UX: My next comment usually involves looking at my previous ones and keeping that flow. sometimes my journal has todos that i'm tracking; things like that.So having it all in one place is useful and the git log experience breaks that into two pieces: one to view the log to date and another to add a new log entry.There's probably an opportunity for a shell script that loads up the log in an editor, allows me to add an entry, diffs it on exit and auto commits.
Sometimes i'll enter the same text in both my commit message and journal; and some other times my commit message essentially says "look at the journal, too detailed to list here".
Intent: Sometimes I use the journal to track not just what i am doing but also what I should be doing. Alternate paths I want to try, philosophical sidebars on why I'm doing what I'm doing, etc. These entries explain to my future self why the project is in the state that I come back to it :). I'm not sure how I could put that into anything other than prose - since its not fully fleshed out code yet. I've tried design docs and that works sometimes, but usually I just want to jot down my thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness mode rather than figure out the right document to put the thought in. The journal works best for this. Later, I'll pull things from the journal into a design doc.