreal]

I tried it out on my project. The first time I wanted to tried to merge a stack it broke on me and I had to merge 30+ PRs manually, syncing, submitting, rebasing, using all my CI quota. Very bad experience.

[@chrisholland6366]

Yeah, I was just thinking about this lol

[@user1234-iu1jg]

No thank you, i can see the appeal. But this increases the cost and increases the complexity(more things to learn, ui, cli to get used to, abstraction etc). most of it seems to be some git commands and some small kind of svn ideas, which is cool, not sure what to think about it.

[@codeChuck]

Theo likes to use new advanced tools and likes to challenge the established patterns to get a speed boost to lead his team ahead of competition! (tRPC, tailwind, Next, Clerk, Upstash, Axiom) are all parts that he uses NOW (2023-2024), and Graphite is a new addition to simplify his github workflow!

[@tekkie_]

For those who have worked at Google: this is basically just cl/ and hg on top of Git. But question: I have one big commit with bunch of files. Now I want to break into smaller stacked PRs. How?

[@emmanuelchucks]

I couldn't exactly put my finger on it but this is what I have been looking for

[@taliosnz]

Does "gt sync" require syncing to main/master? Or is that branch configurable?

[@stercorarius]

I was using a tool called stgit which is similar to this back in 2015

[@fdimb]

are there similar open source implementations?

[@Dzatoah]

Gitlab integration would be so fucking cool.

[@oso_estudioso]

black xl theo sus 😮😮

[@devviz]

13:35 summary of graphite in a sentence (or two)

[@aayush_dutt]

Do you use it at work with all your colleagues?