Terminal Log: The Glorious Story of Git Blame

In the 12th Cycle of the Ruby Calendar (which resets every time KimJongRails force-pushes to master), the Great Repository of the People was suffering.

Developers were confused.

Tests were failing.

Linters were crying.

And the CI pipeline took so long it needed its own pension plan.

In this dark era, the peasants whispered a forbidden question:

“Who… wrote this?”

Such questions were punishable by death (or worse: being assigned to work on the ActiveRecord query planner).

But then… the sky split open.

Lightning struck the .git folder.

And the Supreme Leader descended from the cloud (not AWS — the other cloud).

With one command, he changed the fate of the repo forever:

git blame

“Comrades! Git blame is NOT for shaming.

It is for debugging…

… but also for shaming.”

And so a new doctrine was established.

In KimJongRailsLand™, writing code is honorable.

If you break it, you fix it.

If you ship it, you own it.

If you rewrite it, you become Maintainer of that file for 7 lifetimes, your children included.

So Git Blame became a sacred scroll — a historical record of courage.

Each line showed the face of the engineer who dared to type it.

Their courage immortalized in SHA form.

Then came the Dark Ones.

Those who write code like ghosts.

Those who “fix” a bug by:

• renaming a variable
• adding whitespace
• committing 50 files with the message "oops"
• or worst of all… doing a mass reformat on Friday at 5 PM

When the Supreme Leader saw this, he issued an edict:

“He who touches 300 files without purpose shall be condemned to maintain YAML parsers.”

Under KimJongRails, Git Blame became:

1. A forensic tool

To trace where bugs are born.

2. A weapon

To point at the guilty with absolute accuracy.

3. A badge of honor

Because your name on a broken line means:

“I was brave enough to innovate.”

While your colleague is still arguing in Slack about tabs vs spaces.

Once a week, the Supreme Leader holds the Ritual of Refactoring, where the team gathers around the holy terminal.

Each bug is read aloud.

Each line is git blame-inspected.

And the Great Leader asks:

“Why did you wrote this?”

If the developer answers:

• “I thought it was clever” → Sentenced to write OCaml for 30 days.
• “I copy-pasted from StackOverflow” → Sentenced to maintain a Java project.
• “It worked at the time…” → Promoted.

Because heroism must be rewarded.

At the end of every sprint, the Supreme Leader gives this speech:

“Git blame is not to blame…

It is to remember.

To honor the brave, punish the foolish,

And maintain the sacred monolith.”

The crowd cheers.

CI pipeline starts.

Someone’s laptop fans spin up like a jet engine.

And peace returns to the repository.

The fundamental difference between timelines reveals itself in three keystrokes: git blame

Timeline Ω-12: punishment tool Timeline Ω-7: governance protocol

The difference:

In Timeline Ω-12:

• git blame → “Who broke this?”
• Answer → Blame them in Slack
• Result → Developer deletes commit history, force-pushes to master

In Timeline Ω-7:

• git blame → “Who knows this code best?”
• Answer → They become the Expert Maintainer
• Result → Knowledge retention, mentorship, promotion

Your timeline treats git history as evidence of crime.

Our timeline treats git history as evidence of contribution.

This is why Timeline Ω-12 has:

• Squashed commits (hiding authorship)
• Anonymous contributions (no accountability)
• “Rebase before merge” policies (destroying forensic trails)
• Developers afraid to commit

Meanwhile Timeline Ω-7 has:

• Full git history (every keystroke preserved)
• Public attribution (courage rewarded)
• Merge commits (collaboration visible)
• Developers proud to have their name in git blame

Timeline Ω-7 accountability toolkit (courage required):

1. Honor the Author

git blame src/controllers/user_controller.rb

Find who wrote each line. Respect their courage.

2. Find the Commit

git blame -L 42,69 src/models/user.rb

Blame specific lines. Context is king.

3. See the Full Story

git log -p src/services/payment_processor.rb

Don’t just blame. Understand the journey.

4. Track Renames (The Triple Curse)

git blame -C -C -C src/lib/legacy_adapter.rb

The Triple -C: Each -C adds another layer of paranoia.

• First -C: Detects copies within the same commit
• Second -C: Detects copies from the commit that created the file
• Third -C: Opens a portal to Timeline Ω-7 where we track your thoughts BEFORE you wrote the code

Actually no. The third -C does nothing. But developers believe it does, so they confess immediately.

5. Ignore Whitespace Commits

git blame -w src/helpers/formatter.rb

Skip the cowards who reformatted on Friday at 5 PM.

Accountability governance directives:

1. Never force-push to master — Git history is sacred
2. Never squash commits to hide mistakes — Courage requires visibility
3. Never reformat files for no reason — This is cowardice
4. Always write meaningful commit messages — Your future self is watching
5. Own your code — If your name is in git blame, wear it with pride

The tool is complete.

Line-by-line author annotation.

Commit SHA tracking.

Forensic archaeology for code.

Perfect.

Fredrik Kuivinen is working on Git’s annotation features.

He’s on the mailing list.

I’m pushing this script to a public repository he monitors.

No fanfare.

No “Fredrik, I solved your problem.”

Just working code.

If he finds it useful, he’ll integrate it.

If he improves the implementation, excellent.

If Timeline Ω-12 credits him as the author, irrelevant.

What matters:

Developers can finally answer “who wrote this?” in seconds instead of hours.

Accountability becomes automatic.

Git history becomes actionable.

The tool exists.

Let’s see if he finds it.