A small trick with git

I keep relearning this, which is exactly why it goes here. After cleaning things up, the whole thing runs noticeably faster. The fix turned out to be one line, after an hour of looking in the wrong place. The documentation was correct, I just did not read it carefully.

Measuring before changing anything saved me from a pointless rewrite. It is worth writing down the commands you only need twice a year. I wish someone had told me this when I started. Writing a tiny test first made the problem obvious.

Next time I will start with the boring solution and see if it is enough. I ran into this again last week, so here is a short note for future me.

There is probably a better way, but this one is easy to remember. Plain text keeps winning for small personal projects. Most of the time the simplest tool is good enough. Naming things clearly helped more than any clever trick.