I’ve been using Jujutsu (jj) for about a week now after reading Matthew’s blog post on using jj with Claude Code hooks, and my shell history shows 635 commands - which is a lot for a week’s usage but I learn by doing.

I wasn’t really a Git power user to begin with, so switching wasn’t about figuring out advanced workflows I could unlock with jj, rather just plain curiosity to learn a new skill and be on the top of today’s fast-paced software scene. My Git usage was pretty basic: create branch, make changes, commit, push, open PR, but with jj, multiple cool tricks seem possible that I am yet to learn.

The biggest thing I like so far - I can commit changes to my main bookmark (think of main branch for now but the concept of bookmarks is very different) and when I’m ready for a PR, just run jj git push -c @- and let jujutsu handle the branch naming. Turns out I don’t care what the temporary branch is called - I just want my code reviewed.

Steve Klabnik’s tutorial helped me understand the concepts, but honestly, what made it click was just using it on real projects and asking Claude when I got stuck. The Discord community is pretty active too, which helped when I wanted to see how other people actually use this thing day-to-day. Claude helped fill in the gaps when I got stuck. “I want to do X but don’t know the jj command” worked way better than trying to map git knowledge to jujutsu concepts myself - Claude got some commands wrong, but I don’t blame considering jj is only four years old.

After 635 commands, here’s what I actually use:

232 jj st          # my new git status
 53 jj log         # checking history constantly
 23 jj git push    # getting changes out
 23 jj diff        # seeing what changed
 21 jj bookmark list # equivalent to checking list of branches but there is no concept of being on a specific branch
 10 jj git fetch   # staying current

Here’s how I work now, based on what actually happens in practice:

Just start coding. No branch creation, no naming decisions. I’m always working on @ (the current change) in my main bookmark.

Making progress:

jj st                    # see what changed
jj diff                  # review specific changes
jj describe -m "message" # describe the current change

Ready for review

The jj git push -c @- command is magic. It pushes the change I just finished (not the current working change) and automatically creates a GitHub PR. The branch name gets auto-generated and I don’t care what it is.

Multiple changes: If I want to work on something else before the first thing is done, jj new creates a new change on top. But, I am yet to figure out how I can properly branch a new revision out of an earlier commit instead of the latest commit that’s considered incomplete. I suppose something as easy as jj new -r change-id would do?

Most of my projects are existing Git repos, so I use colocated mode: jj git init --colocate

This keeps the .git directory and adds jujutsu on top. I can still use git commands when needed, but mostly stick to jj. The git remotes just work, and I can push to GitHub normally.

Had to set up a few config things in my first run:

jj config set --user user.name 'Arun'
jj config set --user user.email '[email protected]'
jj config set --user ui.paginate never
jj config set --user user.editor "code --wait"

The ui.paginate never is important - I want to see command output directly in my terminal, not in a pager.

Play

I am still figuring out a few things:

Commit signing: I sign commits in git but haven’t figured out how to do this in jujutsu yet. The docs mention it but I haven’t tried it yet.

Workspaces vs git worktrees: This is the big one. Claude Code recommends multiple worktrees so you can run multiple instances on the same project. Jujutsu has workspaces, which sound similar but work differently.

From my experimenting with jj workspace add --name try/public-fixes tree/try/public-fixes, I can create workspaces, but they don’t play nice with git colocation the way I expected. When you add a workspace in a colocated repo, it seems to become a pure jj repo in that workspace. Not ideal when other tools expect git.

Might need to use git worktrees for the Claude Code use case and jujutsu for regular development. Still working this out.

Advanced rebasing: I know jujutsu is supposed to be better at handling complex history operations, but I haven’t needed that yet. My workflows are pretty linear.