One takes them from the last commit log and uses the first few letters

So - it’s not the length of the random garbage that is the issue it’s the fact that it’s random garbage that I have no chance of remembering after 5 seconds and switching between branches. All my branches are instead random hashes that I’ll need to lookup or remember.

I’ve read through the blog. It sounds like they’ve taken the minor inconvenience of doing a git merge --squash and distributed that pain across every-single-commit you’re ever going to make instead. All to get “tidy commits” which were possible before anyway.

I was actually rather interested in the idea of jj being something that made history-rewriting easier (e.g. for removing bad commits with passwords and the like). But the fact that it almost completely throws out the entire concept of working on named branches (yes you can have them - but “One interesting thing about branches in jj that’s different than branches in git is that branches do not automatically move.” - genius) is just ridiculous. And to claim that it’s now simpler just seems like gaslighting.