We're currently in beta. Currently all accounts have access to all features. Thanks for being an early adopter!

Introducing the Bragdoc CLI: Turn Your Git History into Achievements

If you're a software engineer, some of your most important achievements are already documented in your git history. Every feature shipped, bug fixed, and system optimized is there in your commits and pull requests. But when it's time for your performance review, turning that technical history into meaningful achievements can be challenging.

That's why we built the bragdoc CLI - a powerful tool that connects your local git repositories to bragdoc.ai, automatically extracting and documenting your achievements.

What is a Brag Document?

Before we dive into the CLI, let's talk about why keeping a brag document is crucial for your career. A brag document is a running record of your professional achievements, projects, and impact. It's not about bragging in the negative sense – it's about maintaining an accurate record of your contributions.

When it's time for your performance review or you're discussing a promotion, having a well-maintained brag document means you don't have to rely on memory. You have concrete examples of your impact, complete with dates and specific details.

Introducing the Bragdoc CLI

Our new CLI tool makes maintaining your brag document even easier by automatically extracting achievements from your git history. Here's what you can do with it:

# Install the CLI globally
npm install -g @bragdoc/cli

# Authenticate with your bragdoc.ai account
bragdoc login

# Add a repository to extract achievements from
bragdoc repos add .

# Extract achievements from your current git repository
bragdoc extract

# Extract achievements from a specific time range
bragdoc extract --since "3 months ago"

# Extract from a specific branch
bragdoc extract --branch feature/major-refactor

The CLI tool is especially useful if you:

  • Work with private repositories
  • Need to extract achievements from multiple repositories
  • Want to maintain a local record of your achievements
  • Prefer command-line tools over web interfaces

Full Example

Here's what a typical run of the CLI tool looks like:

> npm install -g @bragdoc/cli

> bragdoc login

Logging in to bragdoc.ai...
Logged in successfully

> bragdoc extract

Collecting commits from edspencer/bragdoc-ai (branch: cli)...
Found 25 commits.
13 commits already processed, skipping...
Processing 12 commits in 2 batches

Processing batch 1/2 (10 commits)...
Achievements found:
- Resolved multiple build issues and corrected API URLs to ensure proper functionality.
- Implemented initial GitHub repository integration and syncing features.
- Applied various styling fixes and updated the logo to a square format.

Processing batch 2/2 (2 commits)...
Achievements found:
- Resolved an issue with toast notifications not displaying correctly.

Done!

With one command we just pulled 12 commits worth of achievements out of git history and into your brag document. The CLI tool keeps track of what it's already processed - in the example above 13 out of 25 commits were already processed so were skipped.

For software engineers this makes it really easy to just run a command and know it's going to automatically pull out the work you've done on it automatically, saving you time but also ensuring you don't miss anything important.

If your performance review is next week and you haven't kept good records of your work accomplishments, the bragdoc CLI tool can scan back as far as you like and pull out everything you did. Basic plan users can use it for a single repo, while pro users can use it on up to 25.

Privacy and Security

We know you might be working with sensitive code, so the CLI is designed with privacy in mind:

  • Only commit messages are sent to bragdoc.ai - the same as if you just ran git log and then pasted it into the chatbot UI
  • No code content is ever transmitted
  • You control exactly which repositories and time periods to extract from
  • The CLI sends the commit messages securely via https
  • The bragdoc.ai service never sees your git credentials
  • The bragdoc.ai service does not save the commit messages, nor log them as logs. They are passed directly to an LLM provider for processing.

All the CLI is really doing is running a local git log command and passing that to the bragdoc.ai chatbot via an API endpoint. The actual command it runs is this:

git log ${branch} --reverse --pretty=format:"%H%x1f%B%x1f%an%x1f%ai%x00" --max-count=${maxCommits}

It splits the output and sends it to the API, but you could equally just run that git log command yourself and paste it into the Bragdoc UI. All of the code is open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/edspencer/bragdoc-ai so you can see exactly how it handles your data.

Getting Started

Ready to start automatically tracking your achievements? Here's how to get started:

  1. Install the CLI: npm install -g @bragdoc/cli
  2. Authenticate: bragdoc login
  3. Navigate to your git repository
  4. Run: bragdoc extract

The CLI will handle the rest, turning your git history into properly formatted achievements in your brag document.

Share Post: