yesterday

What did I work on yesterday?

A tiny, zero-dependency bash CLI for daily standups.
Lists your git commits from yesterday and today, de-duplicated by message.

---

$ yesterday
f0388245  2025-01-14 16:45  Daniel Dewhurst  docs: update API reference
dab654e5  2025-01-14 15:26  Daniel Dewhurst  fix: resolve auth timeout
51483f0e  2025-01-13 14:49  Daniel Dewhurst  feat: add user preferences

Installation · Usage · AI Summaries · Multi-repo · Testing

Features

• Smart defaults — Filters to your commits using git config user.name
• Workday-aware — On Mondays, shows Friday's commits instead of Sunday's
• De-duplication — Same commit on multiple branches? Shows once
• All branches — Searches across your entire repo
• Consistent dates — Uses commit date, not author date
• Multi-repo scanning — Scan all repos in a directory with -d
• AI summaries — Get plain-English standup summaries with --ai

Installation

curl (recommended)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danjdewhurst/yesterday/main/yesterday \
  | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/yesterday > /dev/null && sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/yesterday

Other methods

wget

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danjdewhurst/yesterday/main/yesterday \
  | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/yesterday > /dev/null && sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/yesterday

From source

git clone https://github.com/danjdewhurst/yesterday.git
cd yesterday
sudo cp yesterday /usr/local/bin/yesterday

Usage

yesterday                       # Your commits from yesterday + today
yesterday -a                    # All authors
yesterday -t                    # All time
yesterday -l                    # Literal yesterday (disable Monday → Friday)
yesterday -d ~/Projects         # Scan all repos in a directory
yesterday -at                   # All authors, all time (combined flags)
yesterday --ai                  # Your commits with AI summary
yesterday -ai                   # All authors with AI summary
yesterday --since="1 week ago"  # Custom time range
yesterday --author="john"       # Custom author filter

Flag	Description
-a, --all-authors	Show commits from all authors
-t, --all-time	Remove the date filter
-l, --literal	Use literal yesterday (disable workday logic)
-d, --directory DIR	Scan all git repos in DIR
-i, --ai	Summarize commits with AI (configure with --setup)
--setup	Configure AI provider and API keys
-h, --help	Show help message

Flags are case-insensitive and can be combined (e.g., -at, -ai, -atd ~/Projects).
Any additional arguments are passed directly to git log.

Multi-repo scanning

Use -d to scan all git repos in a directory at once — perfect for standup prep when your work spans multiple repos:

$ yesterday -d ~/Projects
[yesterday]  f0388245  2025-01-14 16:45  Daniel Dewhurst  docs: update API reference
[my-api]     dab654e5  2025-01-14 15:26  Daniel Dewhurst  fix: resolve auth timeout

If the path is itself a git repo, it runs in single-repo mode on that repo.

AI Summarization

Add --ai (or -i) to get a plain-English summary of your commits, powered by an LLM:

$ yesterday --ai
f0388245  2025-01-14 16:45  Daniel Dewhurst  docs: update API reference
dab654e5  2025-01-14 15:26  Daniel Dewhurst  fix: resolve auth timeout
51483f0e  2025-01-13 14:49  Daniel Dewhurst  feat: add user preferences

AI Summary (openai/gpt-4o-mini):
- Updated the API documentation
- Fixed a login timeout issue
- Added a way for users to save their preferences

Run yesterday --setup to choose your provider and enter your API key. Configuration is stored in ~/.config/yesterday/config (permissions 600).

Supported providers:

Provider	Default model	Requirements
OpenAI	gpt-4o-mini	API key
Claude (Anthropic)	claude-sonnet-4-20250514	API key
Gemini (Google)	gemini-2.0-flash	API key
Ollama	llama3.2	Local Ollama install

Requires curl and either jq or python3 for JSON handling.
Combined flags work naturally — yesterday -ai shows all authors' commits with an AI summary.

Testing

Tests use BATS (Bash Automated Testing System), included as git submodules.

# Clone with submodules
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/danjdewhurst/yesterday.git

# Or init submodules in an existing clone
git submodule update --init --recursive

# Run all tests
./test/libs/bats-core/bin/bats test/

# Run a single test file
./test/libs/bats-core/bin/bats test/flag_parsing.bats

Platform Support

Platform	Status
Linux	Native
macOS	Native
Windows	Via Git Bash or WSL

License

MIT