Thoughts on Git mode

GitHub issue #10 Feature Proposed jeffallenvia github Dec 24, 2025 View original 1 GitHub reaction

I first started using coding agents via aider, which is centered around git: it commits each change and you can add extra changes of your own and commit them too.

Then I used Sketch, and was really happy to see the tight GitHub integration.

I can see why exe.dev is less centered on GitHub, but I'd like it if it still used git by default. Like if the system prompt told it to always git init before writing code, and to commit between test runs. So that people who don't care won't notice, and people like me who want a history will have it by default.

Then as a second level integration, something that makes it easier for me to give Shelley access to a repo. For example, she makes a key for herself and gives me the right gh command (or codeberg cli, or whatever) to enable that ssh key for a certain repo.

4 Comments

josharianvia github Dec 24, 2025

Yeah, I'm really feeling this one as well.

We can add some prompting to Shelley, but there are limits to what it can do.

I'd love for gh to be the right tool here, but it does't use narrow enough permissions. https://exe.dev/docs/faq has a bit about "How do I access Github?" but it all feels too manual.

I have a little setup-vm.py script that does:

result = run(["ssh", "exe.dev", "new", f"--name={vm_name}", "--json"], capture=True)

and then connects and runs (among other customization):

mkdir -p ~/src
git config --global user.name {json.dumps(git_name)}
git config --global user.email {json.dumps(git_email)}
git config --global alias.st status
cd ~/src
git init
git commit --allow-empty -m "initial commit"

but it doesn't do GitHub yet because...well, basically because there aren't good GitHub APIs to mint new narrow tokens.

There are some nuclear options, like creating an outbound GitHub proxy, but as of our last discussion we couldn't convince ourselves it was a good idea.

There's also clearly some general work to do here around managing configuration and exposing it to VMs.

All of which is to say: Yes, we agree, but we don't know how to solve it yet.

philzvia github Jan 5, 2026

I just did some nudging in the system prompt for shelley to have it "git init" more. We'll see if it works. There's also some new git integration wherein Shelley tells you that HEAD has changed, which lets you look at diffs, and so on.

jeffallenvia github Jan 6, 2026

Related: I seem to be persistently in the situation where the web-based diff view doesn't work because it doesn't notice that the git repo is in a subdirectory. (Don't ask me how/why Shelley decided to do that, I'm full-on vibe coding here, just along for the ride. 😂)

philzvia github Jan 6, 2026

@jeffallen Yeah, I've seen the subdirectories thing and need to figure that out too.