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Shell Snippets

After finishing the Effective Shell Book I still find myself regularly discovering techniques that are huge time-savers. I've called these Effective Shell Snippets and will update this page with them from time to time, so check back regularly!

Git + AI: Interactively Staging Changes, Summarising with AI​

A fun snippet I built is the function aigac - this is short for "AI Git Add & Commit". It performs an interactive patch add of changes to the working tree, commits the changes, then uses the Terminal AI tool to create a commit message with a title and description that follows conventional commit syntax:

Demo

The function looks like this:

aigac() {
  # Add untracked files but none of their content - so that 'git add --patch'
  # lets us interactively stage new files as well as existing file changes.
  git add -N .
  git add --patch

  # If there's no changes, bail.
  if git diff --cached --quiet; then
    echo "No changes staged for commit."
    return 1
  fi

  # Generate the commit message using terminal-ai. Pipe it into 'git commit'
  # by using the '-F -' (i.e. read from the stdin file). Make sure we edit it
  # in the editor first with '-e'.
  git diff --cached |\
    ai -- 'summarise this git diff into a conventional commit, e.g. feat(feature): short description\n\nlong description' |\
    git commit -e -F - 
}

This snippet may change over time - you should be able to find the latest version in my dotfiles.