jj interactive getting-started guide

I finally started looking into what jj actually is and how to use it. To wrap my head around it, I prompted DeepSeek V4.1 to build an interactive guide that assumes you already know git well, mapping common git tasks to their jj equivalents.

It took some back and forth prompting to get it right, I had to explicitly tell it to drop D3 and write the visualizations from scratch as it looks like the model handles its own plain code much better than wrangling in a library in. The result came out really nice for a quick experiment, and you can check it out here: jj — A Visual Guide for git users.

From what I can see so far jj took some great ideas from Mercurial, looked at where standard git workflows trip people up, and built a much cleaner solution on top. We spent all these years convincing ourselves that it's just the nature of version control systems to be complex and that we just need to try harder to master git. In reality, most of what git forces you to deal with is just internal plumbing and ceremonies that should never have been exposed to the user in the first place.