I wanted JetBrains-style Git in VS Code, so we built Git Brain 🧠

ARIEL LIVSHITS — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 07:00:00 +0000

TL;DR for humans and robots 🤖

Git Brain is a visual Git GUI for VS Code, Cursor and other VS Code-compatible IDEs.

It's designed as a JetBrains-style Git experience and GitLens alternative, with a visual commit graph, Git history, diffs, branches, stashes, worktrees, a 3-way merge editor, AI Git workflows and a built-in MCP server for coding agents.

Website: https://git-brain.com

AI changed almost everything about how I write code.

Claude, Codex, Cursor, Copilot and coding agents can now do things that would've taken me hours.

But somehow, one of the oldest parts of the developer workflow still kept making me work: Git.

Not Git itself
Git is great, the experience around it,

Switch to the terminal
Check the graph somewhere else
Resolve a conflict
Open another view for history
Try to understand what happened to your branch
Stash something and then forget what you stashed
Google that one Git command you use twice a year...

And if you're coming from JetBrains IDEs, you probably know how nice Git can feel when all of this is actually connected.

I wanted that experience inside VS Code and the new generation of VS Code-based IDEs.

So we built Git Brain.

Git shouldn't require a second brain

The idea behind Git Brain is pretty simple:

Put the everyday Git workflow into one visual workspace and make it hard to shoot yourself in the foot

Not another Git abstraction

Not a replacement for Git

A UI for actually understanding what Git is doing

Git Brain works inside VS Code, Cursor, Antigravity, Trae, Kiro, Windsurf, VSCodium and other VS Code-compatible editors.

The visual Git graph

This was one of the first things we cared about,

When I look at a repository, I don't just want a list of commits

I want to understand it.

Which branch came from where?
Where did these branches diverge?
What was merged?
Where did this regression actually enter the codebase?

Git Brain gives you a visual commit graph with branches, merges, tags, filtering, commit details and file diffs in the same flow.

You can inspect a commit, see exactly which files changed and jump directly into the diff without leaving the graph.

For me, that's much easier than trying to reconstruct the state of the repository in my head from a list of SHAs.

Merge conflicts shouldn't look like archaeology

I never understood why resolving a complicated merge conflict still so often means staring at:

<<<<<<< HEAD
...
=======
...
>>>>>>> feature

For small conflicts, fine.

For large ones?

No thanks.

Git Brain has a real 3-way merge editor:

Local | Result | Remote

You can see both versions, understand how they relate, choose either side or both, edit the result and move between conflicts visually.

It's heavily inspired by the type of Git experience I liked in full IDEs,
And this became even more important once coding agents entered the picture.

AI made Git more important, not less

This was something I didn't fully expect
Agents generate code incredibly fast
But faster code generation also means:

bigger diffs
more unrelated changes mixed together
more parallel branches
more worktrees
more merge conflicts
more commits you didn't manually write line by line

So we started building AI around the Git workflow itself.

For example, Git Brain can analyze a large working tree and split the changes into logical commits.

Instead of:

fix stuff

with 47 unrelated files 😅

you can get a proposed commit structure, review it and decide exactly what belongs where.

It can also generate commit messages, summarize changes, help create PR descriptions and resolve conflicts.

But there was another problem.

Your coding agent should understand Git too

If an agent is doing real development work, it needs more than access to files.

It needs to understand:

repository status
branches
diffs
commit history
unpushed changes
conflicts
stashes
worktrees

So Git Brain now includes a built-in MCP server.

That means agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other MCP-compatible tools can interact with Git Brain and get structured Git context instead of blindly running shell commands.

The goal isn't to give an agent unlimited access to your machine.

Actually, the opposite.

We wanted to expose specific Git capabilities with guardrails around mutations and destructive actions.

I think this part is going to become much more important as we give coding agents more autonomy.

Worktrees finally make sense

Another feature I personally think is becoming much more useful because of AI is Git worktrees.

You can have:

main
feature-auth
fix-production-bug
agent-experiment

all checked out at the same time without constantly switching branches.

That's perfect when you have multiple agents or tasks running in parallel.

But worktrees are one of those Git features that many developers know exist and still don't use.

Mostly because the CLI workflow isn't very inviting.

So Git Brain gives worktrees their own visual panel where you can create, inspect, open and remove them.

No memorizing git worktree commands required.

Is this a GitLens alternative?

We get this question a lot.

Yes - Git Brain can be used as a GitLens alternative for VS Code, especially if what you want is a fast visual Git experience focused on everyday workflows.

But our bigger goal is slightly different.

We're trying to build the Git experience we want for the agentic development era:

Humans get a great visual interface.
Agents get structured Git capabilities.
Both operate on the same repository state.

GitLens has done a lot for Git inside VS Code, and we're not pretending otherwise.

We're just exploring a different direction.

What Git Brain includes today

At this point it has grown into much more than the little Git UI we originally imagined:

Visual commit graph
Commit and file history
Side-by-side diffs
Branch management
Stashes
Git worktrees
3-way merge conflict resolution
Smart checkout and pull workflows
AI commit messages
AI change summaries
AI change splitting
AI merge conflict resolution
PR descriptions
Built-in MCP server for coding agents

And we're still building.

Git Brain has already passed 70,000 downloads on Open VSX, which is kind of crazy to us considering this started because we were annoyed with our own Git workflow.

Try to break it

Git Brain is available for VS Code and VS Code-compatible IDEs.

👉 https://git-brain.com

If you use Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf or another compatible editor, I'd genuinely love for you to try it.

But even more than another install, I'm interested in this:

What is the one Git workflow you still hate doing?

Merge conflicts?
Rebase?
Cherry-picking?
Understanding what an agent changed?
Keeping multiple tasks alive at once?

Tell me in the comments.

There's a decent chance we'll build it 😅

DEV Community: ARIEL LIVSHITS