I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.
But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has roughly the same priority as “try out a more exciting shower gel”. But did you ever step on a LEGO brick while walking to the bathroom at night? That pain is immediately obvious.
Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends. If you look at how VC (or really any network) funding circulates, it’s just people who are allowed to enter that circle and money just flows between them constantly. On one hand, you have trusted people who you are willing to give money, on the other hand, this inherently creates a clique.
It reminds me how the Bohemian Club’s slogan, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is a bit farcical given that it is impossible for the club members not to engage in commerce.
Money is given to ideas that might become billion dollar businesses and teams that look like they can do it. Pedigree, domain expertise, previous exits.
Because solving problems isn’t the goal, the goal is money (and sometimes a little fame) with the least possible effort, and software can be changed on a whim and is very cheap to manufacture and distribute and “fix in flight”, it’s the perfect vehicle for those who are impatient and don’t really care about understanding and studying a need.
> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably ...
People complaining about investors throwing stupid sums of money at stupid or trivial things unrelated (or only marginally related) to AI? ...sounds to me like the first glimpse of hope I have come across in this industry for half a decade.
> Today, with Git, we're all teaching swarms of agents to use a tool built for sending patches over mailing lists. That's far from what is needed today.
HN is not a hive mind with a single opinion. You get the extreme opinions of both sides and every nuance in between. There are people here who despise VC and people who live for it and think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.
> one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.
And what's the next step? I can't even imagine how rich (and how large the their houses) the parents need to be for them to comfortably buy such dedicated tool. Perhaps 100x~1000x richer than me?
And, while this is just pulled out from my rear side, I feel even getting this passed safety regulation would cost your $17M. It's a fully automated machine working next to toddlers!
For what it's worth, that LEGO vacuum does exist[0], it was on Shark Tank[1]. I assume they stole the idea from The Office. It doesn't sort the bricks, but I assume that was more of a stretch goal based on the insane amount of money being discussed. After all, the LEGO vacuum only cost $495k to get to market.
I'm sure, by now we could make them for <$1k per robot, if we wanted to.
EDIT: BTW did you see that the page you linked to has this at the bottom of their landing page:
"Example product"
"This area is used to describe your product’s details. Tell customers about the look, feel, and style of your product. Add details on color, materials used, sizing, and where it was made."
> EDIT: BTW did you see that the page you linked to has this at the bottom of their landing page:
I'm not seeing it. When I search for "example" nothing comes up, but maybe I'm looking wrong.
I see it on Amazon as well, with reviews and videos from "customers", so I assume it's not vaporware and that is more an issue with people not filling out the full website template, which is also not a great sign.
> But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works.
Perhaps you should have. Based on the link it seems like it's more an extension to than replacement for Git.
The page is mostly sort of fluffy AI hype, but the concrete bits are things like integrating issue tracking and PR logic in one tool/repo, like e.g. fossil does.
Also git proper could use some love too. The UI is still a mess. And the large file support and the submodule/subtree/subrepo situations are quite dismal.
> $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size.
Doing this robustly is probably quite far from robotics SOTA.
Thing i learned about raising capital it, you need to build or have a network. Thats YC is great, accelerators, incubators help you do that. Network and story you tell. Also, every stage you raise, you have to make sure the folks you raise from help you craft the narrative for thr next round.
I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
Irony of thr market is, just like tinder 20% of the companies attract all the attention rest of them try to gran the attention. Those who need capital get the capital, those who need the capital die trying.
> I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
My previous employer was like this. A 20yo company with a nice always increasing ytoy growth. The CEO told for 20 years that he would never raise any money. It was an incredible place to work : nice compensation, product and consumer centered, we had time and means to do the right things.
Until the CEO changed his mind and raised money anyway. But we didn't have to fear anything because those investors were very different and not like the other greedy ones.
Well I'm not working there anymore for a hella lot of reasons that are just the same as everywhere else.
But at least the CEO who was already rich is now incredibly rich.
> I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
This is the reason why I don't wish for VC investments if I do something preferably.
Also I feel like your comment is highly accurate, I feel like this narrative though can sometimes be the only thing that matters, something like a vibes based economy.
I don't like this so much because some idea's technical prowess is taken at the back seat while its the marketing which ends up mattering, like many other things, it feels like that tends towards something akin to influencer level marketing and its something that I sometimes personally dislike.
To be honest, the reason why I am seeing YC investments especially from say people my age 18-19, is that, it is becoming a point of flex for them and just a capitalization of hype that they might have. It really does feel like it to me that when we boil down people and interactions sometimes into how much money they have, we lead inevitably to societies like ours.
The network is something that I understand can be hard to make though. I do believe network plays a role and I do feel like I have bootstrapped my own network by just talking with people online and helping, but I do believe one issue in that, that particular network isn't my business market sadly, and I do feel unsure about how to network to them and so I would be curious if others face somewhat of an similar issue.
I am twice your age so i would assume i have some wisdom here.
Flex often dont translate to value. I often say dont look at what others are doing, head down focus and execute. Raising capital is actually the starting point, i would say it is not an achievement.
I think anyone can network. You dont have to be sales person, you have the increase your probability to be in the right place at the right time.
Git is still pretty lacking in the area of big files. This is quite annoying if you're dealing with big deep learning data. So your LEGO vacuum robot could actually benefit from a better Git.
Unsure if you want the real answer, but the financials on gitv2 will be much more appealing to a VC. Hardware is hard, slow, expensive, risky. Finally, China is the place to build physical things not the US.
> So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I’d seen the problems others had. I’d seen what I wanted to avoid doing.
Just so that people know that creating software is not only coding.
My comment is unrelated on the point you are making about expenses.
Not to shoot down your comment with sarcasm, I'm being really honest: I changed my shower gel with an expensive one this week, and it really had an unexpected, exciting effect. Small stuff can really have consequences much bigger than themselves.
That said, if you ever decide solve the tidying the toys problem, start a kickstarter, I pledge to pledge support! :D
I like git, it works perfectly fine on my command line.
I do wonder, though, if it would have been designed differently if the whole “code forge” sort of application (or whatever GitHub and the like are called) was envisioned at the time. Pull requests aren’t even a concept in git proper, right?
It seems like a kind of important type of tool. Even though git is awesome, we don’t need a monoculture.
Generates a pretty email requesting someone to pull commits from your online repository. It's really meant for Linus to pull a whole bunch of already-reviewed changes from a maintainer's integration branch.
The rough equivalent to GitHub's "pull request" is the "patch series", produced by:
Which lets you provide a "cover letter" (PR description), and formats each commit as a diff that can be quoted inline in an email reply for code review.
> I do wonder, though, if it would have been designed differently if the whole “code forge” sort of application (or whatever GitHub and the like are called) was envisioned at the time.
I would argue that it was purposefully designed in contrast against that model.
Sorceforge predates git by about 11 years. As do several other projects like google code. Its not a new idea. Or basically most source control systems. Git, actually, is the more unique idea, of a DVCS... versus a cVCS...
git is not a new idea, various features of git existed in various SCMs for decades. The distributed aspect existed in Bitkeeper too, for example.
But it took a big brain with a systemic view of the problem and solutions space to bring them all together - in a lighting fast implementation to boot.
Perforce had change sets and there were lots of tools for code reviews that worked a lot like GitHub before GitHub (review board, phabricator, another one I can’t remember).
I just looked into this out of idle curiosity, after watching some guy build a LEGO sorting machine. (They work in a warehouse that sells used bricks for model builders.)
Interestingly, this is on the cusp of viability, but training the ML model would still be cost-prohibitive (for me). With $17M, it's within reach, but there's still the obvious mechanical hurdles: Kids don't disassemble their Lego, the conditions are "less than ideal", and even vibrating belts in a warehouse scenario have a lot of trouble keeping bricks separated for the camera to get a clear image.
Robot hands are nowhere near the point where they can reliably (or even unreliably!) take apart two arbitrary Lego bricks that are joined, let alone anything of even mild complexity. This is hard for most humans, and often requires the use of tools! See: https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/help-topics/article/lego-...
The machine vision part is... getting there! You could pull some clever tricks with modern hardware such as bright LED lights, multi-spectral or even hyper-spectral sensors, etc. The algorithms have improved a lot also. Early attempts could only recognise a few dozen distinct shapes, and the most recent models a few hundred, but they're about 2-3 years old, which means "stone ages".
A trick several Lego recognition model training runs used was to photo realistically render 3D models of bricks in random orientations and every possible color, which is far faster than manually labelling photos of real bricks.
These days you could use the NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to heavily accelerate and automate this.
The author is a founder of GitHub, he could raise $17m for “git but it’s called pit and a repository is a hole and committing code is called burying it” if he wanted to, investors care about pedigree.
I feel like git started to feel outdated overnight as the company I work for went agentic development first.
I fought for years trying to convince my colleagues to write good commit messages. Now Claude is writing great commit messages but since I'm no longer looking at code - I never see them. I don't think Claude uses them either.
Branches are now irrelevant since all agents work in worktrees by default. But worktrees are awkward since you run out of disk space fast (since we're in a monorepo).
There is a constant discussion ongoing whether we commit our plans or not. Some argue that the whole conversation leading up to the PR should be included (stupid imo).
The game changed completely. It isn't weird that people are wondering if the tools should as well.
Definitely feels like there's opportunity to build something better
I have to agree that the comment you are referring to seems to be nothing other than sarcasm despite that it doesn’t read that way at all. If it’s true, the world is definitely in trouble…
Have you considered returning to actual software engineering and workflows that tools were designed to support instead of playing the LLM slot machine?
Funny the replies you're getting here when already we see companies with engineers not having written a single line of code since late last year when models became good enough to go end to end.
We see companies running web apps on top of Oracle or not using any version control at all, let alone agentic coding; it doesn't mean it's a good idea because someone is crazy enough to do it.
I thought the consensus what that vibe coding is a bad idea and you're supposed to review whatever is machine-generated, however "good enough" you believe it to be.
17M seems like a rounding error these days with all the AI investments. Probably some spare cash in a fund that needed to be closed or something.
Solving actual problems are hard, and even harder to get money for (see research). Most VC’s are in it for the returns only, not actually making a change, there are some exceptions but they are far and few apart.
On the other side, people who were using, say, Perforce, also thought there can't be anything better. Still, BitKeeper appeared as an innovation in the area, eaten later by Git, created by angry Linus (because of BitKeeper licencing changes).
So, even though Git seems to be ok (people who store large binary files or who run huge monorepos would probably disagree), maybe we can do better.
Altavista was kind of okeish for search, yet Google managed to figure out something that was (at that time) way better.
Guessing you aren’t working with hundreds of collaborators in a distributed offline system. Which is what git was for and why svn wasn’t enough for that type of use case.
I came here to say precisely that. I was on svn before git was a thing, and I've never moved off it for any projects where I get to decide such things.
To a first approximation, one could say that distributed version control is a problem nobody ever had, and nobody ever intends to have. (GitHub is the world's centralized monorepo.)
Yet, distributed version control is the majority of the reason why git's mental model is so overcomplicated.
Maybe you're not a parent. To me, this sounds like arguing against the existence of the dishwasher by saying "of all the major problems of society, washing dishes by hand isn't one."
Successfully would be big business, because everyone and everyone and the F1000 uses git. Or at least it could more of a feature than a product, and gets merged into some other VC company, or some Jira feature or etc.
Who really wants cheap lego vacuums? Basement-dwellers who are getting yelled at by their mom? Not a good market.
Tbf, git is very much a problem that needs solving. It only works well for text data, the fact that it is decentralized adds a lot of complexity but doesn't matter for 99% of users since they use a centralized git forge like Github or Gitlab, and the UX is pretty much non-existent.
It works exacly as it was designed to work.. GIT as VCS.. Version Control System.. for text code sniplets. It can handle small binary blobs just fine.
If you need (D)VFS aka Distributed Versioned Filesystem, grab right tool. Or write one.
This is exacly way I wrote DOT (Distributed Object Tracker). Its pure DVFS repo manager, to handle binary blobs and that it.. Nothing more.
People complaining about GIT not working well w/ big data just handling GIT wrong. Linus said it from the begining, its NOT tool for such datasets. Just move along.
But do you really think $17M is going to give us that alternative, or will it come from some brilliant guy going on a caffeine-fueled weeklong side quest (like how Git was invented)?
There are some things that need to come from a place of manic self-motivated genius. It's not something that you can buy with money. The money is really just there to help you shove a mediocre solution down everyone's throats (which is exactly what's going on here).
I think it’s always good to dig a bit deeper on these things.
This seems ridiculous to you, compared to a very obvious win with a Lego sorting vacuum.
Lego isn’t niche, and the explanation isn’t a weird technical thing that only experts would get and understand how important or valuable it is.
Yet it’s not being done.
Is there nobody who has realised this gap but you? Has nobody managed to convince people with money that it’s worthwhile? Have you tried but failed?
Or is it not many many thousands of people who are wrong but you?
Is the problem harder than you think? I’ve worked with robotics but not for a long time and I think the core manipulation is either not really solved or not until recently. I don’t know about yours but my kids also don’t fully dismantle their Lego creations either so would the robot need to take them apart too? That’s a lot of force. And some are special.
How people want Lego sorted is pretty broad. Kids don’t even need it sorted that much. And the volume can be huge for smaller buckets of things.
Is the market not as big as you think? Is it big enough for the cost, I’d buy one for £100 but £1000? £10,000?
How does it compare for most people against having the kids play on a blanket and then tipping it into a bucket? Or those ones that are a circle of cloth with a drawstring so it’s a play area and storage all in one? I 3d printed some sieves and that’s most of the issue right there done.
People are solving actual problems, but lots of problems are hard, and not all of them are profitable.
As a gut feeling, there is such a large overlap of engineers and large Lego collections and willingness to spend lots of money and time saving some time sorting Lego that the small number of implementations usually split over many years is very telling about the difficulty.
I continue to be amazed at American capital allocation. $17M for an idea to improve Git? For a fraction of that money Ukrainian housewives build anti-drone air defence systems in their garage that protect their country. For that kind of money you could build an apartment block to ease the housing shortage. You could invest in electricity resilience and build mini nuclear power plants or a small wind farm. Soviet capital allocation: while they were pouring money into their space program and building the "biggest baddest military helicopters" there wasn't enough bread in grocery stores.
It’s 17m for a tool which hopes to serve companies and charge money and make more than 17m in profit as a result.
If you look at the set of dev tooling, teams will frequently pay many hundreds per dev on things like CI, Git tools, code review, etc.
And to be fair, GitHub is really quite bad for a lot of workflows. I haven’t used gitbutler, but my team pays ~$30 a month per dev for tools which literally just provide a nicer interface for stacking PRs, because it saves us WAY more than that in time.
This isn’t even an egregious example of VC, it’s just an enterprise dev tooling bet.
After a decade of negative interest, there is still a lot of excess capital looking for high-risk-high-gain investments. Perceived future economic value is unfortunately not in the stuff we know and understand to be useful, essential.
Use value != sales value; hype sells.
Ps. not too sure how far $17M gets you toward mini nuclear power plants, but I catch your drift.
You'd have thought the same about all the big tech companies when they were startups. Yet now they're making piles of money and contributing to America's overall economic success.
But then again, for a fraction of the money US-Americans pay for health insurance, we actually have public health insurance here...
Yes, we have higher taxes, yes, we pay more in social security... but in the end we have far less "Working Poor" and I know very, very, very, very few people who have more than 1 job.
But I guess that's just socialist bullshit.
What I am trying to convey is: The US lives in its own bubble, just like the rest of us does.
The difference is that the US hears the US propaganda and the rest of us heard the US propaganda for decades as well, through Hollywood and media.
Europe is far from perfect though. In all the three countries I'm familiar with (UK, Sweden, Spain) the healthcare system is really struggling. Extremely long wait times are becoming more common, for more procedures, even in the emergency departments.
But the taxes remain very high, especially on income so it hits middle-class professionals the hardest. In some countries like Spain (and increasingly Sweden) they are contributing to a high structural unemployment, especially youth unemployment, too.
So in the end, the problem isn't just higher taxes, but higher unemployment and therefore lower gross salaries (before those higher taxes are even taken into account).
I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. We are definitely heading in the wrong direction. It's the same development here (not UK, Sweden or Spain)
I'm paying maximum social security and in previous generations the service you got in the public healthcare system was way better.
For some procedures I definitely go to private doctors as well nowadays. It's not a huge burden, but e.g. I will never go to a public skin doctor ever. The stories you hear about them are... brrr!
But overall the system is still miles ahead of the one in the United States.
I've been there on multiple occasions and witnessed first hand, I have friends there and I know both systems. (Obviously I know the European system or rather the one in my country of residence even better)
I think it means parallel branches. Normally in git you can use one branch at a time. With agentic coding you want agents to build multiple features at the same time, each in a separate branch
Can agents not checkout different branches and then work on them? It's what people also do. I have a hard time to understand what problem is even solved here.
Well, yeah, but Git is basically UNIX/POSIX or JPEG. Good enough to always win against better like Plan 9 or JPEG XL (though I think this one may win in the long term).
A lot of people seem confused about how they raised the money, but it’s actually a pretty easy VC pitch.
- It’s from one of GitHub’s cofounders.
- GitHub had a $7.5B exit.
- And the story is: AI is completely changing how software gets built, with plenty of proof points already showing up in the billions in revenue being made from things like Claude Code, Cusor, Codex, etc.
So the pitch is basically: back the team that can build the universal infrastructure for AI and agentic coding.
I watched video to see where my prompts etc are stored in a way that makes sense. But no, this is just a nicer git. We need a solution to all these 10k loc PRs.
Makes sense to me. The new coding agents are drastically changing software development, and I think there's a lot of space for innovation in how version control tooling works in this new world.
Another commenter explained it: It's about working on multiple branches in parallel. You can only check out one branch at a time currently in git - but with "but" you have all the changes just in memory so different agents can work on different branches at the same time.
I recently switched to Jujutsu (jj) and it made me realize that “what comes after Git” might already exist.
It turns out the snapshot model is a perfect fit for AI-assisted development. I can iterate freely without thinking about commits or worrying about saving known-good versions.
You can just mess around and make it presentable later, which Git never really let you do nicely.
Plus there’s essentially zero learning curve, since all the models know how to use JJ really well.
Yes, it’s fantastic. I have a post-tool-use hook for Claude Code to snapshot the repository for every edit. It’s like the built in file history feature but native in my VCS and works for my edits too. Don’t want to froth too much but JJ is my favourite piece of software in a while, and the fact that it’s not VC-funded is a major plus point.
I was doing something with jj snapshots with AI now that you have mentioned.
I will admit, I didn't know jj but I wanted snapshots so I used it, so then when AI made some changes and kept on going and I wanted to go back to a particular change and I used ai to do that. It was actually really frustrating. To the point that I think I accidentally lost one of the good files within the project and I had to settle on good-enough which I had to try to get for hours to that particular point.
My point feels like I should either learn jj properly to use it or to at this point, just ask AI agents to git commit. Another point but I was using ghostty and I had accidentally clicked on the title bar and somehow moved the folder to desktop, I wasn't thinking the most accurately and I just decided to delete it thinking that it must have copied it rather than moved it. (Also dear ghostty why do you make it so easy to move folders, it isn't the best of features and can lead to some honest errors)
My face when I realized that I have deleted the project:
Anyhow decided to restore it with ~/Trash but afterwards realized that the .git/.jj history is removed because it deletes hidden folders (from my understanding) so I definitely lost that good snapshot. I do have the binary of the app which worked good but not the source code of it which is a bit frustrating
These were all just an idea of prototyping/checking how far I can move things with AI. Yeah so my experience for that project has been that I could've even learnt a new language (Odin) and the raylib project to fix that one specific bug in lower time than AI which simply is unable to fix the bug without blowing the whole project in foot.
I think the takeaway is to have good backups man. I mean I was being reckless in this project because I had nothing to lose and was just experimenting but there have been cases where people have lost databases in prod. So even backups should be essential if you find any source code which is good to be honest.
I am sure you guys must have lost some source code accidentally which you have worked upon, would love to hear some horror stories to hopefully know that I haven't been the only one who has done some mistake and to also learn something new from these stories. (I am atleast happy in the sense that I learnt the lesson from just an tinkering thing and not something truly prod)
Jujutsu has changed how I work with git. Switching tasks is just "jj edit <change>" or "JJ new <change>". The only thing it can't do properly is git worktrees (it doesn't replicate the .git dir to the worktrees, breaking tooling that relies on git) but there is a (old) issue relating to it. Not sure on the priority, though.
The only security incident I've had in my career was due to Git Butler - it committed temporary files into GitHub without me explicitly approving it! Of course, it was a private repository, but still, it became impossible to delete those secrets because there were plenty of commits afterward. Given the large file tree and many updated files in the commit, it wasn't apparent that those folders got sneaked into the commit.
So, I really hope security incidents don't come after Git!
How will you ever get the network effects needed to get sustained users with a commercial tool?
Given Git was created because BitKeeper, a commercial tool, pulled their permission for kernel developers to use their tool aren’t we ignoring a lesson there?
Uhh, to be fair, if the goal was only to recreate git from 2005, it probably wouldn't cost $17M. I'd hazard a guess that they're recreating modern git and the emergent stuff like issues, PRs, projects, etc. I've also heard that the core devs for git are essentially paid a salary to maintain git.
Literally true if it's that one guy you're talking about.
Also, you should hear Linus talk about building git himself, what he built wasn't what you know as git today. It didn't even have the commands like git pull, git commit etc until he handed development over.
Thinking it for bit it comes to "what comes after Git" and what does "Git" mean there.
To build better tool than git, probably a few months by tiny team of good developers. Just thinking of problem and making what is needed... So either free time or few hundred thousand at max.
On other hand to replace GitHub. Endless millions will be spend... For some sort of probable gains? It might even make money in long run... But goal is probably to flip it.
No he didn’t. He built a proof of concept demo in 7 days then handed it off to other maintainers to code for real. I’m not sure why this myth keeps getting repeated. Linus himself clarifies this in every interview about git.
His main contributions were his ideas.
1) The distributed model, that doesn’t need to dial the internet.
2) The core data structures. For instance, how git stores snapshots for files changes in a commit. Other tools used diff approaches which made rewinding, branch switching, and diffing super slow.
Those two ideas are important and influenced git deeply, but he didn’t code the thing, and definitely not in 7 days!
He did what needed to be done. Linux similarly has thousands of contributors and Linus's personal "code contribution" is almost negligible these days. But code doesn't matter. Literally anyone can generate thousands of lines of code that will flip bits all day long. What matters is some combination of the following: a vision, respect from peers earned with technical brilliance, audaciousness, tenacity, energy, dedication etc. This is what makes Linus special. Not his ability to bash on a keyboard all day long.
Installed GitButler to try it out — and realized it installs malicious Git hooks to take over the git commit workflow:
* pre-commit — The malicious one. It intercepted every `git commit` attempt and aborted it with that error message, forcing you to use `but commit` instead. Effectively a commit hijack — no way to commit to your own repo without their tool.
* post-checkout — Fired whenever you switched branches. GitButler used it to track your branch state and sync its virtual branch model. It cleaned this one up itself when we checked out.
* There's also typically a prepare-commit-msg hook that GitButler installs to inject its metadata into commit messages, though we didn't hit that one.
* The pre-commit hook is the aggressive one — it's a standard git hook location, so git runs it unconditionally before every commit. GitButler installs it silently as part of "setting up" a repo, with no opt-in. The only escape (without their CLI) is exactly what we did: delete it manually.
Why are investors still investing in SAAS products like this? I've heard some investors made rather blunt statements about such investments being a very hard sell to them at this point. Clearly somebody believes differently here.
We have AI now. AI tools are pretty handy with Git. I've not manually resolved git conflicts in months now. That's more or less a solved problem for me. Mostly codex creates and manages pull requests for me. I also have it manage my GitHub issues on some projects. For some things, I also let it do release management with elaborate checklists, release prep, and driving automation for package deployment via github actions triggered via tags, and then creating the gh release and attaching binaries. In short, I just give a thumbs up and all the right things happen.
To be blunt, I think a SAAS service that tries to make Git nicer to use is a going to be a bit redundant. I don't think AI tools really need that help. Or a git replacement. And people will mostly be delegating whatever it is they still do manually with Git pretty soon. I've made that switch already because I'm an early adopter. And because I'm lazy and it seems AI is more disciplined at following good practices and process than I am.
> If you think like that why invest in software at all; the AI will do everything?
Correct, hence the "SaaSpocalypse" phenomenon in recent weeks. Investors are slowly becoming disinterested in investing in software anymore precisely because models are good enough now to replicate any SaaS pretty easily, which still requires effort but is less so than paying for a SaaS particularly in large organizations which are charged per seat.
There seems to be a bit of a trend that dev adjancent open source companies with not much monetization strategy are being bought off by AI companies. Most prominently Anthopic bought bun, OpenAI is buying Astral. So that may be the exit plan too.
Not sure what the business logic is. Maybe they are mostly acquihire. Or the companies just have so much money to throw around they just spray it everywhere. Whatever the reason, if the tools remain open source, the result for devs is probably better open source tools. At least until enshittification begins when the companies run out of funding, but hopefully the tools remain forkable.
I actually believe we need to rethink Git for modern needs. Saving prompts and sessions alongside commits could become the norm for example, or I could imagine having different flags for whether a contribution was created by a human or not.
This doesn't seem to be the direction these guys are going though, it looks like they think Git should be more social or something.
What do people expect to do with these saved prompts/contexts? Nobody is going to read through them, right? I suppose the thinking is LLMs will, but any decently active codebase will soon contain far too much context for any current LLM. Is this the same thinking behind cryonics, ie. we may be able to use this stuff one day so let's start saving it now? Hoarding has ruined many people and it will ruin us all if we're not careful...
For me the reason would be to preserve traces of intentionality (ie what was the user trying to achieve with this commit?). These days a 10k LOC commit might be triggered by a 100-word user prompt, there is a lot more signal in reading the prompt itself than the code changes.
I mean, it's just text, so it shouldn't be too taxing to store it. I agree it's hoarder mentality though :)
I was really hoping we'd see some competition to Github, but no, this is competition for the likes of the Conductor App. Disappointed, I must say. I am tired of using and waiting for alternatives of, Github.
The diff view in particular makes me rage. CodeMirror has a demo where they render a million lines. Github starts dying when rendering a couple thousand. There are options like Codeberg but the experience is unfortunately even worse.
I'd like to pretend that inability to render large diffs is a feature. Nobody is going to actually read the multi-thousand line diff; you need to make smaller PRs, or just admit that the diff in that particular view isn't helpful. I doubt that's the actual reasoning, but I can live with it.
I like what I see in the video, it would solve a lot of problems I end up having with git.
That said, I find the branding confusing. They say this is what comes after git, but in the name and the overall functionality, seems to just be an abstraction on top of git, not a new source control tool to replace git.
i dont get it, watched the video seeing the "power" of using multiple branches at the same workdirectory etc. all i was thinking was ok they want to make it easy for coding agents work with multiple branches / feautres at once... Just that works already pretty well with git and worktrees... and agent uses the tools anyway... dont know what they want to build with 17M
It can back on to git if you want, so a migration doesn't have to be all-at-once. It already has all of these features and more. It's stable, fast, very extensible.
jj truly is the future of version control, whereas git plus some loosely specified possibly proprietary layer is not.
I'm excited to see what ersc.io produces for a jj hosting service and hopefully review UI.
Git is pretty close to ideal for the distributed model.
I think the real money is in figuring out a centralized model that doesn't suck. Explicitly locking things has certain advantages. Two people working on the same file at the same time is often cursed in some way even if a merge is technically possible. Especially if it's a binary asset. Someone is going to lose all of their work if we have a merge conflict on a png file. It would be much better to know up front that the file is locked by some other artist on the team.
Is this actually replacing git, or just a new frontend for the same git stuff? In any case, I'll be interested to see if this still exists in a year, and if that $17M actually made it replace git
Some others mentioned pijul, but I will put in my two cents about it. I have been looking to make use of it because it seems really nice for working with an agent. Essentially you get patches that are independently and can be applied anywhere instead of commits. If there is ambiguity applying a patch then you have to resolve it, but that resolution is sort of a first class object.
I watched the video but I don't quite get it. I feel like I'm missing something? A nicer git workflow is not what I need because I can ask an LLM to fix my git state and branches. This feels a bit backwards. LLMs are already great at working with raw git as their primitive.
I'm curious what their long term vision they pitched investors is.
The title mentions 'after git' but the video demo shows that it's very much tied to git and Github. The post also mentions the overhead of dealing with git, but the examples shown come with their own overhead and commands. I'm admittedly unable to see the appeal or just misunderstanding it, but the number of stars on the repo shows I'm in the minority.
Yes, I think that “after git” claim is just marketing. This is indeed just a nice frontend to git. It looks interesting and seems to solve real problems, in the same way that jj already does. But it is not a radical change.
Also if they really wanted to “replace git” I think that would be much more difficult due to network effects. Everybody is already using git.
Dunno what they’re trying to build, but I encourage everyone to try what they already have built. It helps me work on multiple changesets in parallel. This often just happens, for example you work on something and discover a bug in something else that needs to be fixed. In GitButler, I can just create another branch, drag the changes in there, push and done.
Also, if you ever worked with Perforce, you might be familiar with changelists. It’s kind of like that.
Now, GitButler is by no means perfect. There are many rough edges. It tends to get stuck in unexpected states and sometimes it isn’t easy to rectify this.
It also cannot split changes in a single file, which is a bummer, because that’s something I encounter routinely. But I understand this complicates the existing model tremendously.
> I know what you’re thinking. You’re hoping that we’ll use phrases such as “we’re excited,” “this is just the beginning,” and “AI is changing everything”. While all those things are true
Superbly tone deaf. The only people who might possibly want to read that are those already drinking your Kool-Aid, most everyone else can already smell the bullshit.
Wow. So much hate in the comments here. Of all the funding / equity events lately, I wonder how this one gets so much doubt and distrust from the start.
If this isn’t something to at least root for, in the sense of a small team, novel product, serving a real need, then I dunno what is. You can use jj or tangled and still appreciate improvements to git and vcs on the web in general. Competition amongst many players is a good thing, even if you don’t believe in this one particular vision.
Heaven forbid it isn’t 100M going to a YC alum for yet another AI funding raise.
Wow, very impressive, great job!
You mentioned monitoring, I think it might be a very interesting way to see the "ongoing" work of your agents and orchestrate them. Do you have a precise idea on how it's going to happen, or is this already planned?
GitHub CEO also raised 60M for 'entire' to bring agent context to git. The dust is yet to settle here as it's difficult to bring a paridgm shift from today's git workflows
To me jj is an ok porcelain for git, but I find it worse than magit. Sure, it has some tricks under their sleves for merging, but I just don't run into weird merges and never needed more advanced commands like rerere.
What I'd would expect of the next vcs is to go beyond vcs of the files, but of the environment so works on my machine™ and configuring your git-hooks and CI becomes a thing of the past.
Do we need an LSP-like abstraction for environments and build systems instead of yet another definitive build system? IDK, my solution so far is sticking to nix, x86_64, and ignoring Windows and Mac, which is obviously not good enough for like 90%+ of devs.
> We've raised $17M to build something like git and bait-and-switch it later because VCs only exist to extract value and anything we end up building will be a shadow of a fart of how useful git actually is
FTFY. I don't understand how anyone could think to replace git by raising money. The only way to truly do this is grassroots iteration. You can build the software, but the distribution will never reach the same network size as git before your investors start asking "When do I get my return?"
> Imagine your tools telling you as soon as there are possible merge conflicts between teammates, rather than at the end of the process.
So you're centralizing a fully distributed process because grepping for "<<<<<<<" and asking your teammate the best way to merge is too hard? I thought coding was supposed to be social?
I mean, honestly, go for it and build what you want. I'm all for it! But maybe don't compare it to git. It's tone deaf.
But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has roughly the same priority as “try out a more exciting shower gel”. But did you ever step on a LEGO brick while walking to the bathroom at night? That pain is immediately obvious.
Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
It reminds me how the Bohemian Club’s slogan, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is a bit farcical given that it is impossible for the club members not to engage in commerce.
Money is given to ideas that might become billion dollar businesses and teams that look like they can do it. Pedigree, domain expertise, previous exits.
Because solving problems isn’t the goal, the goal is money (and sometimes a little fame) with the least possible effort, and software can be changed on a whim and is very cheap to manufacture and distribute and “fix in flight”, it’s the perfect vehicle for those who are impatient and don’t really care about understanding and studying a need.
People complaining about investors throwing stupid sums of money at stupid or trivial things unrelated (or only marginally related) to AI? ...sounds to me like the first glimpse of hope I have come across in this industry for half a decade.
> Today, with Git, we're all teaching swarms of agents to use a tool built for sending patches over mailing lists. That's far from what is needed today.
And what's the next step? I can't even imagine how rich (and how large the their houses) the parents need to be for them to comfortably buy such dedicated tool. Perhaps 100x~1000x richer than me?
And, while this is just pulled out from my rear side, I feel even getting this passed safety regulation would cost your $17M. It's a fully automated machine working next to toddlers!
On the contrary Github is a proven product.
[0] https://pickupbricks.com
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25MIpQqLIU
This video is from 8 years ago:
https://youtu.be/wXxrmussq4E?si=bgDdDvZODVov3sSC&t=15
I'm sure, by now we could make them for <$1k per robot, if we wanted to.
EDIT: BTW did you see that the page you linked to has this at the bottom of their landing page:
"Example product"
"This area is used to describe your product’s details. Tell customers about the look, feel, and style of your product. Add details on color, materials used, sizing, and where it was made."
so I wonder if they actually sell anything.
I'm not seeing it. When I search for "example" nothing comes up, but maybe I'm looking wrong.
I see it on Amazon as well, with reviews and videos from "customers", so I assume it's not vaporware and that is more an issue with people not filling out the full website template, which is also not a great sign.
https://www.amazon.com/Pick-Up-Bricks-Compatible-Accessories...
Perhaps you should have. Based on the link it seems like it's more an extension to than replacement for Git.
The page is mostly sort of fluffy AI hype, but the concrete bits are things like integrating issue tracking and PR logic in one tool/repo, like e.g. fossil does.
Also git proper could use some love too. The UI is still a mess. And the large file support and the submodule/subtree/subrepo situations are quite dismal.
> $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size.
Doing this robustly is probably quite far from robotics SOTA.
I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
Irony of thr market is, just like tinder 20% of the companies attract all the attention rest of them try to gran the attention. Those who need capital get the capital, those who need the capital die trying.
Enough friday pessimisim.
My previous employer was like this. A 20yo company with a nice always increasing ytoy growth. The CEO told for 20 years that he would never raise any money. It was an incredible place to work : nice compensation, product and consumer centered, we had time and means to do the right things.
Until the CEO changed his mind and raised money anyway. But we didn't have to fear anything because those investors were very different and not like the other greedy ones.
Well I'm not working there anymore for a hella lot of reasons that are just the same as everywhere else.
But at least the CEO who was already rich is now incredibly rich.
If you find a greedy VC then most likely they are real VC and often gets attracted when your business is not doing great.
Reputation travels in this industry therefore people care.
This is the reason why I don't wish for VC investments if I do something preferably.
Also I feel like your comment is highly accurate, I feel like this narrative though can sometimes be the only thing that matters, something like a vibes based economy.
I don't like this so much because some idea's technical prowess is taken at the back seat while its the marketing which ends up mattering, like many other things, it feels like that tends towards something akin to influencer level marketing and its something that I sometimes personally dislike.
To be honest, the reason why I am seeing YC investments especially from say people my age 18-19, is that, it is becoming a point of flex for them and just a capitalization of hype that they might have. It really does feel like it to me that when we boil down people and interactions sometimes into how much money they have, we lead inevitably to societies like ours.
The network is something that I understand can be hard to make though. I do believe network plays a role and I do feel like I have bootstrapped my own network by just talking with people online and helping, but I do believe one issue in that, that particular network isn't my business market sadly, and I do feel unsure about how to network to them and so I would be curious if others face somewhat of an similar issue.
Flex often dont translate to value. I often say dont look at what others are doing, head down focus and execute. Raising capital is actually the starting point, i would say it is not an achievement.
I think anyone can network. You dont have to be sales person, you have the increase your probability to be in the right place at the right time.
> So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I’d seen the problems others had. I’d seen what I wanted to avoid doing.
Just so that people know that creating software is not only coding.
My comment is unrelated on the point you are making about expenses.
That said, if you ever decide solve the tidying the toys problem, start a kickstarter, I pledge to pledge support! :D
I do wonder, though, if it would have been designed differently if the whole “code forge” sort of application (or whatever GitHub and the like are called) was envisioned at the time. Pull requests aren’t even a concept in git proper, right?
It seems like a kind of important type of tool. Even though git is awesome, we don’t need a monoculture.
Generates a pretty email requesting someone to pull commits from your online repository. It's really meant for Linus to pull a whole bunch of already-reviewed changes from a maintainer's integration branch.
The rough equivalent to GitHub's "pull request" is the "patch series", produced by:
Docs: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-format-patchWhich lets you provide a "cover letter" (PR description), and formats each commit as a diff that can be quoted inline in an email reply for code review.
I would argue that it was purposefully designed in contrast against that model.
GitHub is full of git anti patterns.
But it took a big brain with a systemic view of the problem and solutions space to bring them all together - in a lighting fast implementation to boot.
GitHub is a social networking site that just so happens to have code hosting related features.
So the maintainer adds you as a remote and pulls from you.
Because that’s too risky for investors.
I just looked into this out of idle curiosity, after watching some guy build a LEGO sorting machine. (They work in a warehouse that sells used bricks for model builders.)
Interestingly, this is on the cusp of viability, but training the ML model would still be cost-prohibitive (for me). With $17M, it's within reach, but there's still the obvious mechanical hurdles: Kids don't disassemble their Lego, the conditions are "less than ideal", and even vibrating belts in a warehouse scenario have a lot of trouble keeping bricks separated for the camera to get a clear image.
Robot hands are nowhere near the point where they can reliably (or even unreliably!) take apart two arbitrary Lego bricks that are joined, let alone anything of even mild complexity. This is hard for most humans, and often requires the use of tools! See: https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/help-topics/article/lego-...
The machine vision part is... getting there! You could pull some clever tricks with modern hardware such as bright LED lights, multi-spectral or even hyper-spectral sensors, etc. The algorithms have improved a lot also. Early attempts could only recognise a few dozen distinct shapes, and the most recent models a few hundred, but they're about 2-3 years old, which means "stone ages".
A trick several Lego recognition model training runs used was to photo realistically render 3D models of bricks in random orientations and every possible color, which is far faster than manually labelling photos of real bricks.
These days you could use the NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to heavily accelerate and automate this.
Well, cofounding Github helps
"We've replaced due diligence with a DNA test."
"No mutts, no miracles. Three generations of wealth or GTFO."
"Your bloodline is fine. Don't fret the cap table."
"You forgot to attach the pitch deck, but we really like your family crest."
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toy-Storage-Organizer-Lego-Play/dp/...
I fought for years trying to convince my colleagues to write good commit messages. Now Claude is writing great commit messages but since I'm no longer looking at code - I never see them. I don't think Claude uses them either.
Branches are now irrelevant since all agents work in worktrees by default. But worktrees are awkward since you run out of disk space fast (since we're in a monorepo).
There is a constant discussion ongoing whether we commit our plans or not. Some argue that the whole conversation leading up to the PR should be included (stupid imo).
The game changed completely. It isn't weird that people are wondering if the tools should as well.
Definitely feels like there's opportunity to build something better
What GP wrote sounds like an absolute nightmare of tech debt and unmaintainable spaghetti code that nobody understands anymore to me.
But I guess for some people the increased speed outweighs all other concerns?
"I'm not sure. But at least we got here fast."
I thought the consensus what that vibe coding is a bad idea and you're supposed to review whatever is machine-generated, however "good enough" you believe it to be.
Solving actual problems are hard, and even harder to get money for (see research). Most VC’s are in it for the returns only, not actually making a change, there are some exceptions but they are far and few apart.
It doesn't solve the picking-up-off-the-floor problem.
They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFRzIOna2oQ
So, even though Git seems to be ok (people who store large binary files or who run huge monorepos would probably disagree), maybe we can do better.
Altavista was kind of okeish for search, yet Google managed to figure out something that was (at that time) way better.
I came here to say precisely that. I was on svn before git was a thing, and I've never moved off it for any projects where I get to decide such things.
To a first approximation, one could say that distributed version control is a problem nobody ever had, and nobody ever intends to have. (GitHub is the world's centralized monorepo.)
Yet, distributed version control is the majority of the reason why git's mental model is so overcomplicated.
Let me just state the obvious. Of all the major problems of society, sorting legos isn't one. If you disagree, try emerging from the cellar.
Kids face a lot of new problems these days. They also face some old one, like sorting their legos.
Then you step on a lego.
Who really wants cheap lego vacuums? Basement-dwellers who are getting yelled at by their mom? Not a good market.
If you need (D)VFS aka Distributed Versioned Filesystem, grab right tool. Or write one.
This is exacly way I wrote DOT (Distributed Object Tracker). Its pure DVFS repo manager, to handle binary blobs and that it.. Nothing more.
People complaining about GIT not working well w/ big data just handling GIT wrong. Linus said it from the begining, its NOT tool for such datasets. Just move along.
There are some things that need to come from a place of manic self-motivated genius. It's not something that you can buy with money. The money is really just there to help you shove a mediocre solution down everyone's throats (which is exactly what's going on here).
This seems ridiculous to you, compared to a very obvious win with a Lego sorting vacuum.
Lego isn’t niche, and the explanation isn’t a weird technical thing that only experts would get and understand how important or valuable it is.
Yet it’s not being done.
Is there nobody who has realised this gap but you? Has nobody managed to convince people with money that it’s worthwhile? Have you tried but failed?
Or is it not many many thousands of people who are wrong but you?
Is the problem harder than you think? I’ve worked with robotics but not for a long time and I think the core manipulation is either not really solved or not until recently. I don’t know about yours but my kids also don’t fully dismantle their Lego creations either so would the robot need to take them apart too? That’s a lot of force. And some are special.
How people want Lego sorted is pretty broad. Kids don’t even need it sorted that much. And the volume can be huge for smaller buckets of things.
Is the market not as big as you think? Is it big enough for the cost, I’d buy one for £100 but £1000? £10,000?
How does it compare for most people against having the kids play on a blanket and then tipping it into a bucket? Or those ones that are a circle of cloth with a drawstring so it’s a play area and storage all in one? I 3d printed some sieves and that’s most of the issue right there done.
People are solving actual problems, but lots of problems are hard, and not all of them are profitable.
As a gut feeling, there is such a large overlap of engineers and large Lego collections and willingness to spend lots of money and time saving some time sorting Lego that the small number of implementations usually split over many years is very telling about the difficulty.
For what it’s worth I want this too.
It’s 17m for a tool which hopes to serve companies and charge money and make more than 17m in profit as a result.
If you look at the set of dev tooling, teams will frequently pay many hundreds per dev on things like CI, Git tools, code review, etc.
And to be fair, GitHub is really quite bad for a lot of workflows. I haven’t used gitbutler, but my team pays ~$30 a month per dev for tools which literally just provide a nicer interface for stacking PRs, because it saves us WAY more than that in time.
This isn’t even an egregious example of VC, it’s just an enterprise dev tooling bet.
Use value != sales value; hype sells.
Ps. not too sure how far $17M gets you toward mini nuclear power plants, but I catch your drift.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon all were founded years or decades before Git was created and money had a different value back then. (Inflation)
For every unicorn there are tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands dead horses...
Nicely put!
So thanks, I take this compliment. You just made my day!
Yes, we have higher taxes, yes, we pay more in social security... but in the end we have far less "Working Poor" and I know very, very, very, very few people who have more than 1 job.
But I guess that's just socialist bullshit.
What I am trying to convey is: The US lives in its own bubble, just like the rest of us does.
The difference is that the US hears the US propaganda and the rest of us heard the US propaganda for decades as well, through Hollywood and media.
But the taxes remain very high, especially on income so it hits middle-class professionals the hardest. In some countries like Spain (and increasingly Sweden) they are contributing to a high structural unemployment, especially youth unemployment, too.
So in the end, the problem isn't just higher taxes, but higher unemployment and therefore lower gross salaries (before those higher taxes are even taken into account).
I'm paying maximum social security and in previous generations the service you got in the public healthcare system was way better.
For some procedures I definitely go to private doctors as well nowadays. It's not a huge burden, but e.g. I will never go to a public skin doctor ever. The stories you hear about them are... brrr!
But overall the system is still miles ahead of the one in the United States. I've been there on multiple occasions and witnessed first hand, I have friends there and I know both systems. (Obviously I know the European system or rather the one in my country of residence even better)
1) Git is fine
2) I would not want to replace critical open source tooling with something backed by investor capital from its inception.
Sure, it will be “open source “, but with people throwing money behind it, there’s a plan to extract value from the user base from day one.
I’m tired of being “the product”.
Critical open source tooltips by should spring from the community, not from corporate sponsorship.
16M$ VC money saved.
You can define your own merge strategy that uses a custom executable to fix conflicts.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/24965574/735926
Surely $trillion "ai" thing can generate a better solution than one Finnish guy 20 years ago.
- It’s from one of GitHub’s cofounders.
- GitHub had a $7.5B exit.
- And the story is: AI is completely changing how software gets built, with plenty of proof points already showing up in the billions in revenue being made from things like Claude Code, Cusor, Codex, etc.
So the pitch is basically: back the team that can build the universal infrastructure for AI and agentic coding.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713650
It turns out the snapshot model is a perfect fit for AI-assisted development. I can iterate freely without thinking about commits or worrying about saving known-good versions.
You can just mess around and make it presentable later, which Git never really let you do nicely.
Plus there’s essentially zero learning curve, since all the models know how to use JJ really well.
Vibecoding moto.
I will admit, I didn't know jj but I wanted snapshots so I used it, so then when AI made some changes and kept on going and I wanted to go back to a particular change and I used ai to do that. It was actually really frustrating. To the point that I think I accidentally lost one of the good files within the project and I had to settle on good-enough which I had to try to get for hours to that particular point.
My point feels like I should either learn jj properly to use it or to at this point, just ask AI agents to git commit. Another point but I was using ghostty and I had accidentally clicked on the title bar and somehow moved the folder to desktop, I wasn't thinking the most accurately and I just decided to delete it thinking that it must have copied it rather than moved it. (Also dear ghostty why do you make it so easy to move folders, it isn't the best of features and can lead to some honest errors)
My face when I realized that I have deleted the project:
Anyhow decided to restore it with ~/Trash but afterwards realized that the .git/.jj history is removed because it deletes hidden folders (from my understanding) so I definitely lost that good snapshot. I do have the binary of the app which worked good but not the source code of it which is a bit frustrating
These were all just an idea of prototyping/checking how far I can move things with AI. Yeah so my experience for that project has been that I could've even learnt a new language (Odin) and the raylib project to fix that one specific bug in lower time than AI which simply is unable to fix the bug without blowing the whole project in foot.
I think the takeaway is to have good backups man. I mean I was being reckless in this project because I had nothing to lose and was just experimenting but there have been cases where people have lost databases in prod. So even backups should be essential if you find any source code which is good to be honest.
I am sure you guys must have lost some source code accidentally which you have worked upon, would love to hear some horror stories to hopefully know that I haven't been the only one who has done some mistake and to also learn something new from these stories. (I am atleast happy in the sense that I learnt the lesson from just an tinkering thing and not something truly prod)
Jujutsu has changed how I work with git. Switching tasks is just "jj edit <change>" or "JJ new <change>". The only thing it can't do properly is git worktrees (it doesn't replicate the .git dir to the worktrees, breaking tooling that relies on git) but there is a (old) issue relating to it. Not sure on the priority, though.
Anyway, YMMV, but I love it.
So, I really hope security incidents don't come after Git!
How will you ever get the network effects needed to get sustained users with a commercial tool?
Given Git was created because BitKeeper, a commercial tool, pulled their permission for kernel developers to use their tool aren’t we ignoring a lesson there?
"Why fund $17M towards development of an operating system, when Linux was made by one guy with a chip on his shoulder?"
Also, you should hear Linus talk about building git himself, what he built wasn't what you know as git today. It didn't even have the commands like git pull, git commit etc until he handed development over.
To build better tool than git, probably a few months by tiny team of good developers. Just thinking of problem and making what is needed... So either free time or few hundred thousand at max.
On other hand to replace GitHub. Endless millions will be spend... For some sort of probable gains? It might even make money in long run... But goal is probably to flip it.
His main contributions were his ideas.
1) The distributed model, that doesn’t need to dial the internet.
2) The core data structures. For instance, how git stores snapshots for files changes in a commit. Other tools used diff approaches which made rewinding, branch switching, and diffing super slow.
Those two ideas are important and influenced git deeply, but he didn’t code the thing, and definitely not in 7 days!
On the ninth he roasted some fool.
* pre-commit — The malicious one. It intercepted every `git commit` attempt and aborted it with that error message, forcing you to use `but commit` instead. Effectively a commit hijack — no way to commit to your own repo without their tool.
* post-checkout — Fired whenever you switched branches. GitButler used it to track your branch state and sync its virtual branch model. It cleaned this one up itself when we checked out.
* There's also typically a prepare-commit-msg hook that GitButler installs to inject its metadata into commit messages, though we didn't hit that one.
* The pre-commit hook is the aggressive one — it's a standard git hook location, so git runs it unconditionally before every commit. GitButler installs it silently as part of "setting up" a repo, with no opt-in. The only escape (without their CLI) is exactly what we did: delete it manually.
We have AI now. AI tools are pretty handy with Git. I've not manually resolved git conflicts in months now. That's more or less a solved problem for me. Mostly codex creates and manages pull requests for me. I also have it manage my GitHub issues on some projects. For some things, I also let it do release management with elaborate checklists, release prep, and driving automation for package deployment via github actions triggered via tags, and then creating the gh release and attaching binaries. In short, I just give a thumbs up and all the right things happen.
To be blunt, I think a SAAS service that tries to make Git nicer to use is a going to be a bit redundant. I don't think AI tools really need that help. Or a git replacement. And people will mostly be delegating whatever it is they still do manually with Git pretty soon. I've made that switch already because I'm an early adopter. And because I'm lazy and it seems AI is more disciplined at following good practices and process than I am.
Wealthy people don't have time to do all due diligence and vetting specially when random startups become unicorn.
Does AI make reading or writing stacked PRs any nicer? No, it does not.
Correct, hence the "SaaSpocalypse" phenomenon in recent weeks. Investors are slowly becoming disinterested in investing in software anymore precisely because models are good enough now to replicate any SaaS pretty easily, which still requires effort but is less so than paying for a SaaS particularly in large organizations which are charged per seat.
Maybe if I were reviewing some random dude's code, where I have no idea what he's been working on...
git ≠ GitHub
Not sure what the business logic is. Maybe they are mostly acquihire. Or the companies just have so much money to throw around they just spray it everywhere. Whatever the reason, if the tools remain open source, the result for devs is probably better open source tools. At least until enshittification begins when the companies run out of funding, but hopefully the tools remain forkable.
This doesn't seem to be the direction these guys are going though, it looks like they think Git should be more social or something.
but if not just your own work flow, have a dir dedicated to storing prompt history and then each file is titled with the commit id.
As for the flag just agree to some convention and toss it in the commit message
Only useful if it can be reliably verified, which is challenging at best.
The point of git is that it has strong authentication built into the fabric of the thing.
I mean, it's just text, so it shouldn't be too taxing to store it. I agree it's hoarder mentality though :)
As others alluded, JJ already exists and is a credible successor to Git for the client side.
Technical desides aside though: how is this supposed to make money for the investors?
I was really hoping we'd see some competition to Github, but no, this is competition for the likes of the Conductor App. Disappointed, I must say. I am tired of using and waiting for alternatives of, Github.
The diff view in particular makes me rage. CodeMirror has a demo where they render a million lines. Github starts dying when rendering a couple thousand. There are options like Codeberg but the experience is unfortunately even worse.
Are you interested in giving https://tangled.org a try? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
That said, I find the branding confusing. They say this is what comes after git, but in the name and the overall functionality, seems to just be an abstraction on top of git, not a new source control tool to replace git.
It can back on to git if you want, so a migration doesn't have to be all-at-once. It already has all of these features and more. It's stable, fast, very extensible.
jj truly is the future of version control, whereas git plus some loosely specified possibly proprietary layer is not.
I'm excited to see what ersc.io produces for a jj hosting service and hopefully review UI.
I think the real money is in figuring out a centralized model that doesn't suck. Explicitly locking things has certain advantages. Two people working on the same file at the same time is often cursed in some way even if a merge is technically possible. Especially if it's a binary asset. Someone is going to lose all of their work if we have a merge conflict on a png file. It would be much better to know up front that the file is locked by some other artist on the team.
I'm curious what their long term vision they pitched investors is.
Also if they really wanted to “replace git” I think that would be much more difficult due to network effects. Everybody is already using git.
Also, if you ever worked with Perforce, you might be familiar with changelists. It’s kind of like that.
Now, GitButler is by no means perfect. There are many rough edges. It tends to get stuck in unexpected states and sometimes it isn’t easy to rectify this.
It also cannot split changes in a single file, which is a bummer, because that’s something I encounter routinely. But I understand this complicates the existing model tremendously.
Superbly tone deaf. The only people who might possibly want to read that are those already drinking your Kool-Aid, most everyone else can already smell the bullshit.
Easier Git doesn't translate into something I can get my boss to pay for.
No doubt, it will be packaged as a product based on a lucrative pricing model.
If this isn’t something to at least root for, in the sense of a small team, novel product, serving a real need, then I dunno what is. You can use jj or tangled and still appreciate improvements to git and vcs on the web in general. Competition amongst many players is a good thing, even if you don’t believe in this one particular vision.
Heaven forbid it isn’t 100M going to a YC alum for yet another AI funding raise.
https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/operation...
and git's reflog:
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reflog
With a box of scraps!
Quite an understatement. I'm pretty sure GitHub is the primary reason that Git took off like it did.
What I'd would expect of the next vcs is to go beyond vcs of the files, but of the environment so works on my machine™ and configuring your git-hooks and CI becomes a thing of the past.
Do we need an LSP-like abstraction for environments and build systems instead of yet another definitive build system? IDK, my solution so far is sticking to nix, x86_64, and ignoring Windows and Mac, which is obviously not good enough for like 90%+ of devs.
FTFY. I don't understand how anyone could think to replace git by raising money. The only way to truly do this is grassroots iteration. You can build the software, but the distribution will never reach the same network size as git before your investors start asking "When do I get my return?"
> Imagine your tools telling you as soon as there are possible merge conflicts between teammates, rather than at the end of the process.
So you're centralizing a fully distributed process because grepping for "<<<<<<<" and asking your teammate the best way to merge is too hard? I thought coding was supposed to be social?
I mean, honestly, go for it and build what you want. I'm all for it! But maybe don't compare it to git. It's tone deaf.
Leave Git alone.
Git has issues, but it works pretty well once you learn it and it's basically universal. Will be hard to dislodge.