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RP Rain Paharia On Fallthrough

“I think personally that agents actually like JJ more than they like Git. Not to anthropomorphize it too much, but what I mean specifically is that I have seen agents screw up and then use undo.”

Fallthrough · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026

“I think personally that agents actually like JJ more than they like Git. Not to anthropomorphize it too much, but what I mean specifically is that I have seen agents screw up and then use undo.” — Rain Paharia, Fallthrough

Paharia is describing using coding agents with Jujutsu (JJ), a version control system that snapshots and logs every operation. Because of that log, an agent can undo its own mistakes and see what changes a human made in the meantime.

Transcript

Fallthrough Around 21:04 into the episode
Rain Paharia

…real expertise and mastery in it. And, um, and you know, I think I guess a lot of people these days don't even use version control, they just use agents to do their version control. I am still pretty old school, I do my version control by hand for the most part. I do have is that old school now?

Matthew Sanabria

Is that what the definition of old school has updated to now?

Rain Paharia

You know, like I, I, uh, the, the one thing, the one source control operation I do use uh, uh, it for uh agents for is resolving merge conflicts, by the way. Uh, so if folks are, um, you know, that that's the thing that I do use it for. Um, I have found that JJ, you can just tell your agent to use JJ whenever it needs to do, say, read-only operation or something like that. And then it just uses JJ consistently. And what that means is that with JJ, and I think personally, that agents actually like JJ more than they like Git. Not to anthropomorphize it too much, but what I mean specifically is that I have seen agents screw up and then use undo. Or, for example, I have made local changes, right? And so, you know, I'll have an agent window and then I will make a local change to it. And then I will go back to the agent window and it'll be like, okay, well, you know, resume from here. And then the agent knows like clawed code or whatever, knows how to look at the operation log in JJ…

Matthew Sanabria

You hear that, Chris? This is for you. Okay. We're going to convert you over to JJ. It's happening. You're not holding out on us anymore. I think Chris and I have spoken about it in the past, especially since we've had Steve on and we chat a little bit about it too. And I think Chris is still in…

Kris Brandow

Steve on is an understatement. Yeah, Steve's been

Matthew Sanabria

on a lot.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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