Making changes

Your primary goal is always to work on a project, Jujutsu just helps you manage your work. So let's pretend we're doing some actual work by putting stuff in a file:

echo "# jj-tutorial" > README.md

When you change files in a directory tracked by Jujutsu, what you're conceptually doing is modifying the working copy commit. Let's see what jj log has to say now:

@  mkmqlnox alice@local 2025-07-22 20:19:25 e21958c2
│  (no description set)
◆  zzzzzzzz root() 00000000

A couple of things have changed:

• The timestamp of the commit was updated.
• The commit hash changed. That's one of the reasons the commit hash is less interesting, it changes every time anything else in the commit changes.
• The commit is not "(empty)" anymore!

The last point means that our new file was successfully recorded in the working copy commit.