Learning Git
My pet project "Terse," a minimalist blogging engine, has been coming along nicely. I’ve been using OpenAI’s Codex web app to build it, and the experience has been surprisingly smooth. The tight integration with GitHub makes the workflow feel structured in a way that just makes sense: creating branches, testing changes, and merging them back into main. Through this process, I’ve learned a lot about Git—how to fetch, switch, pull, and push branches—but more importantly, how to think like a developer who collaborates with AI instead of fighting against it.
In the early days of AI-assisted coding, the biggest frustration was that the AI would forget previous instructions. You’d fix one thing, and it would break something else. The new Codex workflow changes that by forcing you to slow down, review code changes, and decide what to merge. It’s not a hands-off experience; it’s more like managing a small team of intelligent agents. You learn to describe problems clearly, define tasks precisely, and read through their work critically before approving it. The better you get at explaining what you want, the better the results become. It’s a form of agentic workflow—each task is its own small project, and you, the developer, act as the orchestrator.
This realization changed how I view productivity. Managing AI tools is like managing a team of developers: give each agent a clear area of responsibility, avoid overlap, and you’ll have fewer conflicts—both in code and in direction. Git, in this sense, is more than a version control system; it’s a discipline for structured thinking. Every branch tells a story of exploration and refinement, a snapshot of your learning process over time.
I’ve also learned when to use Codex and when to turn to ChatGPT. Codex is great for focused coding tasks, while ChatGPT is better for quick turn around time for explanations, brainstorming and feedback. Together, they make for an incredibly efficient workflow. Subscribing to ChatGPT Plus has been worth it—not just for coding, but for the way it integrates into daily life. Learning Git through Codex wasn’t just a technical exercise; it was a mindset shift. It taught me to think like a systems designer—someone who doesn’t just write code, but coordinates an evolving conversation between humans and machines.