git reflog expire --expire=now --all; git gc --prune=now

[Syzygies]

Problem description

What? You were expecting a human readable title? The whole reason I paid $80 to add Sublime Merge to my upgrade is because Git is so inscrutable. My title is however unambiguous, for those who understand Git better than I do.

Sublime Merge was worth the price of admission if I never use it again: I accidentally made two commits that included some large website downloads I meant to exclude. Despite a facility with the command line and getting AI help in Cursor, I was uncomfortable not having a clear view of the mess I'd made. Sublime Merge gave me that view, and the GUI helped me to perform a soft reset back two commits with no damage to my working directory, sort out staged items whose names had since fell under .gitignore exclusion, and catch back up with clean commit.

What I found inexplicable was that both ChatGPT and a careful web search suggested that you dropped the ball on actually reclaiming the space I was wasting.

No one looks at their git archive, let's be honest, at least without the Sublime Merge beautiful view. And somehow we manage to execute basic commands without paying you $80, figuring we can learn more Git in an emergency, say by asking ChatGPT-4o (dumber that Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but able to search the web).

So my $80 got me the view convincing me that the last two commits were at fault. And like a NYC contractor, you started the job of repairing this damage, but walked off the job without finishing the work. We all have lives; if I were going to leave the mess in place, why waste precious time even thinking about this problem?

Finishing the job your contractor walked away from took my .git down from 71M to 20M.

Preferred solution

Support garbage collection in Git archives, for people who can articulate the concept but have no clue how to carry it out. If we have to ask ChatGPT how to finish, why bother paying you the $80?