One thing that "conflicts as first class items" implies is that commits can exist in a conflicted state. This implies that you don't have to deal with conflicts

One thing that "conflicts as first class items" implies is that commits can exist in a conflicted state. This implies that you don't have to deal with conflicts right away. Let me explain. jj's rebase works just like git's rebase conceptually: take these commits and move them on top of some different commits. But unlike git, `jj rebase` will aways succeed, and succeed immediately. The resulting rebased commits/changes will just be in a conflicted state if a conflict happens. This decouples the "do the rebase" from "fix the conflicts" in time, meaning I can choose if I want to handle them right away or later. This ends up being very powerful in a few ways: for one, because it will always succeed, and succeed quickly, we can start automatically rebasing. Let's say you have a branch with three changes on it. You go back and edit the first change, because you forgot to do something. jj will then automatically rebase the two children, and you immediately see if you've introduced a conflict. You can then fix it right now, or you can continue working on change #1, until you're ready to address the conflict. Let's say you decide to do that, and the conflict originates in change #2: when you fix that conflict, #3 gets rebased again, and in this hypothetical story, the conflict goes away. It's also nice if you have a bunch of outstanding work, and you want to rebase it all on top of your latest trunk/main/master branch: run the command to do so, and it'll all get rebased right away, and you can immediately see what has a conflict and what doesn't, and fix them when you feel like it, rather than doing it right now just so that the command completes. There are secondary advantages, like the fact that this means rebases can happen in-memory, rather than through materializing files. This means it's super fast, and doesn't interrupt what you're doing. But I think those kinds of things are harder to grok than the workflow improvements.