I’ve done some digging –the reason that we do this is to help us to work around GitHub rate limits. GitHub rate limits how quickly you can pull / clone. We do the re-write from HTTPS to ssh in order to allow us to authenticate using your credentials for git pulls. If the pull or clone is authenticated, the rate limits are much higher.

@marc-omorain since -> if?

Maybe this should be a configuration option in the circleci.yaml rather than a default .gitconfig?