The Wringer

The Wringer is papertowel’s system for git history humanization. While the Scrubber cleans the code, the Wringer cleans the provenance.

Overview

A perfectly clean git history—where every commit is a logical unit of work, devoid of mistakes, and applied at a steady cadence—is a strong signal of AI generation (or an obsessively clean rebase, which is similarly suspicious).

The Wringer replaces “perfect” history with “human” history.

The Core Mechanism: Worktree Drip-Feeding

Most history-humanizers attempt to rewrite the existing git log using filter-branch or rebase. This is dangerous and leaves forensic traces in the git object database.

The Wringer takes a different approach. It uses git worktrees to maintain a parallel “public” version of your project.

1. Private Branch: You continue developing on your private branch, committing at “machine speed” with whatever messages you like.
2. Public Worktree: The Wringer creates a separate worktree on a public branch.
3. The Queue: It analyzes the delta between your private and public branches and builds a Replay Plan.
4. The Drip: Instead of applying all changes at once, the Wringer “drips” commits into the public worktree over time, based on a Persona Profile.

The Replay Plan

When you run papertowel wring queue, the tool doesn’t just copy commits. It analyzes them to create a realistic human flow:

Session Grouping

Humans don’t commit every 5 minutes for 24 hours. They work in bursts. The Wringer groups commits into “sessions” based on temporal proximity.

Intelligent Squashing and Splitting

• Squashing: Small, related commits (e.g., fixing a typo in the same file) are squashed into a single “human” commit.
• Splitting: Massive commits that touch unrelated parts of the codebase are flagged as candidates for splitting, simulating the process of a human breaking down a large task.

Target Scheduling

Each commit in the queue is assigned a target_time. This time is calculated based on the Persona’s active hours and productivity peaks, ensuring that the public history looks like it was written by someone with a life, a timezone, and a sleep schedule.

Using the Wringer

Setup

Initialize the public worktree:

papertowel wring init --branch public

Planning

Analyze your dev branch and build the replay queue:

papertowel wring queue --from dev

Execution

Start the drip-feed process. You can run it as a one-off or as a daemon that applies commits as their target_time arrives:

papertowel wring drip --daemon --profile night-owl

Status

Check the current progress of the drip-feed:

papertowel wring status

Lock Recovery

Safely remove a stale drip lock file on demand (it will not remove an active lock):

papertowel wring unlock-stale