The only thing that changed in the two things you wrote was `ranch` -> `cdef`. Every other part of that PS1 output was the same.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a git novice and ask yourself if you'd always notice the difference. At least from my experience, they often don't, especially if they're concentrating on something else, it if they're using an IDE and the visual information about which branch/commit is checked out.

I don't think you're crazy, I think you're just too used to this sort of stuff to remember what it was like to still be learning git. When I say people make these sorts of mistakes, I'm thinking about real colleagues of mine who have made exactly these mistakes and then panicked that commits suddenly had disappeared.

Similarly, I think to you, unnamed branches feel like something complicated because in git that are. Git makes it very easy for commits to seemingly disappear into the ether, even though they are still there. But in jj, they don't disappear - they remain very visible, and the log UI shows them in a way that makes it clear where they come from. The default log UI is something like git's --graph output, which means you see how the different commits interact with each other. I really recommend having a look at the output of `jj log`, because I think then it'll be a lot clearer what I mean when I say that it's not hard to figure out what the right commit is.

> Now put yourself in the shoes of a git novice

Sometimes it seems to me that's only in SWE we allow people to proceed in the workplace without any training. There's enough learning material that people should take a week or something to practice git and not be git novice anymore.