Neatly subdivide a single branch into multiple branches

[edverma]

From @CityOfThrowaway on HN -

I haven't tried this yet (though I plan to).

One thing I would love is if I could give it a hint and have it extract out certain types of changes into its own branch that could split into a new PR.

I often find myself adding a new, re-usable component or doing a small refactor in the middle of a project. When you're a few commits into a project and start doing side-quests, it's super annoying to untangle that work.

The options are one of:

1. A mega PR (which everybody hates)
2. Methodologically untangling the side quest post-hoc
3. Not doing it

In principle, the "right" thing to do would be to go checkout main, do the side quest, get it merged and then continue. But that's annoying and I'd rather just jam through, have AI untangle it, and then stack the commits (ala Graphite).

It's easy to verbally explain what stuff is side-quest vs. main quest but it's super annoying to actually do the untangling.

Maybe this tool magically can do that... but I do wonder if some context hints from the dev would help / make it more effective.

[jaredsohn]

Custom instructions might work for this.

git-smart-squash/DOCUMENTATION.md

Line 143 in cdfc482

| `--instructions TEXT` | `-i` | Custom instructions for AI | None |

Set the -instructions param and indicate the side quest you want placed into a separate commit. Indicate you want that to be the initial commit so you can merge it first. Then cherry-pick the side quest commit into a separate branch and ship that. Optionally remove from the original branch.

Update: Tried this out and it works for me; hopefully it solves CityOfThrowaway's problem.