My preferred workflow is to start with a new change, pick the changes I want, then use jj commit to describe the change and create a new empty one on top. Feels very similar to my old git workflow.
If I end up with multiple features or abstractions in one change (equivalent to the “dirty repo”), jj split works very well as an alternative to the git add/git commit/repeat workflow tidying up one’s working copy.
jj edit is the biggest jj footgun I can think of, as other comments said just use jj new. But also if you do accidentally edit or change something jj undo works surprisingly well.
I found when using jj it worked best for me when I stopped thinking in commits (which jj treats as very cheap “snapshots” of your code) and instead focus on the “changes”. Felt weird for me at first, but I realized when I was rebasing with git that’s how I viewed the logical changes I made anyway, jj just makes it explicit.
jj auto-rebasing doesn’t matter until you push changes, and once you do it marks them immutable, preventing you from accidentally rebasing changes that have been shared.
I’m trying Gleam out right now, and having most recently been writing Go, I’m really loving:
- No nil, instead Option and Result
- ADTs
- Pattern matching + destructuring
- Immutable everything by default
- `use` syntactic sugar (weird at first, but once you’re used to it it’s pretty elegant)
- LSP server works great for such a young language
But most of all I think the overall simplicity of the language is really what’s standing out to me. So far I think the lack of ad-hoc poly and macros are a plus - it really reduces the impulse to write “magical” code, or code with lots of indirections. In the past I’ve definitely been guilty of over-abstracting things, and I’m really trying to keep things as simple as possible now. Though I’ve yet to try Gleam with a large project - maybe I’ll miss the abstractions as project complexity increases.
I suspect Gleam will be a great language for small to medium sized projects written with LLM assistance (NOT vibecoded) - the small language, strong typing and immutability gives good guardrails for LLM-generated code, and encourages a simple, direct style of programming where a human programmer can keep the whole structure in their head. Letting an LLM run free and not understanding what it’s written is I think where projects run into big problems.
The “Signal protocol” only specifies how encryption is performed, but WhatsApp and Signal have very different protocols for actually transmitting the encrypted messages (I think WhatsApp was at one point based on XMPP, vs Signal is a bunch of protobuf blobs over a websocket)
If I end up with multiple features or abstractions in one change (equivalent to the “dirty repo”), jj split works very well as an alternative to the git add/git commit/repeat workflow tidying up one’s working copy.