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Most developers spend hours each week wrestling with Git. Not because they’re bad at their jobs, but because Git doesn’t actively teach you its most powerful features. At GitKon 2025, our Senior Product Marketing Manager Jonathan Silva revealed 6 underused Git commands that solve the workflow problems developers face every day: botched rebases, lost commits, and merge conflict chaos. These aren’t advanced techniques.

As developers, we’ve all been there: a frantic coding session, a few hasty commits, and suddenly our Git history looks like a patchwork quilt of “fix,” “oops,” and “stuff.” While git rebase -i is a powerful tool for cleaning up, it’s also a source of anxiety for many, often leading to more headaches than it solves. What if you could achieve a pristine, meaningful commit history without the fear of breaking things or hours spent squashing and rewriting?

Some releases break new ground. Others clear the path. GitKraken Desktop 11.8 does both. You know that moment when you’re three commits deep into an interactive rebase and realize you’ve made a terrible mistake? Or when you’re trying to explain what changed on a feature branch, but it means manually selecting 47 commits? Or when you just want to preview a README without opening another app?

You’ve probably used AI earlier today. Maybe you asked it to debug a function, generate a test case, or explain a legacy codebase you just inherited. But here’s the thing: you didn’t just type a question and get an answer. You explained your problem, shared background context, pasted code snippets, clarified what you meant, then refined the output until it was actually useful. In other words, you were context engineering.

The software world has spent the last two years obsessed with one question: “Will AI replace developers?” Wrong question. The right question is: “How do developers stay in control while AI becomes part of the toolchain?” Welcome to The Builders Era, where the craft of software development and AI’s computational power meet on developer terms. Not as a replacement narrative. Not as a threat to our profession.

The tech world loves buzzwords. We’ve lived through the Cloud Era, the Mobile Era, the AI Era (we’re still in that one, apparently). But 2025 marks something different. Something developers have been craving for years but couldn’t quite name. Welcome to The Builders Era. Not because of some shiny new framework or yet another platform promising to 10x your productivity. The Builders Era is happening because developers are done being spectators in their own craft.

There’s a striking disconnect happening in software development right now. According to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 84% of developers are using or planning to use AI tools in their workflows. Over half of professional developers are using AI daily. The adoption is real, it’s fast, and it’s accelerating.

GitKraken Desktop 11.5 delivers massive performance improvements where they count most, opening repos up to 5x faster, stash refreshes 100x faster, and branch/tag loading 100x faster. No workflow changes required. Just measurably faster Git operations that give you back your time and flow. Ready to see it in action? Check out the Youtube Tutorial below. We need to talk about something that’s been frustrating many of you: performance.

AI assistants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot are fun to play with. They autocomplete code, refactor functions, and occasionally argue with you about whether you really needed that semicolon. But the moment you ask them to do something grounded in your repo, say, “start work on JIRA-123”… you hit a wall. They don’t know your branching conventions. They don’t know how your team links issues.

In GitLens 17.2 we introduced Commit Composer as an early preview of a set of AI-powered tools to help you craft cleaner, more meaningful commits. With GitLens 17.4, Commit Composer has leveled up. Based on your feedback, it’s now a fully interactive drafting experience that lets you compose commits in a single click, and puts you in control of your commit history.