Natural language version control

You should be using a version control system for all the text you write on a computer, especially if you ever write text on a computer as part of your job. But it can be tricky. I have spent an alarming amount of my career trying to figure out how to do version control on text files. Especially with git, whose interface and mental model are weird, with strange names for things and extra concepts that don’t feel essential but that you must constantly carry around with you anyway.

LLMs, and Claude Code specifically, provide a much better way.

I had finished tweaking the first cut of SimCDN and wanted to freeze it as version 0.1 but couldn’t remember the syntax. I registered my intent with the model by saying “commit this as v0.1”, and off it went:

❯ great.  commit this as v0.1

⏺ Bash(git status)
  ⎿  On branch main
     Changes not staged for commit:
       (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
       (use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
        modified:   index.html

     Untracked files:
       (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        embed.html

     no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

⏺ Bash(git log --oneline -3)
  ⎿  7293360 peer sync, origin revalidation, load balancing, and population growth
     b11370b double population centers (32 regions), double latency tolerance
     529bbb6 10x health rate for faster feedback

⏺ Bash(git add index.html embed.html && git commit -m "$(cat <<'EOF'
      v0.1: add embeddable version for Hugo blog

      - Scope all CSS under #cdn-sim to avoid leaking into host page
      - Rename #app to #cdn-sim
      - embed.html: standalone fragment (no document shell, IIFE-wrapped JS)
      - 800px fixed height, centered map with preserved aspect ratio

      Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
      EOF
      )" && git tag v0.1)
  ⎿  [main dbf0db0] v0.1: add embeddable version for Hugo blog
      2 files changed, 1058 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)
      create mode 100644 embed.html

⏺ Committed as dbf0db0 and tagged v0.1.