Date Intelligence

Standups are entirely dependent on time. “Yesterday” and “Today”.

But extracting the correct concept of “Yesterday” from a Git repository requires careful date handling.

The Rebase Problem: %aI vs %cI

Every git commit actually has two dates:

1. Author Date (%aI): When the commit was originally written.
2. Commit Date (%cI): When the commit was applied to the current tree.

If you write a commit on Monday, but then git rebase your branch on Wednesday to fix merge conflicts before merging, the Author Date remains Monday.

If a standup tool relies on the Author Date, your Wednesday standup will be completely empty, because Git thinks that work was done on Monday.

git-brief strictly parses the Commit Date (%cI). When you rebase or squash, the Commit Date is updated, ensuring you get accurate credit for the day you actually integrated the work.

The Weekend Look-back

If you run git brief on a Tuesday, “Yesterday” means Monday.

But if you run git brief on a Monday, “Yesterday” means Friday (and the weekend).

git-brief has a built-in weekend look-back algorithm. If the current day is Monday, it automatically extends the --since argument passed to the Git and GitHub collectors to 3 days ago. You don’t have to pass any manual flags on Monday mornings.