Git Intent

Express the Git intent, not the surgery.

Git Intent is a community-maintained collection of safe, deterministic, and recovery-aware Git operations for humans and AI agents.

Git already gives us excellent primitives. The difficult part is that many simple intentions still require surprisingly fragile combinations of those primitives:

• correct attribution across existing commits;
• recover lost work;
• move a history range safely;
• repair refs;
• rewrite sensitive history; and
• unwind an incorrect operation.

Humans repeatedly reconstruct these procedures from memory and documentation. Coding agents repeatedly spend context and tokens reasoning through the same operations—and can still improvise the wrong sequence.

Git Intent captures proven solutions once.

Instead of expressing the surgery:

git rebase ...
git commit --amend ...
git update-ref ...

express the intent:

git fix-author \
  --start fix/author \
  --finish feature/foo \
  --name "AIPAL" \
  --email "aipal@uklok.ai"

Every mutating operation follows the same model:

preflight
  -> resolve
  -> preview
  -> checkpoint
  -> execute
  -> verify
  -> recover

Built on what already works

Git Intent is not another version-control system, branch-management philosophy, or generalized Git wrapper. It does not replace Git's plumbing.

When Git, git-filter-repo, git-revise, libgit2, or another established project already solves the underlying problem reliably, Git Intent can build on that work. Engines are implementation details unless they materially change an operation's safety or semantics.

The value of Git Intent lives at the boundary between intent and safe execution.

Humans and agents share the same tools

Operations are ordinary command-line tools first. Agent Skills package those same reviewed executables with enough context for an agent to recognize when to use them.

The agent chooses the operation. The operation owns the surgery.

This reduces improvisation without creating an agent-only Git abstraction.

Install git fix-author

Install the reference operation somewhere on PATH:

install -m 0755 \
  skills/git-fix-author/scripts/git-fix-author \
  "$HOME/.local/bin/git-fix-author"

Git discovers executables named git-<command>, so the installed program is available as either git-fix-author or git fix-author.

Preview an inclusive rewrite range:

git fix-author \
  --start fix/author \
  --finish feature/foo \
  --name "AIPAL" \
  --email "aipal@uklok.ai" \
  --dry-run

Read the operation guide for behavior, limitations, recovery, and automation examples.

Project documents

• Philosophy
• Architecture
• Operation contract
• Contributing
• Security policy

Develop and verify

The test suite creates disposable repositories and proves the promised history invariants:

scripts/test
scripts/validate-skills

ShellCheck and shfmt are used in CI when available locally:

shellcheck scripts/test scripts/validate-skills \
  skills/git-fix-author/scripts/git-fix-author \
  tests/git-fix-author/test.sh

shfmt -d -i 2 -ci \
  scripts/test scripts/validate-skills \
  skills/git-fix-author/scripts/git-fix-author \
  tests/git-fix-author/test.sh

Status

git-fix-author is the first reference implementation of the Git Intent operation contract. New operations should start from a real, repeatable Git problem whose intent is simple but whose safe execution requires careful work.

Git Intent is licensed under the MIT License.