Often, I do a small spike to see if a certain code change makes sense. When it’s time to actually make code changes, I want to start from scratch to do proper TDD. However, sometimes I want to reference the code I spiked out to guide me.

One option is to stash away the spike, and reference it using:

git stash show -v

This will show you the contents of the most recently stashed code.

If it’s not the most recently stashed change, you can specify the stashed change you want to see:

git stash list
git stash show -v @{2}