I feel like submodules are one of Git's most misunderstood features. I agree that they're really not great for the use-case of "I have to work in a bunch of rep

I feel like submodules are one of Git's most misunderstood features. I agree that they're really not great for the use-case of "I have to work in a bunch of repos at the same time", but they're also not designed for that. Submodules are a really good solution for problems that look like "this repo depends on some upstream repos that I don't control", and a bad solution for any other problem. They do what they were designed to do. Imagine that your build-script needs to clone a bunch of third-party dependencies. So maybe you write some kind of clone.sh that loops through a bunch of Git repo URLs. Then later you want to also specify specific commit hashes, so you add a commit-ID field. Then you write a tool that makes it easy to update the fields in your clone.sh file. Guess what you've got? Git submodules.