"Which commit broke everything?"
Every developer who has inherited a legacy codebase has asked this. We just never had a good way to answer it.
The Problem That Started This
Six months ago I was debugging a production issue in a codebase I'd inherited. The bug had been there for a long time — I could tell because the workarounds had workarounds. But I couldn't figure out when it started, or what change introduced it.
I opened git log. 2,847 commits. Three years of history. Everything was in there — every decision, every mistake, every refactor — locked inside commit messages that ranged from "fix critical auth bug" to "stuff".
