beans-mcp: Skill for Claude Code

Git MCP Workflow

An MCP-first workflow skill for repositories exposed through git-mcp.

This skill adapts common Git guidance for a world where the preferred interface is the server's tool catalog, not ad-hoc shell commands. It covers both everyday Git work and the spicier recovery and history-editing cases.

Why LLMs Must Not Use the Git CLI

Using git directly via the shell is highly error-prone for LLMs and should be considered forbidden except as a narrow last resort.

The root cause is structural: Git commands frequently require commit messages, branch names, file paths, and other string arguments that contain spaces, quotes, special characters, or newlines. Shell interpreters handle quoting through multiple layers (single quotes, double quotes, $'...' escapes, heredocs) and the rules differ between sh, bash, and zsh. LLMs routinely produce subtly malformed quoting that causes:

• Commit messages truncated at the first space or quote character
• Arguments interpreted as flags (a message starting with - becomes a flag)
• Multi-line messages collapsed to one line or silently dropped
• Shell word-splitting breaking file paths that contain spaces
• Quote nesting errors causing the command to hang waiting for a closing delimiter
• $ or backtick characters in messages accidentally triggering command substitution

These errors are often silent: the command appears to succeed, but the result is wrong (e.g., a commit message of "fix" instead of "fix: resolve null pointer in auth handler"). LLMs typically cannot observe the actual error because the shell may not surface it clearly in the tool output.

The git-mcp server solves all of this. Every tool parameter is a typed, validated field that the server passes directly to simple-git as an argument array, bypassing shell interpretation entirely. There are no quoting problems, no interpolation hazards, and no silent truncation.

Rule: Always use git-mcp MCP tools for git operations. Never invoke git via shell unless the specific operation is genuinely not available through any git-mcp tool.