Why I Ditched Git LFS for my Blog (AI Sandboxes)

Up until recently I had been using git-lfs with Jules. In the last couple days, this functionality stopped working and I have decided to ditch git-lfs in favor of standard git.

The Problem: The Jules “Chicken and Egg”

Jules works by cloning your repository to understand your codebase before it ever runs your custom setup scripts. This creates a fatal loop for LFS-enabled repos.

1. The Proxy Conflict

Jules uses an internal proxy (192.168.0.1:8080) to cache repository objects and speed up clones. This works perfectly for standard Git objects. However, the Git LFS Batch API uses a different protocol. When Jules’ automated clone tries to “smudge” (download) LFS files, the proxy often returns an unexpected EOF or an authentication error because it doesn’t know how to handle the LFS traffic.

2. The Hook Lockdown

For security, Jules sets the global Git hooks path to /dev/null. Git LFS relies entirely on hooks to trigger the download process during a clone or checkout. When LFS tries to initialize itself, it hits a brick wall because it cannot write its hooks to a read-only bit-bucket.

3. The Authentication Loop

Since the clone happens before your setup script, you can’t inject the necessary credentials or proxy bypasses in time. Your session crashes before it even starts.

What I tried

I had a script like this in the Jules environment page. THIS DOES NOT WORK

# 1. Install LFS & Fix Hook Path
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git-lfs
mkdir -p ~/.git-hooks
git config --global core.hooksPath ~/.git-hooks

# 2. Force LFS to 'Success' without downloading
# This allows Jules' automated clone to complete.
git config --global filter.lfs.smudge "true"
git config --global filter.lfs.process "true"
git lfs install --skip-smudge

# 3. Bypass the Jules Proxy
git config --global --unset-all 
  url."http://[email protected]:8080/.insteadOf"

# 4. Manual authenticated pull
cd /app
git -c url."https://github.com/".insteadOf="" 
    -c lfs.url="https://github.com/jpoehnelt/blog.git/info/lfs" 
    lfs pull

This was successful on the Jules environment script page, but like I said above, the timing is wrong.

Abandoning Git LFS

Instead of fighting the environment with complex overrides and global “no-op” smudge filters, I decided to abandon Git LFS entirely.

My files are small enough to be handled by standard Git. I have a GitHub workflow that optimizes my images and then commits the files to GitHub.

How to Migrate Back to Standard Git

If you’re stuck with LFS, here is how you move the files back into your main Git history:

# 1. Pull everything local
git lfs pull

# 2. Export LFS objects back to standard Git
# (Replace extensions with whatever you were tracking)
git lfs migrate export --everything --include="*.png,*.jpg,*.jpeg,*.gif"

# 3. Cleanup and GC
rm .gitattributes
git add .
git commit -m "chore: migrate assets to standard Git"

Some additional steps that YOU SHOULD RESEARCH before running:

# 4. Rewrite history to keep it lean
# This removes any accidental blobs over 10MB from the history
git filter-repo --strip-blobs-bigger-than 10M

# 5. The "Deep Clean"
git reflog expire --expire=now --all
git gc --prune=now --aggressive

Conclusion

By moving away from LFS, I simplified my stack and made my repo “agent-friendly.” Jules can now clone my blog in seconds without a single line of Git configuration in my setup script.