Today I wanted to feed the output of git diff to an LLM, but ran into issues because it was too long. There were several files (e.g. package-lock.json) I didn’t care about including since they’re compiled output. Turns out you can exclude files or paths like so:

git diff -- . ':(exclude)path/to/excluded-file' ':(exclude)path/to/excluded-directory/*' | pbcopy

The | pbcopy bit is to pipe the output to the clipboard for easy pasting wherever.