Retelling Stories with Commit Diffs in My Head

In my teenage coding days around 2001, before I used version control systems, and for a long time, I spent a lot of time reading code just to somewhat memorize it and to know what happens where and when and how I got there. This state of mind has a distinct feeling for me, or rather: an aftertaste, that I instantly remember when I stare at a codebase that past me left with tons of dirty changes. In a way, it’s a feeling of being lost and having no clue what’s going on, plus an embodied memory of soon having to fumble around. I can also get this from brute force coding sessions where I touch one place, then another, and another, and just can’t find a good point to commit something as ‘working’. Just one more tweak, one more thing to try, one other place to change. Eventually, looking at the git status diff, I notice I can’t make sense of the changes anymore. That lands me in the same foreign territory where I feel lost and clueless and know I’ll need to fumble, even though I just have…