[HN Gopher] We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
___________________________________________________________________
We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
Author : ellieh
Score : 302 points
Date : 2026-04-10 01:52 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.gitbutler.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.gitbutler.com)
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| Isn't that jj? Hopefully no one tells the VCs.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| 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(tm)
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Which version control system should we not tell?
| jer0me wrote:
| a16z
| f33d5173 wrote:
| Idk if you're joking but I edited to make it clearer...
| stavros wrote:
| I was :(
| tormeh wrote:
| Pijul?
|
| Git has issues, but it works pretty well once you learn it and
| it's basically universal. Will be hard to dislodge.
| MBCook wrote:
| Why does it take $17m to beat 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?
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| Apparently it takes $17M and a whole team full of people to do
| what one guy with a chip on his shoulder could do for free.
| bee_rider wrote:
| On one hand that's true. On the other, the "one guy" there
| is, like, _the_ guy who does impressive projects "just as a
| hobby."
| reverius42 wrote:
| Yeah, it's really burying the lede to call Linus Torvalds
| "one guy with a chip on his shoulder".
|
| "Why fund $17M towards development of an operating system,
| when Linux was made by one guy with a chip on his
| shoulder?"
| Orygin wrote:
| While he's technically excellent (or so it seems on the
| outside) he's still just, like, a guy
| paradox460 wrote:
| Zaphod iz just zis guy, you know
| irjustin wrote:
| I'm not sure if I should take these comments seriously or as
| a joke...
| Defletter wrote:
| 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.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| They're not though, they're using Git internally.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| 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.
| lamasery wrote:
| I'd be 1,000x more interested in a project with the official
| git maintainers' buy-in to leverage the alleged power of LLM
| development to bring _all_ git 's features into libgit2 (or
| whatever, but that's a starting point) and switch git itself
| over to using that as its backend.
|
| I've _twice_ in my career found reasons that git being
| (officially; I have no interest in dealing with another
| implementation with its own missing features and distinct
| bugs) a library instead of a messy ball of scripts and
| disparate binaries, would have saved me tons and tons of
| time. You can look at the stories of how Github was designed
| and built, or look at the architectures of other similar
| software, and see folks struggling with the same issue. You
| 'll run into frustration on this front pretty much instantly
| if you try to build tooling around Git, which turns out to be
| such a useful thing to do that I've ended up doing it twice
| in ~15 years without particularly looking for reasons to.
|
| (While we're at it, how about some kind of an officially-
| blessed lib-rsync with a really pleasant API?)
| ergocoder wrote:
| Linus built git in 8 days or something.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Nah, on the 7th day he rested... On the 8th he apologized for
| his behavior having learned the error of his ways.
|
| On the ninth he roasted some fool.
| sph wrote:
| I wish we had old Linus back just one day to review some
| vibecoded patch to Linux. I'd love to hear him rant about
| it.
| dvdyzag wrote:
| In a cave, with a box of scraps!
| materielle wrote:
| 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!
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| srdjanr wrote:
| The point was only that Linus didn't build git in 8 days
| and alone.
| ergocoder wrote:
| That's just being pedantic for the sake of it.
|
| Git is decades old. Of course, there are tons of
| contributions after the first 10 days. Everyone knows that.
|
| He started it and built the first working version.
| otterley wrote:
| Those were not his ideas. Before Git, the Linux kernel team
| was using BitKeeper for DVCS (and other DVCS
| implementations like Perforce existed as well). Git was
| created as a BitKeeper replacement after a fight erupted
| between Andrew Tridgell (who was accused of trying to
| reverse engineer BitKeeper in violation of its license) and
| Larry McVoy (the author of BitKeeper).
|
| https://graphite.com/blog/bitkeeper-linux-story-of-git-
| creat...
|
| You may find this 10-year-old thread on HN enlightening,
| too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667494
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| alexpadula wrote:
| Rather confusing, your name has Git in it, "to build what comes
| after git", what comes after your own Git product? Good luck.
| monooso wrote:
| Clearly butler comes after git.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| To all the salty people- the person cofounded GitHub. It's not
| the product that raised 17M, it's the person.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I was going to be snarky, but Scott Chacon is a serious person,
| so we'll see!
| pistoriusp wrote:
| Scott is brilliant, funny, and kind, and maybe he could be
| serious if he ever needed to be serious... But I've never
| seen that in him.
| schacon wrote:
| I'm seriously funny...
| gen2brain wrote:
| He is Super Cereal.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
|
| Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
| noosphr wrote:
| I for one can't wait for open Ai to buy them and reroute every
| git commit to chatgpt.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| mzi wrote:
| A pull request is just you requesting someone to pull from
| you in git proper.
|
| So the maintainer adds you as a remote and pulls from you.
| k33n wrote:
| There's really nothing resembling a "pull request" that's
| used by 99.999% of git users. We have merge requests. But
| we call them pull requests for some dumb reason.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| They sure aren't. Before github you set up remotes or emailed
| patches.
| tadfisher wrote:
| git request-pull
|
| Docs: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull
|
| 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: git format-patch
|
| Docs: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-format-patch
|
| 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.
| functional_dev wrote:
| You are right, PRs are not in git. _format-patch_ and
| _request-pull_ are originals designed for mailings lists.
| Github just put UI on top.
|
| Interesting that DAG model means any branch from anywhere
| can be merged... the forge is just coordination.
|
| Explored here if curious - https://vectree.io/c/git-graph-
| theory-logic
| grogenaut wrote:
| 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...
| cornholio wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| I don't think technical features were the key to git's
| success. What really made the difference was:
|
| 1. it was free;
|
| 2. it was sponsored by the most fashionable project of
| the time (Linux);
|
| 3. it did not require a server;
|
| 4. because it was FOSS, people could extend it without
| asking anyone's permission; and...
|
| 5. ...once GitHub appeared, simplifying the PR process,
| the network effect did its thing.
|
| Git was hard to use and to understand. It did not win on
| technical features alone, as you said there were plenty
| of alternatives. It won because of _community_ and
| _network_ effects.
| skydhash wrote:
| > Git was hard to use and to understand
|
| So is ffmpeg and ImageMagick. Or Blender. Or Freecad.
| There are domains that do require some learning and
| training to properly use the available tool.
| thwarted wrote:
| > _or whatever GitHub and the like are called_
|
| GitHub is a social networking site that just so happens to
| have code hosting related features.
| Hamuko wrote:
| People keep saying this but I can't really find much
| anything social about GitHub.
| toyg wrote:
| Some people spend most of their time in issues and PRs,
| which are social features mapping social interactions.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Is Bugzilla also a social network?
| toyg wrote:
| To the degree that it emphasizes communication between
| individuals over being a dumb database, yes, a bugtracker
| can be a social network. Bugzilla is a bit too close to
| the "database" side of the spectrum, whereas GitHub is at
| the other end; Jira sits somewhat in the middle.
| petepete wrote:
| You can follow, star, favourite and comment on things,
| you get a feed where recent updates on stuff/people
| you've interacted are listed, you can customise your
| profile page with snippets about yourself, a photo, a
| status, contact info and add whatever else you want
| (including more photos, images, charts etc) in markdown.
| It now has discussions which are essentially a forum.
|
| It's as much a social network/collaboration tool as it is
| place to store your code these days.
| imron wrote:
| > 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.
|
| GitHub is full of git anti patterns.
| jonhohle wrote:
| 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).
| red_admiral wrote:
| Indeed they're not; they live on the 'user layer' rather than
| the 'application layer'. That's not to say many git-frontends
| (IntelliJ, Sourcetree, Github desktop) don't support them,
| but "git pullrequest" isn't a thing.
|
| Edit: see "git request-pull" as mentioned below
| (file:///C:/Program%20Files/Git/mingw64/share/doc/git-
| doc/git-request-pull.html) but what it does is write "a
| pretty email" (the other poster's words) to STDOUT.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > mentioned below
| (file:///C:/Program%20Files/Git/mingw64/share/doc/git-
| doc/git-request-pull.html)
|
| What? Is the intention, that I access your C: drive? Also
| is it common to have a file:// link on MS Windows? I
| thought this was a unix thing.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Sorry. For some reason I used to get `git help ...`
| redirect me to the (URL of) the actual website.
|
| I think the file:/// is so that you can fire off "[cmd
| /c] start FILEPATH" to load the default browser, while
| also not having to worry about spaces in the path.
| ngc248 wrote:
| "Pull requests" are part of git though since it was
| originally a DCVS it meant you would pull from an individuals
| git repo ... services like github etc centralized the concept
| vividfrier wrote:
| 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
| sph wrote:
| You guys cannot be serious, it feels like Poe's Law day
| everyday in here!
| vrganj wrote:
| It really is insane how much this topic is dividing
| technical folks.
|
| 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?
| thwarted wrote:
| "Where are we? Are we where we wanted to be?"
|
| "I'm not sure. But at least we got here fast."
| jb1991 wrote:
| 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...
| ChrisGreenHeur wrote:
| if you can't get ai to handle git, that's certainly a skill
| issue
| solid_fuel wrote:
| Have you considered returning to actual software engineering
| and workflows that tools were designed to support instead of
| playing the LLM slot machine?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Where did I say it was a good idea?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Okay, please explain why the replies are funny.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog, you learn
| more but you kill it in the process.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It was a joke? It comes across like you pointing out
| someone missing evidence and being wrong. Obviously you
| used the word "funny" but that's not usually a word that
| goes _in_ a joke.
|
| Nevertheless the joke is already dead. There's no reason
| not to explain.
| sph wrote:
| > Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
|
| Because that's too risky for investors.
| techpression wrote:
| 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.
| Aperocky wrote:
| You see, the actual problem is raising the money.
| fontain wrote:
| 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.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| pedigree is a great word here and being upfront about it (if
| true) would make for some fun VC slogans:
|
| "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."
| amoss wrote:
| I would use this tool. Ship it
| jtfrench wrote:
| Definitely sounded like a shower gel moment.
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://pickupbricks.com
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25MIpQqLIU
| fxtentacle wrote:
| That one needs to be operated manually. I was thinking more
| along the lines of robot dog + OCR + 6 dof arm on the robot's
| back.
|
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Pick-Up-Bricks-Compatible-
| Accessories...
| burnerRhodov2 wrote:
| i noticed the example product page too on their website.
| But why not make it like a bigger rumba on wheels?
| Izkata wrote:
| Roborock Saros Z70 is about a year old:
|
| https://us.roborock.com/pages/roborock-saros-z70
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0AGhb6p8sE
| uwagar wrote:
| i am actually fine with how svn works.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| 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.
| uwagar wrote:
| u guessed right. im one of the world's few solo software
| developers left (behind).
| k33n wrote:
| Keep on keeping on brother.
| uwagar wrote:
| thank you.
| rimliu wrote:
| or using branches.
| siva7 wrote:
| oh svn had branches. people just didn't know that they
| wanted a distributed cvs.
| uwagar wrote:
| for me atomic commit or was that committing a bunch of
| files with 1 command was important. and cvs wouldnt let
| me do it. perforce did. but it was proprietary software,
| though i think they offered a free version for solo
| developers or something like that. and when svn came out
| i jumped ship.
| bluGill wrote:
| The vast majority of git users are using github as a
| central repository. There a a few other not github but
| serves the same purpose central repositories. Distributed
| sounds cool, but almost everybody wouldn't notice a thing
| if git was centralized.
| gyulai wrote:
| > i am actually fine with how svn works.
|
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Well, one person did: git exactly replicated the patch
| email system that Linus Torvalds was using.
| skydhash wrote:
| > To a first approximation, one could say that distributed
| version control is a problem nobody ever had, and nobody
| ever intends to have.
|
| The distributed aspect is important because it let me
| separate how I'd like to control changes vs how it's done
| in the canonical repo. I sync when I want to.
| majke wrote:
| I'm also contemplating a lego sorting machine.
| mkl wrote:
| jacquesm did that impressively 9 years ago:
| https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889 (follow-up
| posts with more details:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14280569,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14654223).
|
| It doesn't solve the picking-up-off-the-floor problem.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| 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.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| 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).
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Yeah probably right :)
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I think they are going to give us _something_. Devs
| probably won't pick it up though.
| Borg3 wrote:
| 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| if you don't understand git you shouldn't be coding, full
| stop. The exact same skill set needed to write good code is
| required to use git in quick and efficient matter.
|
| Then again, it is used for non-coding tasks, but any and all
| of it's UI problems are not from the method of storage
| (pretty much any modern VCS uses same "tree of linked
| snapshots of filesystem) so making one while still making it
| git compatible just with better ui (like Jujutsu) is very
| much possible
| gyulai wrote:
| > 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| HN has always been skeptical of VC, ironically, so that's no
| indication of anything in the overall industry.
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| No, but trends are very prevalent, it is not a uniform
| random distribution.
| rwmj wrote:
| Unless you've done a study of sentiment on HN (please
| link if so) then you have no idea.
| dirkc wrote:
| Is it unrelated though?
|
| > 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.
| gyulai wrote:
| Investor narrative pointing out a relationship is not the
| same as substantive technological overlap.
| flomo wrote:
| > Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
|
| 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.
| choudharism wrote:
| Replacing git is?
| flomo wrote:
| 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.
| reverius42 wrote:
| 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."
| flomo wrote:
| What a ridiculous statement from an obviously over-
| privleged phony. You are actually doubling-down on being
| completely isolated.
|
| Kids face a lot of new problems these days. They also face
| some old one, like sorting their legos.
| reverius42 wrote:
| Sometimes you put the kids to bed before they've cleaned
| up the legos, because it's getting late.
|
| Then you step on a lego.
| dare944 wrote:
| Completely unnecessary retort. At no point did anyone in this
| thread state that sorting legos was a major problem of
| society.
|
| Rather, the GP merely implied that some parents would love to
| have a robot to sort their kids legos, and that (ironically)
| even that unimportant "need" is more important than replacing
| git.
| debarshri wrote:
| 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.
|
| Enough friday pessimisim.
| pjerem wrote:
| > 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.
| debarshri wrote:
| VC by default are founder friendly in my experience.
|
| 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.
| DrScientist wrote:
| > VC by default are founder friendly in my experience.
|
| Founders are only one stakeholder. There are employees (
| I think they fall into that category ), customers,
| suppliers, and the wider society.
|
| It all comes back to why does the company exist - and for
| which stakeholders. I think that's the point the original
| author is making.
|
| I don't buy the argument that making money in the end is
| a perfect surrogate for overall good - it's not - it's an
| imperfect surrogate - and to pretend it is a perfect
| surrogate is just an excuse to behave like an arsehole.
|
| To make that concrete, let's say you are a chemical
| company making paints - really important job, paints are
| needed the cheaper you can make them, the more people can
| have them etc, but if you knowingly pollute a local river
| just because you can get away with it and increase your
| profits - saying that increased profits justifies
| polluting the river based on the assumption that river
| pollution is correctly priced ( free ) is an obvious
| convenient excuse to be a selfish arsehole.
| conartist6 wrote:
| LLMs are major generators of pollution: digital
| pollution.
|
| I wish the companies understood the tremendous cost to
| society of polluting our well of knowledge.
|
| But no, as your mention it is free for them to pollute,
| so they do liberally
| DrScientist wrote:
| Clearly LLMs are tools which can be used for good or ill.
| The supplier of raw chemicals to the paint factory isn't
| really responsible for the river pollution.
|
| However you are right to point out there is a problem.
| Typically societies ( via governments ) try and fix by
| appropriately pricing the behaviours via regulation/laws
| ( fines or prison for the people doing it ).
|
| However making regulation/laws is hard. What's your
| proposal to fix the problem you've identified?
| conartist6 wrote:
| Oh it'll fix itself. Nature is like that.
|
| You might hit a moment where a lot of people whose only
| purpose in life is using Claude Code, um, well, starve.
| But yeah, nature is metal like that.
| DrScientist wrote:
| Perhaps - but not necessarily in an optimal way - cf
| climate change.
| debarshri wrote:
| I dont this wisdom can be applied generically. Lets
| consider your example, if leader or founder comes across
| the fact that a river is getting polluted whether it
| makes profit or not, they will not take that decision as
| it would impact longer term.
|
| What you are mixing is founder led business vs ceo led
| business. CEO often takes a short term view, when
| stakeholders are PE Firm, wall street, short term gains
| are prioritized. But for, a long term investor, would not
| incentivize you to take calls that would harm in long
| run.
|
| What could be wrong is that, you wouldnt know all the
| consequences and causality of your decisions and thats
| very human thing in my opinion.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > 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.
| debarshri wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Thanks for responding, I had to think properly as to how
| I may respond so thus the delay but here are my thoughts.
|
| I feel like, my issue which can be a more society based
| issue is that we are all at the end of the day too busy
| with ourselves which can be fine, but what this leads to
| is that even with my extended family, I have seen people
| treat just a slight but observable way differently to
| elder cousins, one who make money and who doesn't and I
| do believe that cousins who might not earn money in the
| moment already have stress but it piles it on them maybe
| just a bit more too.
|
| So I think that most of the world just somehow tries to
| quantify a person with one dimensional quantity
| sometimes, and this is why we see people whose only
| metric is to reach that goal and I am starting to feel
| like, its not the technical rigor or passion which
| matters sometimes but basically something akin to
| influencer-style marketing (Cluely has basically become a
| skit channel which has hundreds of millions of dollars by
| a16z I think)
|
| And I feel like what this influencer-style thing is
| leading to is that our society, as a whole and people who
| build things, are jumping on the latest trends even when
| not understanding them (Claw-code was essentially the
| peak point of this-all) and we are basically adopting all
| the things wrong with the influencer-style culture and
| things are getting even more alienated from reality.
|
| Our Industry/World-in-general is having grift and I am
| not saying it never had grift but I am witnessing
| something similar to algorithmic form of rage-baits being
| created by some people for them to not be left behind and
| we as a society, are now lacking the ability to have
| discourse with nuance in many-times/places.
|
| > you have the increase your probability to be in the
| right place at the right time.
|
| I completely agree with you but I do sometimes wonder if
| I am on Hackernews or if it is the right place. I mean, I
| am here first and foremost because I like talking here
| but from that viewpoint you mention, I have sometimes
| wondered if I should use twitter but I refuse to use it
| pretty much for most things simply because I feel like I
| would be yet another part of this cycle of rage-bait and
| being sucked into it and I am not sure if it would be
| well worth it. I am not sure if twitter etc. are worth it
| and I feel like even with things like Youtube etc., in
| both of these it becomes a very number game with things
| like followers etc.
|
| Atleast within Hackernews, you don't have the concept of
| followers, so at one hand it is great but on the other, I
| question from that perspective if HN is the right place
| and where do you find people for businesses. Linkedin
| perhaps?
|
| So in essence, I think I would say that I am unsure about
| the probabilities and what definition of right means. I
| would love it if you can talk more about it and thanks
| for commenting that comment, I appreciate it and I wish
| you to have a nice day!
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you
| shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go
| faster.
|
| This is why VC is a cancer on society. If you don't have a
| healthy business growing well, your business shouldn't get
| bigger.
| debarshri wrote:
| If the business is not growing well and VC invests money. I
| think that gambling and not true venture capital.
| caycep wrote:
| granted how much did Linus spend on Git? probably well south of
| $17M and he's not beholden to the likes of a16z
| pjc50 wrote:
| The first version was written in ten days apparently, so more
| in the ballpark of $17k.
| jve wrote:
| I want people to read this sentence from
| https://www.linux.com/news/10-years-git-interview-git-
| creato...
|
| > 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.
| aorloff wrote:
| at the time he was probably thinking about how much time it
| would _save_ him
| leptons wrote:
| >Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
|
| They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFRzIOna2oQ
| eastabrooka wrote:
| GitV2 - It's what Devs Crave.
| jatins wrote:
| > I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money
|
| Well, cofounding Github helps
| Eufrat wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > Money is given to friends.
|
| 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.
| imp0cat wrote:
| So it will be exactly like git, but with a monthly
| subscription fee.
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| And AI... always add AI!
| mcdeltat wrote:
| Upon every commit, AI will review your code to check if
| it's worth committing or not (after all, disk space is
| expensive these days!). If the AI finds the code is not
| up to scratch, it will be reverted and you'll be given a
| chance to try again.
|
| Then, we will develop (read: sell) AI agents that will
| ingest a proposed code change (created by your front-line
| agent), and iteratively refactor it until the commit
| agent accepts it.
| EliRivers wrote:
| _If the AI finds the code is not up to scratch, it will
| be reverted and you 'll be given a chance to try again._
|
| That's the Platinum Premier tier. If you're on the
| regular tier, paying the minimum, the AI will silently
| fix all that right up for you.
| baobun wrote:
| Should have known better than asking the monkey paw for
| more decentralized compute.
| jordand wrote:
| And regular subscription price increases. They never
| forget those!
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| This is the way!
| yread wrote:
| or at least should be
| nikitau wrote:
| That works under the assumption of the "wisdom of the
| markets", and we assume VC possesses that wisdom, but laid
| bare it's just as vulnerable to cronyism as any other
| institution.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Yeah, OK. There's a lot hidden in that word, "pedigree".
| echelon wrote:
| If you're being handed millions of dollars in early
| venture capital and don't have revenue/pmf to show,
| they're going to want to see a top university, FAANG,
| relevant industry experience, etc. How else would they
| underwrite the risk?
|
| Team matters. What other proxies are there?
| otikik wrote:
| Skin color, political tendencies, gender.
|
| Lately, for founders, to which prison they went.
| robbbbbbbbbbbb wrote:
| "Money is given to friends."
|
| While that's completely true, I do think it misses a key
| underlying point: VCs (and many breeds of investor) are not
| ultimately selecting for value creating ideas, or for their
| friends: they're selecting for investments they believe
| _other people_ will pay more for later.
|
| In the case of startups, those people are most likely other
| VCs (at later rounds), private equity (at private sale) or
| retail investors (at IPO).
|
| Very rarely is the actual company profitable at any of those
| stages, demonstrably and famously.
|
| So the whole process is selecting for hype-potential, which
| itself is somewhat correlated to the usual things people get
| annoyed about with startup cliches: founders who went to MIT;
| founders who are charismatic; founders who are friends with
| VCs; etc...
|
| So yeah, they invest in their friends, but not because
| they're their friends. Because they know they can more
| reliably exit those investments at a higher value.
| api wrote:
| The reason "ideas don't get funding" is usually (but not
| always) true is that usually a good idea alone doesn't mean
| much. So usually you have to have good idea plus something
| else the investor feels is a proof point or evidence you can
| execute.
|
| The clearest of these is that you have already built it, or
| an MVP of it that is more than just smoke and mirrors, and
| there's users and customers.
|
| If you have excellent proof points and actual revenue growth,
| you could show up with no pants smelling like weed and
| somebody might fund you. Then they'd call their press people
| to do an "eccentric genius founder" piece about the person
| who showed up stoned with no pants and their pitch was that
| good. That's cause if your graph goes up and to the right
| you're not crazy, you're "eccentric."
|
| If you don't have any proof they fall back on secondary
| evidence, like credentials and schools and vibes. The latter,
| yes, often overlaps with cronies.
|
| And unfortunately that by necessity includes most ideas that
| cost a lot to prototype, which means credentialism and
| croneyism tends to gate keep fields with a high cost of
| entry.
| uffr wrote:
| Ideas shouldn't get funding - ideas are just mere results
| of thought that haven't been played through in depth.
|
| Do you need a working product to get funding? No. But you
| do need a compelling investment thesis - which takes months
| and even years of deep thought to come to fruition. Of
| course you can shortcut this process by smooching but only
| a select few can pull that off.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I'm sure VCs give money to friends but I didn't know any
| investors when I raised millions. They invested money because
| they thought it was a good idea.
| kakwa_ wrote:
| More like an idea decently likely to be resold for more.
|
| Good ideas are a decent subset, but you could also have a
| bit of "Greater Fool Theory" compliant ideas.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Sure, but that doesn't really change anything. The poster
| plainly states:
|
| > Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn't
| hurt). Money is given to friends.
|
| I have an obvious counter example. I'm sure money is
| invested for all sorts of reasons to all sorts of people.
| I'm also sure that money is not exclusively invested
| based on friendships, and I'm quite sure that money is at
| times invested based on the merits of an idea. Obviously
| those merits have to correspond to the ability to form
| the basis of a successful company, unless it's a
| philanthropic investment.
| Eufrat wrote:
| What I meant is that yes, good ideas will get funding,
| _if they like you_ and if you are a good ROI (though, not
| all are required). This also may allow you to enter the
| clique /network. However, _a lot_ of this money
| circulates between the same network. Convincing the right
| person of the value of your idea can enable you to _join_
| the network and access that money at a much, much lower
| threshold later on.
|
| Obviously, it is not that cut and dry, but it is kind of
| impressive how much of the money circulating around is
| between the same people. I'm not really condemning it. I
| think it is a natural consequence because humans trust
| other humans they know. People should be more aware of it
| and need to make sure they keep it in check. Otherwise,
| you eventually start getting high on your own supply.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I don't think describing them as friends is entirely correct.
| People give money to people they trust. And friends often are
| in that subset of people. But that's not a strict
| requirement.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| They trust people who look and smell like them or the
| people they golf or drink with or are part of the same
| fraternity or tennis club.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is. Of course people who see
| and observe others on a daily basis in the flesh can
| determine much better whether they are trustworthy or
| not. They sure as hell don't think some random person who
| has no credibility is trustworthy.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The point is the definition of trust is flawed if what
| you're trying to measure is technical impact and quality
| or ability to execute?
| ghywertelling wrote:
| > money just flows between them constantly
|
| This is also true for how HFT guys make money. It's not that
| they are very good in investments. The Fed injects money
| constantly from the top which gets distributed or trickle
| down to such firms. Because in a tight economy which is not
| akin to gambling, it should be near to impossible to make
| money so easily.
| mbesto wrote:
| The founder of GitButler is the co-founder of GitHub. It
| doesn't matter what he builds, the VC is going to throw money
| at them.
| tencentshill wrote:
| It hasn't been organically popular here[0] among people who
| would be forced to actually use it, so they have to build
| hype from investors instead.
|
| [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=gitbutler
| ndiddy wrote:
| Another thing I've noticed is how when you go on the website
| for a VC funded B2B startup and look at the customers or
| testimonies they have listed, most of them will be other B2B
| startups funded by the same VC. It makes me wonder how much
| of that market is essentially a few friends standing in a
| circle and passing a $100 bill around, but on a larger scale.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| What would "the financials" be on a git replacement? No one
| makes money on git itself. Probably not much even on the
| services around git, given that Microsoft funds github for
| its own reasons, and gitlab is constantly running out of
| money.
| patates wrote:
| 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
| internet_points wrote:
| i may be dense or something but what effect?
| patates wrote:
| It smells better, my skin feels better after using it, and
| I feel happier. Showering may take little time, but I have
| my skin all the time :)
| secondcoming wrote:
| I find that sometimes changing the font in my IDE can give me
| an inexplicable boost
| esafak wrote:
| Some people are not sensitive to quality. A car is a car, a
| shower gel is a shower gel, etc. In the computer world, they
| curiously congregate around Microsoft...
| rjh29 wrote:
| You missed the boat, baskets that open out into a giant play
| mat have flooded amazon and temu. Something like this:
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toy-Storage-Organizer-Lego-Play/dp/...
| piokoch wrote:
| 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.
| jampekka wrote:
| > 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.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Yeah it also sounded to me like they just want to extend git.
| Zed is trying the exact same thing.
|
| Neither of them is doing to be remotely prepared for what I'm
| going to do, which is actually replace Git.
| shafyy wrote:
| You mean the one they try to build in The Office?
| latexr wrote:
| > Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
|
| 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.
| pas wrote:
| people love solving problems, but most solutions are not VC
| fundable (fortunately/unfortunately)
|
| sometimes it's just wait until your kid grows up and learns
| to put the LEGO away
|
| there's a lot of people working on hard problems that are
| pretty far from software
|
| being cynical about early stage software (and any company
| that is overpromising like Theranos, Nikola, etc..) is
| warranted, but also money as a reward motivates a lot of
| innovation (PV panels, batteries, EUV lithography)
| utopiah wrote:
| The problems are in fact that...
|
| the founder does not want to risk money for his own idea
|
| while
|
| funders have simultaneously also too much money while
| believing they don't have enough.
|
| That very simple dynamic is what is driving investment in the
| Silicon Valley, itself praised worldwide as the forefront.
|
| That's what bringing our own civilization on the economical
| (AI bubble), ecological (AI bubble, car brain) and democratic
| (surveillance capitalism, privacy zuckering) cliff.
| raincole wrote:
| > 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!
|
| On the contrary Github is a proven product.
| Izkata wrote:
| Roborock released one of these about a year ago. It doesn't
| do as much as they want, but it can pick up things and put
| them into designated locations, shoes being the main example.
| IanCal wrote:
| 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 PS100 but PS1000? PS10,000?
|
| 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.
| sunir wrote:
| 4 McDonalds. That's a better way of measuring it.
| siva7 wrote:
| Honestly it is. Investors value my company like 4 Mcdonalds.
| sunir wrote:
| Exactly. A safe bet vs a great bet.
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Didn't dvc try to fill this niche and absolutely fail at it?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > sort LEGO bricks by colour and size
|
| 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.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| It's primarily focused on "take from someone else" rather than
| create something new and useful.
|
| Consider that many of the tech posts here are of the form, "i
| did X but with Z" as the poster hopes they will be recognized
| as some master of execution.
| pbkompasz wrote:
| Yes, you may be fine with git, but can you say the same thing
| about AI agents? /s
| palata wrote:
| VCs have no clue. They have money and therefore they are in a
| dominant position. Everybody around them (professionally) is
| trying to flatter them and convince them that they should
| invest in their project.
|
| I had a few interactions with VCs (both professional and
| personal), where I didn't care because I wasn't benefitting
| from them. One of them was "an expert in CRISPR and blockchain"
| (WTF?) and... well I didn't need much time to see that he did
| not understand what a "hash" was. He was mostly an expert at
| repeating stories he had been told about how he would make a
| ton of money with the latest bullshit he didn't understand.
|
| The truth is, it's like trading. You diversify the investments
| and hope that the economy goes up (respectively that one of the
| startups you invested in gets profitable). The only thing a VC
| has to do is verify that they don't invest in a fraud, but even
| that is hard given that they never understand the technology
| enough to say it's worth it (they often invest in shiny
| bullshit).
| amenhotep wrote:
| In fact, a certain amount of investment in frauds is
| acceptable and desirable; if you give PS10m to 9 frauds who
| spunk it straight up the wall and to 1 true visionary who
| builds a unicorn, that's money well spent. Plus of course you
| can always hope that the fraudster is good enough to sucker
| the next guy so you can get out.
|
| Per Matt Levine, the optimum amount of fraud is non-zero.
| Tune your detector too loosely _or_ too tightly and you 'll
| miss out.
| bluGill wrote:
| The optimum amount of fraud is non-zero only because
| detection is expensive as you get close to zero. Getting
| less fraud needs to always be in mind. When someone gets
| away with fraud others will try to copy it so anything that
| has happened before has a much higher value to detect.
|
| But for fraud that hasn't happened yet don't worry about it
| and hope nobody figures out how to do it.
| m_rpn wrote:
| An expert on crisps maybe XD? i'm not really sure about your
| last point on investing in frauds, i guess they only care if
| and when the fraud gets exposed, they might purposely choose
| to do exactly that given the right conditions though, it is a
| completely perverted and deranged system at this point.
| palata wrote:
| Yeah sorry, I was saying "frauds" for "bullshit", I guess?
| Lacking some vocabulary to express this in a nuanced way.
|
| To be fair, many times founders are extremely convinced
| about their idea, they don't necessarily consciously sell
| bullshit to the VCs.
|
| It just feels like what matters is to be very good at
| convincing VCs, not at building something real. When you're
| so good at getting money, of course eventually _something_
| will work (because you will be able to hire competent
| people to do the job). And then you will be called a
| "visionary", and people will say "we need HIM as a CEO
| because nobody else would be able to hire tons of competent
| people to build stuff with billions of dollars" :-).
| gyanchawdhary wrote:
| @fxtentacle I'm at the airport and spat out my coffee reading
| your comment .. this is legendary and super funny ! Happy
| Friday to you kind sir
| hsaliak wrote:
| I've long had the same idea.. this one has legs.
| braggerxyz wrote:
| > ... and sort LEGO bricks by colour
|
| You never sort by color, ever! You sort by form, and then throw
| every color of that specific form in one bin. If you throw
| every red brick in the same bin, you'll never find a specific
| formed red brick because to many red bricks. But if you first
| search by form and then by color, you are much faster.
| phs318u wrote:
| As any DBA worth their salt knows.
|
| Index the many valued column, not the column with few
| discrete values.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Are you sure that's a good strategy if every unique index
| value requires you to buy a physical container?
| vidarh wrote:
| Radix sort. Decide how many containers you're fine with,
| and group accordingly.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You can put a few shapes into one container and it's
| still much faster than searching color-first.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| How about arithmetic coding? That will give you the
| highest amount of entropy reduction for any possible
| number of containers. Which probably means that you'll
| sort similar pieces far apart but group by colors that
| are easy to separate, like red+yellow, brown+green
| layer8 wrote:
| You would use arrays: http://brickarchitect.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_639...
| martin-adams wrote:
| As someone who tried to sort many lego sets lately, I do like
| this. The problem lies that modern lego has so many unique
| forms that it feels like you'll have many bins with one or
| two pieces in.
| withinboredom wrote:
| You need to get some bins that have a top shelf like a
| toolbox. The low item counts go in the top shelf, segregate
| the bottom for efficiency. Bin by color.
| grvdrm wrote:
| I love that we are ignoring Git and taking Legos.
|
| Anyone have a solution for another annoying problem: 1
| missing piece.
|
| Somehow got lost halfway through the build.
| jgilias wrote:
| If you know the ID, I think you can get Lego ship it to
| you.
| withinboredom wrote:
| It's always under the most annoying thing to move or get
| to. Under table legs, couches, etc.
|
| Also, Lego will send you any missing pieces for free.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Thank you!
| sfn42 wrote:
| Just keep those in a single bin
| braggerxyz wrote:
| That's why you buy different sized bins, and then you can
| even combine some forms into one bin (but be careful not to
| combine similiar forms, this counters the goal).
| bombcar wrote:
| As the "Disturbing the Piece" podcast points out - you
| "sort" the good important parts you want easy access to and
| you "bin" everything else in the giant box you can dig
| through if needed.
|
| https://youtube.com/@disturbingthepiecepod
| em-bee wrote:
| counterpoint (don't take this to seriously):
|
| there are to many types of bricks to sort by form. unless you
| have an inventory the size of a brick factory you can only
| sort by category or by size.
|
| otherwise, sorting by color makes your collection
| aesthetically pleasing, and when you build, you usually want
| to use specific colors only to make your model look good.
| braggerxyz wrote:
| There are less different forms than any normal brick
| enjoyer has bricks of a specific color. Therefore the
| lookup is faster ;)
| tectec wrote:
| That's why you have to group similar forms. - Bricks -
| Plates - Narrow Plates - Wheels - Windows/Doors - Smooth
| pieces - People bin
|
| And then if you like to sort further you sort out the
| smallest of each bin because those always fall to the
| bottom when mixed together
| em-bee wrote:
| sorting by size needs to come first. from my own
| experience, you can't find any small pieces if they are
| mixed/covered by larger ones.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Unfortunately there are so many bespoke LEGO brick forms that
| this doesn't work.
| redog wrote:
| When the sock bot dries the socks, matches and folds them
| together we're at peak robot. Come to think of it, its got to
| not lose either of them also. Current tech falls short of this.
| munksbeer wrote:
| > When the sock bot dries the socks, matches and folds them
| together we're at peak robot. Come to think of it, its got to
| not lose either of them also.
|
| Missing socks (and containers or their lids) are still great
| unsolved problems in 2026. Solving this issue is like fusion,
| always 10 years away.
| hequmania wrote:
| But we are not even get a replacement for git, we are getting a
| CLI on top of git. Since agents can use GH CLI and mcp very
| well, I'm very interested to see what is it that Git butler can
| do so much better (I also might be a bit sceptic, but I'll give
| them the benefit of the doubt).
| petre wrote:
| > Git butler can do so much better
|
| Not be tied to Microslop and migrated to Azure?
| hequmania wrote:
| Sounds like great use of 17M.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > But instead, we get a replacement for Git. [...] Why is
| nobody solving actual problems anymore?
|
| While I personally doubt that for $17M one could build such a
| vacuum robot prototype (for a vacuum cleaner company, investing
| this amount of money - if it worked - would be a rounding
| error), I will rather analyze the point that you raised:
|
| It is a very common situation that the workflows of companies
| is deeply ingrained into some tool
|
| - that they can't get rid of (be it Microsoft Excel (in
| insurance and finance), be it Git (in software development),
| ...)
|
| - that is actually a bad fit for the workflow step (Git and
| Excel often are)
|
| So, this _is_ typical for the kind of problem that companies in
| sectors in which billions of $ /EUR are moved _do_ have.
|
| I am actually paid to develop some specialized software for
| some specialized industrial sector that solves a very specific
| problem.
|
| So, in my experience the reason why nobody [is] solving actual
| problems (in the sense of your definition) anymore is simple:
|
| - nobody is willing to pay big money for a solution,
|
| - those entities who _are_ willing to pay big money often fall
| for sycophantic scammers /consultants.
| Liftyee wrote:
| As someone who makes things it always confuses me when
| millions just disappear whenever a company or government
| contractor makes things. Give me $17M and I'll build a vacuum
| robot prototype in under 2 years, I can't imagine 10
| engineers getting paid $100+k/year can't do it in less time?
| Tooling is expensive, but not THAT expensive...
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| You sure? You ever ran a business? Prototyping costs,
| machines, licenses, overhead etc. etc.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The prototyping and machine costs are easily under a
| million. It's one custom-built vacuum.
|
| You can do it with 0-3 digits of license cost too.
|
| There's no sane way the business overhead more than
| doubles things.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I would agree. CNC-ing POM also tends to work extremely
| well for prototype plastic parts.
|
| Also, I already built a robot arm, a robot car, and a
| custom camera in my free time. So I'm having a hard time
| imagining that a robot vacuum prototype wouldn't be
| possible for me to build in a year, let alone with the team
| size that $1m in annual salaries buys.
| petre wrote:
| The robot vacuum is already there. The Chinese buit a
| better, cheaper one and the original company went
| bankrupt.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1lr75lp239o
| ubercore wrote:
| Get it approved in a lot of large markets? Deal with
| ongoing supply issues as suppliers change and you need to
| maintain your product? Market it? I could keep going on,
| but making a prototype is the easy part, making a
| sustaining business out of it is the hard part.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Moving the goalposts so soon.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > While I personally doubt that for $17M one could build such
| a vacuum robot prototype (for a vacuum cleaner company,
| investing this amount of money - if it worked - would be a
| rounding error)
|
| The first Roomba prototype from iRobot was two weeks and $10k
| in 1999 [1], and S. C. Johnson's funding was up to $2M [1].
| The public estimate for total pre-launch program cost is $3M.
| [2]
|
| In 2026 $, that's about $19k, $4M and $6M respectively.
|
| [1] https://nymag.com/vindicated/2016/11/roombas-long-bumpy-
| path...
|
| [2] https://dancingwithroomba.com/funding-tertill/
| conartist6 wrote:
| For $17 mil you can't replace Git either. Can't get it done.
|
| The problem is that the cost of replacing git isn't measured
| in money, it's measured in time.
|
| It's one of the few programming projects that no amount of
| money can buy, and ironically getting more money often means
| having less time.
|
| At the same time, you just can't scale up a company _then_
| decide to disruptively innovate on your core tech. You either
| put your nose to the grindstone or you let yourself play and
| explore but you can 't do both at once.
| imdsm wrote:
| I feel exactly this way
|
| Why are we trying to replace git? What is the problem with git?
| amoss wrote:
| It's the old broken. Clearly it must be replaced with the new
| hotness.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| The same reasons the world needed AI for cats funded to the
| tune of tens of millions of dollars. How do you expect those
| precious people to do anything at all without a bi-yearly
| expenses-paid trip to Cabo and on-site baristas?
| mxkopy wrote:
| Solutions to more actual problems are more expensive. It's
| easier to ask millions of people for $0.01 than it is to ask
| thousands for $100. Things that are easy to sell to millions of
| people for $100 are rarely innovative (transportation, food,
| entertainment, etc), and if they are, they're world-changing
| (cars, supermarkets, smartphones, etc).
| murukesh_s wrote:
| >Scott Chacon is a co-founder of GitHub
|
| Thought so until saw this. Man, he is the co-founder of Github
| and already seed-funded. How can someone refuse him? 17M is a
| small amount considering the valuation VS Code Agent wrappers
| are getting
| Fomite wrote:
| One reason I don't read HN as much as I used to is because I
| can't help translating numbers like that into the amount of
| research that could be accomplished with the same amount, and
| then I get angry.
| mememememememo wrote:
| 17M isn't a lot of money. It is for a person sure. Retire.
| Cessna. etc. But not to build a butler!
| Scholmo wrote:
| Yes!
|
| I mean who tf gives some small team millions to put some Nvidia
| GPU into space and thinking we will have market disrupting GPU
| clusters in space in 10 years?!
|
| There are so many low hanging fruits in IT Industry to just
| being solved.
|
| Even just having something like well build, open smart home
| products whould have been disruptive years ago (until someone
| like ikea decides to enter that space).
| nkrisc wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The world doesn't need this. It would just be more plastic and
| electronic trash.
|
| You and your kids have hands. Pick them up. It's what we do in
| my house.
|
| If you don't have hands, use your feet.
| welder wrote:
| Your kids need to learn how to clean up after themselves.
|
| All you need is a camera pointing at the floor with image
| detection... when there's legos on the floor it triggers a
| video playing that explains how the kids need to pick up the
| legos. /s
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Actually, a camera that scores the clean up progress,
| together with some virtual gold coins and real loot boxes for
| a week of good compliance might really do the trick.
| staticassertion wrote:
| You didn't click the link. Who are you to say that they aren't
| solving actual problems? You might not be their target. The
| whole article is dedicated to explaining why they're building
| their product.
| layer8 wrote:
| The article does a bad job at that, because it remains rather
| vague and doesn't explain the concrete problems they are
| trying to solve, that aren't either already solved by Git-
| linked issue trackers, or would be better solved by improving
| support in Git itself (like for stacked branches).
|
| Building UI and auxiliary features on top of Git is a crowded
| space, it's not clear what compelling innovation they are
| bringing to the table.
| staticassertion wrote:
| You can think that because you've read the article.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| To be fair, discovering a new shower gel that smells better or
| feels better is a nice experience.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Just write down how you'll spend the money to make that, what
| it'll eventually cost to produce, what the market size will be,
| and what the price will be, and if it's enough return you can
| easily convince someone to give you $17m to do it all.
| an0malous wrote:
| It's probably because you're not willing to lie enough. There
| was some founder back in the 2010s, I forgot his name, but he'd
| go around giving talks on fundraising and he basically said he
| just lied all the time.
|
| For example, instead of building a robot to pick up Lego
| bricks, say you're building a platform for personal robotics,
| and it'll cook you food, do your laundry, repair your fridge.
| It doesn't matter if you have any idea how to do this, just say
| you need $50M and you'll hire some robotics and vision guys to
| figure it out. The bigger and bolder the lie, the better.
| skyberrys wrote:
| Hasn't someone already built that robot? At least my kids tell
| me this exists every time I tell them to clean up their Legos.
| Actually it just does Legos, not the general toys.
| esafak wrote:
| I am actively looking for a replacement for GitHub and would
| prefer something that is not based on git.
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| you just need pedigree. any kind. where you went to school,
| where you worked etc.
| ragall wrote:
| You're fine with how git works, many others aren't.
| drunner wrote:
| Not to mention the irony that they need $17M to try and
| recreate/improve what Linus built in a week.
| Aurornis wrote:
| That's not really fair. That first week prototype was proof
| of concept, not the Git we use today. It would easily have
| taken $17 million for a private team to put in equivalent
| work to all of the open source effort that has made Git into
| the tool we have today.
| kva wrote:
| Totally agree - most of these co's that get funded are
| pointless. FWIW, the general math here is that you'd spend <
| 2-3mm developing new git and most of the money goes into
| distribution.
|
| We've strayed really far from where technical innovation began
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Don't do that. Don't buy into the bullshit.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I ask myself this all the time, I have ideas now and then that
| I need to start writing down. Its just sad, we have so much
| potential as a society, but all the money goes to things like
| AI and bitcoin blindly. While I love some aspects of AI, and
| hope to someday be like the Jetsons and have a robot in my home
| that helps with things, and frees up me and my wife to doing
| other things with our family, I also don't trust something that
| is feeding my most intimate events from my home to a server
| somewhere.
| anishgupta wrote:
| 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
| Meleagris wrote:
| 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.
| orbifold wrote:
| is there a jj hosting service?
| imron wrote:
| Any service that hosts git?
| bkolobara wrote:
| We are working on something https://lubeno.dev
| Vinnl wrote:
| Looks like still a bit early for me, but if you add an RSS
| feed to your blog, I would at least be reminded to check it
| out again later :)
| boxed wrote:
| Isn't jj git compatible so you can just use github?
| nchmy wrote:
| Yes.
| colinmarc wrote:
| I know of one: https://lubeno.dev
| pkulak wrote:
| We use GitHub at my work. And I think I'm the only one using
| JJ.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| https://tangled.org/ supports many jj features, but they seem
| to only offer public repos.
| ajkavanagh wrote:
| GitHub.
|
| 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.
| RickS wrote:
| I gotta say, jj was not something that interested me before,
| but that's a compelling pitch.
| dwb wrote:
| 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.
| justincormack wrote:
| Its VC funded https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2076429
| /000207642925...
| mi_lk wrote:
| that's a company built on top of Jujutsu, not jj itself
| drcongo wrote:
| If I remember correctly, jj is one guy who works at
| Google. Which presents a separate worry, which is that
| one day, when jj gets popular enough, Google will consume
| it, make it shit, change the name of it every six months
| and then shut it down.
| aseipp wrote:
| jj is not "one guy who works at Google" and the vast
| majority of submitted code comes from non-Google
| developers. Even if Google were to stop developing jj
| (they won't) the project would be healthy and strong.
|
| There's some legal annoyances around e.g. CLA which was a
| result of being a side project of Google originally.
| Hopefully we'll move through that in due time. But
| realistically it's a much larger project at this point
| and has grown up a lot, it's not Martin's side project
| anymore.
| urschrei wrote:
| That hasn't really been the case for a while imo: Martin
| works at Google and is paid to work on jj (there are also
| other Google employees who contribute, not sure whether
| they're paid to). jj is in use (wide use? No idea)
| alongside Google's internal tool (piper) with which it
| can interact (and with which it has some features in
| common) because jj has a pluggable backend architecture.
|
| While I hate to engage in speculation, tell spooky
| stories, or screech at people about the evil CLA you have
| to sign in order to contribute, my personal opinion is
| that if Google were ever to start throwing their weight
| around, the project would be forked in short order and
| development would continue as normal - it has momentum,
| plenty of non-Google contributors, and a community. It's
| also not a product per se, though as we're about to find
| out, you can certainly build products on top of it - that
| probably makes it less likely for its current home to
| suddenly become proprietorial about it.
|
| (hi Andy!)
| drcongo wrote:
| Good points. I had a horrible vision of a git -> GitHub
| -> Microsoft -> GitHub-on-Azure style pipeline but yeah,
| I think there's enough good people involved around jj
| that your vision is probably more likely. Also, hi Steph!
| aseipp wrote:
| Jujutsu is not "VC funded". But some of the developers,
| including me, work at East River Source Control (I worked
| on Jujutsu before that, too). The majority of the code in
| the project doesn't come from us -- or Google, for that
| matter. We don't allow people to approve patches when the
| author is from the same company, anyway.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| (also at ERSC here, hi Austin!) Heck, I have not had
| enough bandwidth to do as much upstream work as I
| initially thought I would when I started there!
| eproxus wrote:
| Can you expand on this? How do you achieve it? Just a WIP JJ
| commit after every change or something more clever?
| Meleagris wrote:
| In .claude/settings.json you can trigger shell commands on
| events like SessionStart, Stop, PreCompact, and PostToolUse
| [1].
|
| I have all of them run `jj status`, because jj snapshots
| the working copy every time it's invoked.
|
| You can have Claude write the hooks, but mine is:
|
| `[[ -d .jj ]] && jj status >/dev/null 2>&1; exit 0`
|
| [1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/hooks
| dwb wrote:
| "hooks": { "PreToolUse": [ {
| "matcher": "Edit|Write", "hooks": [
| { "type": "command",
| "command": "if command -v jj >/dev/null && jj root
| >/dev/null 2>&1; then if ! jj status >/dev/null 2>&1; then
| echo 'WARNING: failed to snapshot jj repository, tell user
| to fix'; fi; fi" } ] }
| ], "PostToolUse": [ {
| "matcher": "Edit|Write", "hooks": [
| { "type": "command",
| "command": "if command -v jj >/dev/null && jj root
| >/dev/null 2>&1; then if ! jj status >/dev/null 2>&1; then
| echo 'WARNING: failed to snapshot jj repository, tell user
| to fix'; fi; fi" } ] },
|
| In newer jj there's a dedicated snapshot command but I've
| not updated yet. Pop this in your Claude Code
| settings.json. It will snapshot the repository, thus
| recording any changes. Explore with jj evolog.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The others use `jj status`, but if I were to do this, I'd
| use `jj log -n0`, which has no output. All you really need
| is any read-only jj command.
|
| You could also turn on watchman and have this property on
| every save of a file and not even need to worry about
| hooks.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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)
| rimliu wrote:
| "I can iterate freely without thinking".
|
| Vibecoding moto.
| dagurp wrote:
| The biggest problem with Jujutsu is the name. I would love to
| hear a Swedish person try to pronounce it.
| aabhay wrote:
| Its a backronym (or whatever you call it) that cones from the
| actual name, "jj", which itself comes from the ease of typing
| jj on a keyboard
| paradox460 wrote:
| The logo is a pair of bluejays, so I've taken to casually
| calling it twojay with some of my coworkers.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| What's the difference between "snapshots" and git commits? In
| my mind a git commit is already a snapshot of the repo and the
| changes one staged. In what way can you move around more freely
| than what one can do with magit, deciding for files, hunks, or
| even single lines of code, whether or not they get staged and
| committed?
| zarzavat wrote:
| Technically, nothing. But psychologically git commits
| represent a unit of completed work, whereas with AI agents
| what's needed is a kind of agent-wise undo history such that
| you can revert back to the state of the repo 1 minute ago
| before Claude did an oopsie all over your repo.
|
| You can definitely use git as a backend for building such a
| system, but some extra tooling is necessary.
| gonzalohm wrote:
| Just create a new branch before you implement new features
| and if the agent messes up don't merge the branch.
|
| That way you get the best of both worlds. The buggy code is
| still there in case it's needed but it's not in the main
| branch
| zarzavat wrote:
| Most of the time when I'm using Claude my working tree is
| already dirty because I'm mid-task. I usually try to do a
| throwaway commit before every interaction with Claude,
| but it's easy to forget, or to leave the "accept edits"
| mode on accidentally and my working tree gets corrupted.
| Also having to commit takes you out of flow because you
| suddenly have to deal with any new gitignores, which
| requires at least a glance at untracked files to make
| sure you're not committing anything you shouldn't be. I
| want to be able to undo the state of my working tree to
| the moment before a particular interaction with Claude,
| just like how I can undo a file.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| jj offers "jj undo" which will undo changes to your repo,
| and the "oplog", which is sort of like the reflog, but on
| steroids. It's one of the nicest things about it.
| skydhash wrote:
| > You can definitely use git as a backend for building such
| a system, but some extra tooling is necessary
|
| Is it? There's the stash for storing patches, the index for
| storing good hunks, branching for trying out different
| experiments. You can even use worktree if you want separate
| working directory especially when there will be changes in
| the untracked files.
|
| Git has a lot of tooling for dealing with changes, directly
| or at the meta layer.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| git checkout @{1.minute.ago}
| steveklabnik wrote:
| You're right that git commits are snapshots.
|
| jj is very non-modal, that is, it doesn't tend to have a lot
| of state that commands rely on. As an example of what I mean,
| because jj does not have a staging area, everything is
| already committed, which makes it very easy to say, move to a
| different commit: you don't need to stash your working copy,
| as jj has already stashed it for you. Similarly, due to the
| auto-rebase behavior, you can be working in one part of the
| tree, realize something somewhere else should be moved, and
| go rebase that without even moving to it at all!
|
| As a small example: say I'm working on something, and I find
| a typo. I want to send that typo in as a PR, but I don't want
| to do it as part of my work. I can do that with:
|
| 1. make the change in my current working copy (@)
|
| 2. jj split -o trunk (selecting the typo contents to split
| off the typo fix into a new change on top of (hence -o)
| trunk)
|
| 3. jj log (go check out what the change id of that change is
|
| 4. jj git push -c <change id I found in 3>
|
| No need to even move my own HEAD (in git terms), just knock
| it out inline in a few steps while I'm working.
|
| Now, as for magit, I don't use it, and I know that those that
| do love it and it does make some of this stuff easier. But
| not everyone can use magit. And there are "magit, but jj"
| projects as well, but I can't speak to them or which is best
| at the moment.
| jiggunjer wrote:
| Definitely not true about models knowing jj. I've had latest
| opus and gpt fail at revsets and fileset syntax, even
| hallucinating subcommands like jj move (maybe it existed
| before, interface is not stable). Luckily it's easy enough to
| not need them most of the time.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Yes, I use Claude with jj often, and it occasionally tries to
| use older commands like move. Most of the time it gets it
| right for me though, often plugins and such say to use git
| explicitly, and that's where it tends to stray.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It seems to have been build on great idea. Git's "plumbing" is
| just a set of snapshots of the tree, and everything above is
| built on that so replacing the porcelain with something better
| fitting the problem is far more useful than trying to reinvent
| the wheel and making yet another distributed tree snapshot
| based VCS just to reinvent user facing tooling like the other
| VCS tried
| jlokier wrote:
| _> You can just mess around and make it presentable later,
| which Git never really let you do nicely._
|
| I'm surprised to read that, because that's how I've always used
| Git (and GitHub).
|
| That's what I've understood to be good practice with Git, and
| it was liberating compared with what came before. One of the
| nicest things about Git is you can throw things in locally
| without worrying about how it looks, and make it presentable
| later.
| Valodim wrote:
| I also did that with git, but it's no comparison in
| ergonomics. For instance, "move this hunk two commits up" is
| a task that makes many git users sweat. With jj it's barely
| something that registers as a task.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > For instance, "move this hunk two commits up" is a task
| that makes many git users sweat.
|
| Citation needed. You split the commit anyway you like, e.g.
| with the mouse or using cursor movements or by duplicating
| and deleting lines. Then you move it with the mouse or
| cursor or whatever and squash it into the other commit.
| Maybe some people never intend to do it, but then these
| probably also don't want to learn JJ. I guess this is more
| of a selection bias, that these that care about history
| editing are also more likely to learn another VCS on their
| own.
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| I'm one of the git users who would sweat. Can you explain
| a bit (out link relevant docs) how I might split a commit
| up, and move it?
| jlokier wrote:
| Here's two "raw" methods:
|
| 1. Use "git rebase -i commitid^" (or branch point, tag
| etc), ideally with editor set to Magit, set that commit
| to "edit" (single key 'e' in Magit) and let the rebase
| continue, do "git reset -p HEAD^" and select the hunks
| you want to remove from the first commit, "git commit
| --amend", then "git commit -a" (add -c if useful, e.g. to
| copy author and date from the previous one). or to keep
| the author date), then "git rebase --continue" to finish.
|
| 2. Same, but use "git reset HEAD^" (add -N if useful),
| then "git add -p" to select the hunks you do want to
| include in the first commit.
|
| Afterwards you can do the "git rebase -i" command again
| if you want to reorder those commits, move them relative
| to other commits, or move the split-out hunks into
| another existing commit (use the 'f' fixup or 's' squash
| rebase options).
|
| After doing this a few times and learning what the
| commands actually do, it starts to feel comfortable. And
| of course, you don't have to run those exact commands or
| type them out, it's just a raw, git-level view. "git
| rebase -i" and "git add -p" / "git reset -p" are really
| useful for reorganising commit hunks.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Yeah, I mostly do it like that. I don't use Magit (yet?
| Haven't got the motivation to learn or find a good
| tutorial for Emacs.), but instead use the cursor to
| select the lines to stage or unstage with the
| cursor/mouse in my Git GUI. Also depending on what I want
| the commits to look like, I duplicate the pick commit
| line first (and potentially move it).
|
| On an unrelated note, I use @~ instead of @^, because I
| think of moving up down the ancestry, not sideways, e.g.
| I'm more likely to want to change it to an older/newer
| commit, than I am to want to change the second parent
| instead. I don't get why most tutorials show it with @^,
| because you do focus on the commit being an ancestor, not
| precisely being the direct first parent, although of
| course for the first-level first parent, it amounts to
| the same.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| It's already well explained in a sibling comment, but on
| a more conceptual basis, while commits are interpreted as
| diffs on the fly, a commit is a single (immutable)
| snapshot. So in these terms, "splitting a commit" amounts
| to introducing an intermediate snapshot. Having that in
| mind, it should become clear, that using Git you create
| the snapshot by working from the previous or next commit
| (what ever suits you more), bringing it to the state, you
| like it to be and commit. (In theory you could create
| that intermediate snapshot from any commit, but likely
| you want to do it from on of the direct neighbors.)
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| The problem put simply is that git doesn't support
| concurrency. Even if you use worktrees, git has a global lock
| for repo interaction.
|
| https://www.felesatra.moe/blog/2024/12/23/jj-is-great-for-
| th...
| prepend wrote:
| Do you not use git branches? Your use case was why git was
| made.
| Meleagris wrote:
| I do use git branches, but they solve isolation, which isn't
| my pain point with git.
|
| When I'm using agents to code, I don't want to have to stop
| what I'm doing and commit known-good state to the repo every
| few minutes.
|
| jj just snapshots everything automatically, so I know I've
| captured that state, and I can look back and curate it all
| after the fact.
|
| It's like the shift from manually saving Word documents to
| autosave, but instead of forcing it with git, I can use JJ
| which has been intentionally designed for that workflow.
| ezst wrote:
| Every success story and happy conversion to jj is evidence that
| hg should have won the DVCS war, but more importantly, that
| VCSes and their inherent merits and tradeoffs were always
| secondary to the social networks underpinning them. GitHub as a
| defacto monopoly really killed innovation in the VCS space, but
| also shifted the focus and attention elsewhere. That's why I
| don't think there'll be so much of a "post-git" without as much
| as a "post-github".
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Does VCS-agnosticity actually work? It feels like a huge
| burden to migrate it everytime you want to have the tools
| from the innovation in your daily work. Also projects want to
| integrate project versions into each other and reference
| versions and identifiers are likely VCS specific. That's why
| I feel VCS monopolies actually has a lot of benefits.
| manithree wrote:
| LOL. In 2007, I did a side-by-side comparison of SVN,
| Mercurial and git with my codebase at work (~700k LOC). I
| know hg got faster eventually, but I still can't believe
| people say "hg should have won the DVCS war" with a straight
| face. It was orders of magnitude slower in my tests. Like, 20
| minutes to commit large xml files (yeah, I know, but that's
| where we were). Not just a few ms slower, unbearably slow for
| several things.
|
| I liked its features better, but chose git, and that was the
| correct decision.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I thought gitbutler was not a great name, but then I saw their
| CLI command name is "but"
| charlesfries wrote:
| I'd like to see some kind of "whitespace aware" smart diff in
| whatever comes after git
| jauco wrote:
| Use difftastic. You can do so with current git :)
| saint_yossarian wrote:
| There's `git diff -w`, and most forges expose a setting for
| that in their diff views.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| you can literally plug in any diff program you like into git
| and even make it extension-aware
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| If you think like that why invest in software at all; the AI
| will do everything?
|
| Does AI make reading or writing stacked PRs any nicer? No, it
| does not.
| Aperocky wrote:
| It does though.. you don't have agents that can connect to
| github or wherever your git mirrors are and comment on PRs?
| esafak wrote:
| Don't you read the PRs?
| Aperocky wrote:
| Yes, but my agents also do.
|
| The whole concept of PR is that you want additional looks
| on the code, and multiple agents working adversarially on
| PRs with philosophical rules are really nice.
| lan321 wrote:
| The comments stop me from marking MRs with bad issues as
| ready, but if reviewing it's not really helpful.
|
| Maybe if I were reviewing some random dude's code, where I
| have no idea what he's been working on...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > 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.
| ozozozd wrote:
| git isn't Saas.
|
| git [?] GitHub
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The article is about a $17M funding round for GitButler.
| Which I assume has some revenue plan that you might qualify
| as SAAS. Correct me if I'm wrong.
| jampekka wrote:
| 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 giants. 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.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Their product is a CLI.
| faangguyindia wrote:
| Many investment decisions are taken by people who get cut of
| investment as fees.
|
| Wealthy people don't have time to do all due diligence and
| vetting specially when random startups become unicorn.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's obvious that GitButt wants to be bought by one of the AI
| providers so they can add it as a feature to their
| subscription.
| steelbrain wrote:
| The source code is hosted on Github:
| https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/gitbutler
|
| 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.
| mook wrote:
| 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.
| icy wrote:
| > I am tired of using and waiting for alternatives of, Github.
|
| Are you interested in giving https://tangled.org a try? I'd
| love to hear your thoughts!
| everybodyknows wrote:
| I can't see any significant difference between their "Operations
| Log":
|
| https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/operation...
|
| and git's _reflog_ :
|
| https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reflog
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Raising a bunch of money to recreate the wheel.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| 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.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| 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.
| dirkc wrote:
| Another comment [1] has a solution - a new tool called pit,
| it just throws the whole 10k loc PR in a pit and forgets
| about it :p
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713650
| oofbey wrote:
| Agreed. Although I'm not sure what's nicer about it. It's in
| color. But I failed to understand why I'd want any of those
| features.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > We need a solution to all these 10k loc PRs.
|
| One of the most idiotic things about the whole LLM craze is
| the idea that we have to change all of our infrastructure to
| accommodate LLMs instead of figuring out how to train LLMs to
| _make better commits_.
| jgauth wrote:
| 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.
| progx wrote:
| Why should ai need this? A linear backlog is enough, a cache,
| for everything else they can create it new in a short time.
| jcfrei wrote:
| 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.
| leadingthenet wrote:
| git-worktree has been a thing for a decade+ and AI agents
| seem to be using them just fine in my experience. This is
| a solved problem.
| dbbk wrote:
| That's not even true
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Why not? Are you considering git worktrees?
| dbbk wrote:
| Exactly, worktrees solve this problem, every "agentic
| IDE" uses them
| jlokier wrote:
| Working on multiple branches in parallel is literally
| what Git was created for, and how it's been used since
| the very first version 20 years ago.
|
| Other commenters mentioned worktrees, which let you check
| out different branches at the same time from a single
| local repo. That's convenient, but not required.
|
| Git always supported "fast cloning" local repos as well.
| You just "git clone" from one directory to another. Then
| they are independent and you're free to decide what to
| merge back.
|
| These days, agents can also fork their containers or VMs
| as often as required too, with copy-on-write for speed.
|
| So that's four ways to work on multiple branches in
| parallel using Git that we already use.
| IshKebab wrote:
| They actually started before the LLM craze. The original pitch
| was just better Git.
| conartist6 wrote:
| I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after
| git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better.
|
| I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient,
| inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years
| of my life on nothing but this.
|
| My question is: say the investor believes that some new
| platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that
| it will be mine over a famous person's?
| spaghetdefects wrote:
| Sadly you can't, and this is a huge flaw in the venture
| capital model. They invest in people that they think other
| vcs will invest in. More often than not who your parents are
| matters more than anything (unless you've had a huge exit
| like the OP). They'll also throw money at you if you come
| from a rich family, not because they think you'll succeed,
| but because they want your family's money as LPs in their
| funds.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Well regardless of whether it's hard or impossible, I'm
| doing this. I'm going.
|
| The problem they have is that they're betting git is a
| solid foundation to build on. A tectonic change like git
| actually being replaced wouldn't just eliminate their moat,
| it would leave them trapped on the wrong side of it.
|
| I can't win their game, so I'm changing the game.
| basket_horse wrote:
| No offense, but why should I believe you? The guy is famous
| because he has a track record of success doing similar
| projects. Of course that doesn't guarantee success, but I'd
| wager it makes it statistically more likely than a random
| person. Starting a successful company is not all about good
| engineering.
|
| Have you built a prototype and tried to pitch any VCs? Or are
| you just asking rhetorical questions?
| conartist6 wrote:
| I built a prototype, and then I rebuilt and rebuilt it and
| rebuilt it, and somewhere in there my understanding of how
| to think about what I was building completely flipped on
| its head. Then I rebuilt the version flipped on its head
| another several times until I finally understood it. You
| can see that on my Github, it's all public:
| https://github.com/conartist6 (public devlog on Discord).
|
| It's a pretty serious claim to know what comes after git,
| and I have a whole array of criteria I evaluate claimants
| on:
|
| - Will their version control solution fall apart if there
| are not enough line breaks in the code?
|
| - Can they solve the rename-function/add-usage conflict?
| Git normally can't surface this conflict at all.
|
| - Can the system maintain authorship attribution at a fine-
| grained level (per-second resolution)
|
| - Will their solution's performance break down if there is
| too much code in one file?
|
| - How will the solution handle change notifications? Is the
| filesystem watcher the de-facto coordinator?
|
| This GitButler thing fails all my tests for a thing that's
| serious about replacing git; it just seems like they
| haven't thought about any of that stuff, well, at all.
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| The reality is that none of that shit matters if you can
| build a product that people use and want to pay for. I
| would back someone who has made a dollar off of a product
| over someone who has built a great product that no one
| uses 100% of the time.
|
| The reality is that you can make a successful business
| with okay engineering and great product insight. It's
| much more difficult to build a successful business with
| great engineering and poor product insight. Getting
| people to use and pay for what you've built gives you the
| product insight that you need.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Yeah but that's the advice for 99% of people. The
| craziest things: things on the scale of digging through
| 50 years of compounding tech debt, they take time. Have
| you by any chance seen this talk?
| https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-
| world
| basket_horse wrote:
| Does anyone actually care about the above issues?
|
| If yes, and you've solved them, people should be very
| interested in using what you've built. If people are
| using what you've built and are willing to pay for it,
| VCs will be interested.
|
| If you haven't solved them, but can validate they are
| real problems people care about, and have a path towards
| solving them, this should make a compelling VC pitch.
|
| If they are real engineering problems but no one seems to
| care much about them, then it's just a hobby.
| myroon5 wrote:
| Step 1: don't pitch from a conartist6 username
| conartist6 wrote:
| It's been my username for 20 years and I'm not changing it
| to be more corpo-propriate now. I think it makes more sense
| if you know that my name is Conrad.
|
| It's pretty easy to find out who I am in the real world
| too. For one thing I'm a private pilot and for 10 years I
| had an airplane personally registered to me, making my name
| and address a matter of (open) public record.
| beambot wrote:
| No pilot has ever been a con artist...
| compiler-guy wrote:
| I don't blame you for not wanting to change your name.
|
| But fundraising is a game to be played, and part of
| playing the game is building credibility with VCs. It may
| be that a quirky name helps with that, but probably not.
|
| From the classic baseball movie Bull Durham, where the
| old veteran is explaining to the newbie how to be
| successful:
|
| "Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make
| it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think
| classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you
| can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think
| you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however,
| it means you are a slob."
|
| If you already have a track record, then you can have a
| quirky name or personality. Until then, you've got to
| play the game.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I agree completely. However, this mentality is why honest
| people like you get pushed to the sidelines, and
| manufactured, perfect imaged, 1000+ referenced in
| LinkedIn types are more successful in getting VC funding.
| If this is seriously your goal, you are going to have to
| play the game. Remember, even when perfectly playing the
| game in your position you will likely fail. If this is
| what you want to do, do you want to be taken out of the
| running for something like a username?
| buffington wrote:
| > I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now.
|
| Look, I'm not wanting to be rude here, and this is
| obviously all hypothetical since you're likely not
| actively pitching to investors, but if you were, being
| stubborn in this way would be a deal breaker for me as an
| investor.
|
| I see all the reasons you have for keeping it, and
| they're reasonable, but the mere idea that that's a hill
| you're willing to die on is a red flag. I'd see this as
| one of many potential points of friction. Where else will
| you choose to not make compromises?
|
| Maybe it's not rational on my part, but you're trying to
| convince irrational entities to part with their money.
|
| You could look at it this way: if someone offered $17M to
| change it, would you?
| conartist6 wrote:
| I kind of am actively pitching to investors at this
| point.
|
| I wouldn't say the username is a hill to die on. I can't
| hide that this is the online identity I used while
| working on this project. Trying to hide it would just
| feel sketchier, no?
|
| And yeah, for 17 mil I'm willing to talk about most
| anything, but I still see a conversation with investors
| like going on a date. The red flags can go both ways...
| grigri907 wrote:
| Might want to change that username before you make your pitch
| someguynamedq wrote:
| The question is not "will the product be better." The
| question is will you make the investors money.
| conartist6 wrote:
| I understand that money is at the root of the question. I
| don't see any problem with my strategy for making money,
| which is to win over all their users with a wildly better
| product.
|
| Github itself basically followed this route. They didn't
| built Git on top of SVN. They built a much better product
| (than Sourceforge) and they used network effects
| (particularly their free-for-OSS offer) to grow their
| userbase until they could start to land corporate
| contracts.
| cedilla wrote:
| I don't know if you wanted to imply that, but just to
| make sure no one misunderstands: GitHub didn't invent
| git.
|
| I don't know if they were the first git forge, but they
| were certainly among the first.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Yeah I know that they didn't. Even though they didn't
| invent it and don't own it, it's still the cornerstone of
| the wall that has become the Github empire.
|
| The specific problem is that all the competitors to
| Github have to use git, and that limits how different
| they can really be than Github and thus how aggressively
| they can compete to win users
| MyHonestOpinon wrote:
| They are using fame and past success as a proxy. You would
| need to do it on the basis of your ideas and the work that
| you have done. Someone really knowledgable would need to dig
| deep on your work and then the VCs will need to trust these
| person(s). The other alternative might be to try to get
| traction with users like Linus did with git and hope that
| they like it enough that it becomes popular. But Linus had
| the advantage of being famous and highly respected already,
| conartist6 wrote:
| I've considered trying to get Linus to be the knowledgeable
| person given his history. I haven't actually reached out
| though.
|
| I badly want someone to take that deep dive given the work
| I've put in to be ready for it
| maccard wrote:
| Now you understand why people have non technical co
| founders!
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| That is an empirical question answered by the market. The way
| you get your answer is to build it, get it in front of
| people, and see if they use it. Then you will know.
|
| Note that if you want to be the answer, then you have to
| prioritize other things than the technology. You can have the
| best product, but if nobody knows about it you're stuck.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Quite! It just happens that so far I've been stuck on
| purpose.
|
| The nature of developing standards is that you can't have
| people start adopting them until they're done.
| IncRnd wrote:
| It's not that other people are famous. They have a track
| record in this exact field, where he produced results and
| made money for investors. His results help to shape how
| software development gets performed.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes
| after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot
| better._
|
| This sounds like one of those "Hacker News Dropbox"
| comments...
| maccard wrote:
| The trick to raising money is being able to convince an
| investor you are the person to build that platform, not being
| able to build the platform.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| You can stop at bullet #1 and that's plenty to raise $17m on
| right there. No questions asked.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Put another way: the _idea_ didn 't raise $17M, the _team_ did.
| That 's usually the case but you can fully expect a pivot in
| their future.
|
| Once open source spreads into an area, it tends to kill
| (commodify) commercial software in that space.
|
| For example, with databases, MySQL and Postgres "won". Yes,
| there are commercial databases like SQL Server and Oracle but
| they largely exist through regulatory capture and inertia. It's
| highly unlike anyone will ever make a commercial general
| purpose database again. There are always niche cases.
|
| Same with operating systems. Yes we have MacOS and Windows but
| what are the odds we get another commercial mass OS? I'd say
| almost zero.
|
| It's the same for source control. Git "won". There are a
| handful of others (eg Mercurial). But gone are the days of,
| say, Visual Source Safe.
|
| But when people talk about "what comes after Git" they really
| mean (IMHO) "what comes after Github", which is a completely
| different conversation. Because Github absolutely can be
| superseded by something better. Will it though? I don't know.
| It has an incredible amount of inertia.
|
| As for AI and anything related to source control, I'd have a
| hard time betting against Anthropic. But remember the exit
| could be an HN post of "We're joining Anthropic!". Side note: I
| really hate this "we're joining X" framing. No, you took the
| bag. That's fine. But let's be honest.
|
| For people with a proven track record, AI is a gold rush of
| acquisition more than creating a sustainable business, let
| alone an IPO. I think that's what this bet is.
| trollied wrote:
| GitHub has already been bettered - gitlab is much better, in
| my opinion.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| put differently: there's already a lot of money moving from A
| to B as people use AI & agentic coding. Find a way to get
| yourself in the middle of that cash flow and suck out a few
| percentage points of it .. profit!
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I use Git as a deduplication compressing backup tool. Git is
| fine and useful for a multitude of uses both manual and
| automated. Maybe the UI aka. porcelain is a bit clunky, but Git
| was explicitly intended to be separated into porcelain and
| plumbing, so that you can use the plumbing to make your own
| porcelain.
|
| From git(1): LOW-LEVEL COMMANDS (PLUMBING)
| Although Git includes its own porcelain layer, its low-level
| commands are sufficient to support development of
| alternative porcelains. Developers of such
| porcelains might start by reading about git-update-index(1) and
| git-read-tree(1). The interface (input, output,
| set of options and the semantics) to these low-
| level commands are meant to be a lot more stable than Porcelain
| level commands, because these commands are
| primarily for scripted use. The interface to
| Porcelain commands on the other hand are subject to change
| in order to improve the end user experience.
| The following description divides the low-level commands into
| commands that manipulate objects (in the
| repository, index, and working tree), commands that
| interrogate and compare objects, and commands that move objects
| and references between repositories.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| wasn't there another GitHub cofounder that recently also had
| some similar product launched?
| politelemon wrote:
| 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.
| grodriguez100 wrote:
| 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.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| Linus built git in an afternoon with $17 for snacks
| padjo wrote:
| It was the early 2000s though, $17 got you like a weeks worth
| of snacks back then.
| aleksanb wrote:
| Linus Torvalds was able to build this in a cave!
|
| With a box of scraps!
| ultrablack wrote:
| For $17 milion there are few thibga without any gui that i
| couldnt build.
| olalonde wrote:
| > I may have even had a small hand in some part of that.
|
| Quite an understatement. I'm pretty sure GitHub is the primary
| reason that Git took off like it did.
| aoshifo wrote:
| Could be I live in a bubble, but I don't use git because of
| GitHub or with GitHub that much. No doubt, GitHub is/was great
| for distributing software but I feel we'd still all be using
| git without GitHub
| olalonde wrote:
| Practically no one was using Git before GitHub (except
| Linux). Subversion was much more widespread.
| NateEag wrote:
| Subversion was (and is) an admirable project, and filled a
| void by being much better than CVS.
|
| When I discovered git, I couldn't go back to svn - git fit
| my mind _so_ much better.
|
| It might not have seen the meteoric rise without GitHub,
| but just like it's weird to find servers running an OS
| other than Linux these years, I suspect there would have
| been a steady growth that eventually made it dominant.
|
| I suspect it will be very hard to unseat git at this point
| - for all its untuitive UI it's good enough for most
| things, and it's been slowly improving for the use cases
| where it's weak.
| pu_pe wrote:
| 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.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Idk how git works under the hood but those both seem like they
| could both be easily accomplished with git itself .
|
| 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
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > I could imagine having different flags for whether a
| contribution was created by a human or not.
|
| 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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...
| pu_pe wrote:
| 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 :)
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| remove the existing code, add feature to the prompt and re-
| generate everything, probably
| schacon wrote:
| Actually, it is. We're currently leading a conversation among
| several players in this space to agree on a metadata standard
| that helps make attaching, collaborating on and transmitting
| information like this simple, extensible and scalable.
|
| Keep an eye on our blog to see how we're doing this, and how
| we're doing it in a way that hopefully the entire community
| joins us in a way where we're not all reinventing the same
| wheels.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| >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.
|
| Yes, it could have syntax like git notes add
| -m "Claude prompt: foo fee faa foo" <commit-hash>
|
| and then the tooling could attach any metadata to it that is
| desired.
|
| OH WAIT YOU CAN DO THAT ALREADY SINCE 2009
|
| Seriously, the 90% complaints about git not being able to do
| something is just either RTFM or "well, it can, but could use
| some better porcelain to present to user"
| hmontazeri wrote:
| 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
| rsanheim wrote:
| 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.
| choudharism wrote:
| There is nothing inherently special about the straw that breaks
| the camel's back.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Why do they need $17m to build this? Vibe code it in a couple
| weeks, ship it.
| pjmalandrino wrote:
| 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?
| cocodill wrote:
| There is only a tiny final step left, a real piece of cake, to
| build the thing.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| 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.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| 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
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| TRCat wrote:
| I was skeptical at first, but then I watched the video and it
| really looks interesting. I wonder if this works with Azure
| DevOps?
| johntopia wrote:
| gitbutler is actually a great product tbh
| loveparade wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Why this and not jujutsu, pijul or sapling? These are all version
| control systems that are better than git in various ways.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| This is is made for AI or ... something.
| nikolay wrote:
| 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!
| qrobit wrote:
| Just a reminder that even if you managed to amend those commits
| and force-push, the commits would still exist and will be
| addressable given the hash is known.
| Orygin wrote:
| Can't they be purged if they are dangling and the
| housekeeping is ran?
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/47771133/8662097
| password4321 wrote:
| related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41060102
| _Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on
| GitHub_
| mauzybwy wrote:
| Couldn't you expire the reflog entry and prune the db to
| remove it entirely?
| tmountain wrote:
| I personally feel that:
|
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Git is fine. I would like something better than fine though,
| especially for dealing with rebase/merge conflicts where I
| would say Git is mediocre.
| a-french-anon wrote:
| 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).
| k4rli wrote:
| What about a vibecoded replacement with emojis and
| javascript?
|
| Surely $trillion "ai" thing can generate a better solution
| than one Finnish guy 20 years ago.
| weedhopper wrote:
| Rust! it's written in rust and not javascript!!!!
| dare944 wrote:
| Lol. Unfortunately VCs and ever-so-ernest founders are
| impervious to irony. Best to just let them get their grift
| on and just be happy it isn't your money they're
| boondoggling.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| I would urge you to take a look at the founding team here,
| I doubt that they vibe coded this tool.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Git is fine. I would like something better than fine
| though, especially for dealing with rebase/merge conflicts
| where I would say Git is mediocre.
|
| You can define your own merge strategy that uses a custom
| executable to fix conflicts.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/24965574/735926
| DonThomasitos wrote:
| ,,Claude, merge these branches and resolve conflicts. Ask me
| if unclear."
|
| 16M$ VC money saved.
| user34283 wrote:
| So far I have not let AI work with git, because I preferred
| handling version control myself.
|
| Does it work well for resolving merge conflicts in your
| experience?
| speedgoose wrote:
| Not the person you responded too, but in my experience
| the answer is a big yes.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| In my experience, yes. It has done a great job of
| choosing which changes should be integrated based on
| context in the repo, too.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I'm sure that will go well for my formal model in a
| language that about 100 people use...
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| If only 100 people in the world are using this language,
| who are you even merging code with, lol.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Some of the other people?
| skydhash wrote:
| > especially for dealing with rebase/merge conflicts where I
| would say Git is mediocre.
|
| It seems like everyone that hold this opinion want Git to be
| some magical tool that will guess their intent and
| automatically resolve the conflict. The only solutions other
| than surfacing the conflict are locking (transactions) or
| using some consensus algorithm (maybe powered by logical
| clocks). The first sucks and no one has been able to design
| the second (code is an end result, not the process of solving
| a problem).
| IshKebab wrote:
| > It seems like everyone that hold this opinion want Git to
| be some magical tool that will guess their intent and
| automatically resolve the conflict.
|
| Absolutely not. There are plenty of fairly trivial
| solutions where Git's default merge algorithm gives you
| horrible diffs. Even for cases as simple as adding a
| function to a file it will get confused and put closing
| brackets in different parts of the diff. Nobody is asking
| for perfection but if you think it can't be improved you
| lack imagination.
|
| There are a number of projects to improve this like
| Mergiraf. Someone looked at fixing the "sliders" problem 10
| years ago but sadly it didn't seem to go anywhere, probably
| because there are too many core Git developers who have the
| same attitude as you.
|
| https://github.com/mhagger/diff-slider-tools
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > where Git's *default* merge algorithm gives you
| horrible diffs
|
| You are saying it yourself.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Saying what? Defaults matter. The fact that other people
| are doing their best to improve Git's mediocre defaults
| doesn't excuse it.
|
| I doubt you would defend any of Windows' poor defaults
| because there are tools to fix them.
| farouqjalabi wrote:
| Gitbutler is backed by git. Gitbutler is essentially just ui
| for git which also allows you to have multiple branches. It
| isn't meant to replace git.
| toenail wrote:
| What does that even mean? Multiple branches is a git feature.
| rimliu wrote:
| and worktrees too.
| doublesocket wrote:
| Which Claude literally uses.
| arnvald wrote:
| 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
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| 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.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yes, this is the obvious solution. Multiple agents
| working on multiple features should use feature branches.
|
| Can't believe how this whole AI movement seems to want to
| reinvent software engineering, poorly.
| sassymuffinz wrote:
| Their goal is not to give us a better tool, it's to get
| us to think our old tools are rubbish so we give them
| money instead.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| to be entirely fair while git is getting better, the
| tooling UI/UX is still designed with expectation someone
| read the git book and understood exactly how it works.
|
| Which _should be basic skill on anyone dealing with code_
| , but Git is not just programmer's tool any more for a
| long time so better UI is welcome
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Has that ever been achieved in software/dev industry?
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| claude can use worktrees.. so if you have a system with
| say 10 agents, each one can use a worktree per session..
| no need to clone the the repo 10 times or work on
| branches. Worktreeees.
| user34283 wrote:
| That has been implemented 10 years ago:
| git worktree add -b feature-2 ../feature-2
| skydhash wrote:
| Even before git has the worktree feature, you could just
| clone the repo again (shallowly if it's big).
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Sooooo git worktree. It's exactly that. One repository
| dir checked out in different places with different
| branches.
| farouqjalabi wrote:
| Not quite, Gitbutler allows you to apply multiple
| branches to the code base at once. With codebases you
| will have multiple code bases not one.
|
| for example: It allows me to test coworkers branches with
| mine without merging or creating new branch.
|
| It has many features that makes it super easy to add
| patch to any commit in any branch
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > for example: It allows me to test coworkers branches
| with mine without merging or creating new branch.
|
| How is that not supported by worktrees? You are aware,
| that you can checkout commits?
| lamasery wrote:
| Seconding others here, what you're bringing up as
| distinct features of Gitbutler seems to just be stuff git
| can do.
|
| - One local copy of a repo with multiple work trees
| checked out at once, on different branches/commits? Git
| does that.
|
| - "Add a patch to any commit in any branch" I can't think
| of a way of interpreting this statement (and I can think
| of a couple!) that isn't something git can do directly.
|
| Maybe it adds some new UI to these, but those are just
| git features. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (I have no
| idea, and "just UI" can be a good product) but these seem
| to be built-in git features, not Gitbutler features.
| farouqjalabi wrote:
| Yeah ur right, Gitbutler is just UI that makes it easier
| to do the mentioned stuff.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Does it checkout different branches at the same time,
| provides an in memory representation to be modified by
| another API, or does it to multitasking checkouts. The
| first thing is already natively in Git. I guess the
| others are innovation, although the second sounds
| unnecessary and the third like comedy.
| nacozarina wrote:
| 'Embrace, extend, extinguish.'
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| "Backed by" as in "running git under the hood", not as in
| "supported by the git organization". I'd probably use
| "powered by" in this case to avoid confusion
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| So.. worktrees?
| chrysoprace wrote:
| Not quite - it totally takes over your branching strategy and
| locks you into GitButler.
| dethos wrote:
| Bingo
| flux3125 wrote:
| > but with people throwing money behind it, there's a plan to
| extract value from the user base from day one.
|
| They'll start injecting ads in your commit messages, forcing
| you to subscribe to a premium plan.
| nottorp wrote:
| Humm at a quick glance git was functional enough for the linux
| kernel after 2 people worked on it for 4 months. That doesn't
| really add up to 17M.
| foota wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Good luck with that, I would still be using subversion if given
| the choice.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| How do you intend to make money ?
|
| Easier Git doesn't translate into something I can get my boss to
| pay for.
| burnerRhodov2 wrote:
| $17m to replace git with but. no fucking way
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > 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.
| conartist6 wrote:
| > I don't understand how anyone could think to replace git by
| raising money. The only way to truly do this is grassroots
| iteration.
|
| Yeah, that is also my take. I'm biased of course since I'm
| someone working on replacing git through grassroots iteration,
| but I've been around this block a few times though and I never
| saw blasting money at a problem produce real innovation.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Apparently what comes after git is git
| solidarnosc wrote:
| That's a lot of money for something very much not necessary...
| I'm in the wrong business!
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| I refuse to use anything other than git for versioning.
| thiht wrote:
| Standard is better than better. For all of its flaws, I'll take
| Git any day over any (better) alternative, because the value is
| in the absence of fragmentation. If a repo doesn't use Git, I'm
| out.
| admiralrohan wrote:
| They need to have a dedicated page explaining me why should I
| change my current workflow. Else I don't get the point.
| farouqjalabi wrote:
| https://docs.gitbutler.com/why-gitbutler
| aoshifo wrote:
| Remind me, how much venture capital did Linus need to raise for
| building git?
| hk__2 wrote:
| Linus didn't build git. He built a proof of concept and then
| handed it over to real maintainers that wrote real code.
| aoshifo wrote:
| Fair enough, but he created it and I don't know the names of
| the real maintainers (sorry). And I don't think these two are
| writing the code for GitButler tbh. Anyhow, main point still
| stands: git is used by millions with no venture capital
| funding.
| grugdev42 wrote:
| No. Just no.
|
| Leave Git alone.
| znnajdla wrote:
| 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.
| foxglacier wrote:
| 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.
| OtomotO wrote:
| Back then the landscape was a different one.
|
| 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...
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| > For every unicorn there are tens of thousands or even
| hundreds of thousands dead horses...
|
| Nicely put!
| OtomotO wrote:
| And it was 100% natural (un)intelligence. No "AI"
| involved! :)
|
| So thanks, I take this compliment. You just made my day!
| foxglacier wrote:
| There are dead horses and unicorns, which turns out to be
| better than just living horses and no unicorns like Ukraine
| and Europe are more like.
| OtomotO wrote:
| 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.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| 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).
| OtomotO wrote:
| 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)
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Long wait times are increasingly also a major problem in US
| healthcare, so I'm inclined to believe that the root causes
| behind wait time problems aren't related to public vs
| private insurance systems.
| heeton wrote:
| It's not 17m for an idea to improve git.
|
| 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.
| Orygin wrote:
| So it's gambling that they can extract money from open source
| project, by repackaging most of the existing features through
| a nice UX and hope business gamble their tech stack on it.
|
| Great use of 17 million dollars.
| heeton wrote:
| I wouldn't say "buying software that saves us time" is
| gambling, but you do you.
| siquick wrote:
| It's just gambling without the stigma of being called an
| addict.
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| 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.
| znnajdla wrote:
| Oklo's Aurora was budgeted at around $10 million to build,
| with about $3 million/year to operate
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The worst part about what I see here is the inequity or
| imbalance of what we're seeing about where money gets
| allocated, and the material effects of what that inequity
| brings about. It's not "I have a good idea and a great team"
| it's "I am X, or know Y" and... ugh.
|
| There's gobs of amazing technology being built by people who
| just love to build, have great ideas, and huge talent (now
| exponentially compounded by LLM assistance, even) -- and 99% of
| it is ignored by people with $$ and none of them will be paid
| to work on these things -- let alone get funded to build a
| business around them -- and the reason isn't the inadequacy of
| the technology or "lack of a workable business plan": it's lack
| of social connections or pedigree.
|
| And what this tells me is two things
|
| 1. there's a fundamentally sickness to the VC culture coming
| out of Silicon Valley and it's gotten _worse_ not better with
| the new restraints in the post-ZIRP era. It 's an echo chamber
| and a social circle, not a means for creating new profitable
| companies or good infrastructure, and it serves mainly just to
| feed a pipeline of acquisitions into much bigger fish rather
| than building tomorrow's new businesses or ideas. This is very
| different from 80s, 90s tech culture that I grew up in.
|
| 2. there's clearly a desperate need for more actual
| _incubators_ or labs for actual _technology_ , paying people to
| build "good stuff" independent of the vagaries of what VCs and
| their ivy league friends are able to pitch.
|
| Frankly: The $$ out there in heavy circulation has been mostly
| corrosive, not helpful.
| Geniuzz wrote:
| I don't understand the negative sentiment here.
|
| What's the problem?
|
| Do you think less money should be going into VC?
|
| Just some numbers ~1.5M housing units are built in the US with
| an approx cost of $300k - $400k. That is $450B to $600B going
| into housing units construction every year.
|
| On the other hand VC has maybe $1T AUM in the US. Maybe 10%-20%
| of that is deployed every year? So $100b to $200B.
|
| What is wrong with that ratio? Could there be better solutions
| to make more housing cheaper? (lower regulations, efficient
| permitting, etc)
|
| Money moving from VC to housing seems without a first
| principled approach on what problem your solving and how is
| silly.
| znnajdla wrote:
| The problem is they're pouring insane amounts of money into
| non-problems. I use Git every day. There's no problem with
| Git. Real problems that people suffer with everyday like
| healthcare and housing and even defense are doing so
| pitifully and we're spending $17M on improving Git? If you
| don't see the ridiculousness you really are in a bubble.
| factorialboy wrote:
| 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.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| So they decided to start "embrace, extend, and extinguish"
| directly with with "extinguish".
| schacon wrote:
| Just to clarify (and we do say this when you run `but setup`),
| the `pre-commit` hook is needed because of the way that we
| manage commits - we allow for multiple parallel applied
| branches, which Git cannot do. The way we accomplish this is to
| maintain a hidden 'megamerge' commit (as JJ would say). All Git
| commands work fine the way we're doing it except 'git commit',
| which is not aware of our operating model and will commit on
| top of our megamerge, which is problematic. So we install pre-
| commit to protect against getting yourself in a poor situation
| by using both Git and GitButler interchangeably.
|
| It's not difficult to "escape" - using `git checkout` will tear
| everything down properly - that's the only task of the `post-
| checkout` - to determine that you want to go back to using
| vanilla git commit tooling and remove our shims.
|
| We also don't have a prepare-commit-msg hook - our commit
| tooling will inject an extra Change-Id header (of the same
| format and interchangeable with Jujutsu) but that affects
| nothing that vanilla git cares about.
| factorialboy wrote:
| All I did was install GitButler via my OS's package manager,
| and open a local repo via the GUI.
|
| And I saw these malicious (pre-commit) git hooks installed by
| GitButler, without any confirmation, or prompt seeking my
| approval.
|
| I'm sure you folks will come up with a "technical
| explanation" or some "legal-marketing language" to cover up
| for this -- but in my book -- redirect `git commit` to `but
| commit` is dishonest and unethical.
| yard2010 wrote:
| You keep using the word malicious, what do you mean? What
| is the malice?
| anentropic wrote:
| Yeah it feels malicious if it doesn't tell you it's going
| to do that, like a sneaky lock-in
| ing33k wrote:
| this is bad developer UX ( in my opinion). Please reconsider
| . I lost interest the moment I was not able to commit using
| normal git commands. [?] Error: Exit code 1
| GITBUTLER_ERROR: Cannot commit directly to
| gitbutler/workspace branch. GitButler manages
| commits on this branch. Please use GitButler to commit your
| changes: - Use the GitButler app to create commits
| - Or run 'but commit' from the command line If
| you want to exit GitButler mode and use normal git:
| - Run 'but teardown' to switch to a regular branch
| ... +5 lines (ctrl+o to see all)
|
| but was not installed ( I installed the mac app ) .
|
| I still haven't uninstalled the app and will try to figure
| out the working model.
|
| Also please offer some skill file or a text I can add to my
| CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md so that when I ask claude to commit ,
| it will go through gitbutler...( edit: looks like it is
| there, but the discovery is hard ) .
| videlov wrote:
| We will remove the hook constraint as soon as we complete
| this https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/gitbutler/issues/11866
|
| For the Claude question, the CLI ships a skill, set it up
| with `but skill install`.
|
| I hope this helps
| danpalmer wrote:
| jj is what comes after 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.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| TL;DR we decided git needs more "ai" and we got money thrown at
| us!
| latexr wrote:
| > 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.
| schacon wrote:
| Ah, I see. You missed the part where that was funny.
| hanwenn wrote:
| Is anyone from GitButler reading this?
|
| 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?
| ojura wrote:
| Mmmh. git is perfect as it is. It does one thing and does it
| really well: version control. Exact bits that go in come out. And
| it reconciles different versions and handles transferring them to
| remotes.
|
| The need for exactly this is not ever going away, and its
| ubiquity proves that Linus nailed something that is truly
| fundamental.
|
| This is like saying we need a new alphabet because of AI. That is
| VC hype, even if it comes from a Github founder.
| tankenmate wrote:
| As long as this tool doesn't break "fast forward merge" and
| proper linear history and allows you do delete PRs unlike its
| GitHub progenitor then I'm happy.
|
| I have found that a number of times GitHub's idea of "convenient"
| comes either from 1) not understanding git fundamentals such that
| it closes off possible workflows, or 2) pushing a philosophy on
| users, i.e. I know better than you, so I'm going to block you.
| red_admiral wrote:
| I'm still not convinced we need a replacement for git.
|
| > The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one
| linear flow.
|
| Um, there's more than one flow out there? Feature branches are
| usually "one person, lots of branches, squish at the end". Since
| when is Git linear? Some of them even come with their own scripts
| or GUIs.
|
| I'm even less convinced that something that's raised $17M already
| will provide a free-as-in-beer solution.
| kshri24 wrote:
| Great! Instead of solving actual problems we are seeing funding
| for stuff we don't need.
| dhruv3006 wrote:
| Github fallout effect?
| rohitpaulk wrote:
| Most of the comments here are clearly from people who haven't
| used GitButler. Try it out and it's a very sticky product,
| clearly superior workflow to vanilla Git.
| jumploops wrote:
| I don't know about a new Git, but GitHub feels like the cruftiest
| part of agentic coding.
|
| The Github PR flow is second nature to me, almost soothing.
|
| But it's also entirely unnecessary and sometimes even limiting to
| the agent.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| "We are going to spend $17M and have nothing to show for it"
| mhh__ wrote:
| Improving something that basically everyone uses is obviously
| worth money
| secondcoming wrote:
| > Imaging being able to work on a branch stacked on a coworkers
| branch while you're both constantly modifying them
|
| I think that's something I don't want to imagine
| maxehmookau wrote:
| Ok, ok, if you give me $16M I'll do it faster.
| weedhopper wrote:
| The amount of ~skepticism~ hate is astounding here!! People don't
| even acknowledge that it's written in RUST!!!!
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| The lesson is quite simple... don't over promise in the title.
| momocowcow wrote:
| Blog post written by llm.
|
| No thanks.
|
| Was their series A pitch also written by llm?
| schacon wrote:
| I would like to take this opportunity to kindly inform you that
| I wrote that post, as I write all of the blog posts on our blog
| (and everywhere else I write). You will never see something
| with my name on it that was written by AI. Thanks.
| qwery wrote:
| First off, I'm of course interested to see what the future
| infrastructure of software building next looks like.
|
| > The hard problem is not generating change, it's organizing,
| reviewing, and integrating change without creating chaos.
|
| Sure, writing _some_ code isn 't the bottleneck. Glossed over is
| the part where the developer determines _what changes to make_ ,
| which in my experience is the most significant cost during
| development and it dwarfs anything to do with version control.
| You can spend a lot of energy on the organising, reviewing,
| patching, etc. stuff -- and you should be doing some amount of
| this, in most situations -- but if you're spending more of your
| development budget on metaprojects than you think you should be,
| I don't think optimising the metatooling is going to magically
| resolve that. Address the organisational issues first.
|
| > This is what we're doing at GitButler, this is why we've raised
| the funding to help build all of this, faster.
|
| The time constraint ("faster") is, of course, entirely self-
| imposed for business reasons. There's no reason to expect that
| 'high cost + high speed' is the best or even a good way to build
| this sort of tooling, or anything else, for that matter.
|
| Git's UI has become increasingly friendly over a very long time
| of gradual improvements. Yes, Mercurial was pretty much ideal out
| of the gate, but the development process in that case was (AFAIK)
| a world away from burning money and rushing to the finish.
|
| Maybe going slow is better?
| 0xy4sh wrote:
| Makes sense. Git solved versioning, not collaboration at scale.
| Most real pain today is juggling context across PRs, tools, and
| now agents not writing code.
| hotgeart wrote:
| Git just works. If you're not really familiar with it, you can
| use a free UI. If you don't know anything about it, AI like
| ChatGPT or Claude can help you commit or even teach you Git.
|
| If you raise money for this project, you probably intend to make
| money in the near future. I don't think anyone here wants ads on
| Git or to argue with a manager to get the premium version of
| GitButler just because you reached the commit limit.
|
| These $17M should go to the Git maintainers.
| nacozarina wrote:
| Is $17M private equity enough to poison the initiative? Or is
| software-by-committee still the real project killer? Let's find
| out...
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| X is hard to use because when something goes wrong you need to
| have a deep knowledge to figure it out! Let's build Y on top of X
| to make this easy! Now you just need to have deep knowledge of
| both Y and X to figure problems out. And it's gonna cost $17M to
| build Y. Deal?
| gcr wrote:
| jj is rapidly becoming the new standard for post-git VCS in my
| circles. I'd love to see more startups working on that.
| treeblah wrote:
| Claims about "what comes after git" aside, I really like the idea
| of virtual branches. Worktrees have a pitfall IMO that they don't
| allow you to test changes in a running local env, meaning I need
| to commit the changes, close the worktree, and checkout the
| branch on my primary workspace to verify.
|
| Gitbutler virtual branches OTOH appear to provide branch
| independence for agents/commits, while simultaneously allowing me
| to locally verify all branches together in a single local env.
| This seems quite a bit nicer than checking out worktree branches
| in the primary workspace for verification, or trying to re-run
| local setup in each worktree.
| mblode wrote:
| I created a cli called spotlight-testing to solve this pitfall
| with worktrees. I hope it helps!
| https://github.com/mblode/spotlight-testing
| hansmayer wrote:
| "Gitbutler", really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it :) Oh and
| the irony of raising $17M to "replace" a tool which kinda...does
| not need replacing at all? How about replacing some of the
| entshittified services, like Google Workspace? Now that would be
| worth the $17M raised.
| mort96 wrote:
| What "comes after Git" is not a proprietary solution developed by
| a VC-backed company.
| itsfridaythen wrote:
| The title is misleading, it's not a git replacement
| itsfridaythen wrote:
| The title is misleading and click bait perhaps.
|
| But you also get an idea of the average reading skill of people
| based on the top 3 comments: "I don't want a replacement for
| Git!"
|
| I'm not blaming anyone, or maybe both the readers and the
| authors.
|
| People now write something that could've been published as a
| short story 30 years ago, for something that could be a paragraph
| in length, detailing their emotional state, minute background
| information, their hopes and dreams.
|
| The adaptive response to this by humans and society is to read
| the headline and ignore the prose, as the prose is so god damn
| long.
|
| "Gitbutler is a UI for Git" would've been more suitable than hype
| about replacing git.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| First time I heard of gitbutler, is this like gitk? If anyone
| remembers gitk
| myst wrote:
| Bros wanted to work on dev tools. They sold it to VCs as "AI
| tools" to get easy money. Well played!
| csmantle wrote:
| I failed to see why this would be something that "comes after
| Git" from a VCS perspective.
|
| The line-based diff(1)/diff3(1)/patch(1) kit often works, and
| that mindset thrives and gets carried till today. Many toolkits
| and utilities have been designed to make it more ergonomic, and
| they are good. Jujutsu is an example. We also have different
| theories and implementations, some even more algebraically sound
| like Darcs and Pijul.
|
| But GitHub the Platform is another story, given that they
| struggled to achieve 90% availability these days.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| Git isn't that old. I find it interesting people want to replace
| it by big money. Does this say something about the quality of
| git? Enough people also complain about that.
|
| I'm reminded of a comedy album, "The First Family", from the
| 1960s where Bobby Kennedy impersonator wanted to form a new
| political party. He named it something like "Major Affiliate For
| an Independent America" (I might have that wrong.) Or the M-A-F-
| I-A.
|
| He said their first order of business was to change the name of
| the organization.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwu8S6Ekx9w
|
| EDIT: I'm not positive that's the correct album but have a good
| laugh anyway.
| michaelashley29 wrote:
| I feel like we're over-capitalizing a problem that could be
| solved with better protocols. If the "Git successor" is just a
| wrapper to help agents not hallucinate their own worktrees, it
| feels like a very expensive solution to a context-window
| management problem.
| rainmaking wrote:
| I was thinking- why on earth raise 17M for that, it sounds like
| something you make in a basement with a few friends, if that.
|
| But then it's the github cofounder- well, github did add a lot of
| stuff onto git I didn't know I needed, so I'm curious.
| ggrab wrote:
| There's definitely a need for this, but the underlying reason
| there's a need for this is so beyond me. I've worked with a lot
| of Software Engineers over the years, even at FAANG, that didn't
| have a good technical understanding of git (basically, your repo
| is a tree structure, most commands are just about manipulating
| that tree in some way). I mean, just spend the hour to go through
| a git tutorial. There's so many great ones like the interactive
| one that shows the tree as you go through the levels. It's your
| profession. Also, I think another layer on top of Git as this
| seems to propose won't fix it -- once something non-obvious
| happens, these people continue to be stuck.
| hackrmn wrote:
| I started using Git around 2008, if memory serves. I have made
| myself more than familiar with the data model and the "plumbing"
| layer as they call it, but it was only a year ago -- after more
| than two decades of using Git, in retrospect -- that a
| realisation started downing on me that most folks probably have a
| much easier time with Git than I do, _due_ to them not caring as
| much about how it works _or_ they just trust the porcelain layer
| and ignore how "the sausage is made". For me it was always
| either-or situation -- I still don't trust the high-level
| switches I discover trawling Git's manpages, unless I understand
| what the effect is on the _data_ (_my_ data). Conversely, I am
| very surgical with Git treating it as a RISC processor -- most
| often at the cost of development velocity, for that reason. It's
| started to bug me really bad as in my latest employment I am
| expected to commit things throughout the day, but my way of
| working just doesn't align with that it seems. I frequently
| switch context between features or even projects (unrelated to
| one another by Git), and when someone looks at me waiting for an
| answer why it takes half a day to create 5 commits I look back at
| them with the same puzzled look they give me. Neither of us is
| satisfied. I spend most of the development time _designing_ a
| feature, then I implement it and occasionally it proves to be a
| dead-end so everything needs to be scrapped or stashed "for
| parts", rinse, repeat. At the end of the road developing a
| feature I often end up with a bunch of unrelated changes --
| especially if it's a neglected code base, which isn't out of
| ordinary in my place of work unfortunately. The unrelated changes
| must be dealt with, so I am sitting there with diff hunks trying
| to decide which ones to include, occasionally resorting to hunk
| _editing_ even. There's a lot of stashing, too. Rebasing is the
| least of my problems, incidentally (someone said rebasing is hard
| on Git users), because I know what it is supposed to do (for me),
| so I deal with it head on and just reduce the whole thing to a
| series of simpler merge conflict resolution problems.
|
| But even with all the Git tooling under my belt, I seem to have
| all but concluded that Git's simplicity is its biggest strength
| but also not a small weakness. I wish I didn't have to account
| for the fact that Git stores snapshots (trees), after all --
| _not_ patch-files it shows or differences between the former.
| Rebasing creates copies or near-copies and it's impossible to
| isolate features from the timeline their development intertwines
| with. Changes in Git aren't commutative, so when my human brain
| naively things I could "pick" features A, B, and C for my next
| release, ideally with bugfixes D, E and F too, Git just wants me
| a single commit, except that the features and/or bugfixes may not
| all neatly lie along a single shared ancestral stem, so either
| merging is non-trivial (divergence of content compounded with
| time) or I solve it by assembling the tree _manually_ and using
| `git commit-tree` to just not have to deal with the more esoteric
| merge strategies. All these things _do_ tell me there is
| something "beyond Git" but it's just intuition, so maybe I am
| just stupid (or too stupid for Git)?
|
| I started looking at [Pijul](https://pijul.org/) a while ago, but
| I feel like a weirdo who found a weird thing noone is ever going
| to adopt because it's well, weird. I thought relying on a "theory
| of patches" was more aligned with how I thought a VCS may
| represent a software project in time, but I also haven't gotten
| far with Pijul yet. It's just that somewhere between Git and
| Pijul, somewhere there is my desired to find a better VCS [than
| Git], and I suspect I am not the only one -- hence the point of
| the article, I guess.
| dirtbag__dad wrote:
| I watched the demo video on the git butler home page and agree
| with the premises that:
|
| 1. git is not going away 2. git UX is not great
|
| So i appreciate their effort to manage development better as
| agents make it possible to churn out multiple features and
| refactors at once.
|
| BUT, I reject this premise:
|
| 3. Humans will review the code
|
| As agents make it possible to do so much more code (even tens of
| files sucks to review, even if it's broken into tiny PRs), I
| don't want to be the gatekeeper at the code review level.
|
| I'd rather some sort of policy or governance tooling that bullies
| code to follow patterns I've approved, and force QA to a higher
| abstraction or downstream moment (tests?)
| secstate wrote:
| I also concluded based on the video:
|
| 4. GitButler is a terrible name for this
|
| 5. No one will use the "but" command over "git"
|
| 6. The founder needs to learn to enunciate the name of his new
| product better
|
| And also, your central premise is exactly right. The solution
| to agents and humans working faster will not be better manual
| oversight of what they're doing. It's like missing the most
| important principle of agentic development. Supervise, don't
| gatekeep.
| dboreham wrote:
| $17M doesn't seem like enough for this. Perhaps for a prototype.
| internet_points wrote:
| Jumping on the bandwagon, Magit is raising $$$ to Keep Version
| Control Magical https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/5555
| dbvn wrote:
| Nothing needs to come after git. its perfect.
| ipsento606 wrote:
| I'm trying to estimate how much better than git a new system
| would have to be to convince me to abandon git and learn the new
| system
|
| I don't know the answer, but I think it could easily be three
| times as good and I would still stick with git
| alper wrote:
| A lot of blood in the water for Github.
| exe34 wrote:
| You could have given Linus the weekend off.
| sourcegrift wrote:
| I like pijul's mental model much more but it's a single developer
| who's slightly prone to getting sidetracked.
| bullen wrote:
| Meanwhile CVS just keeps working fine...
| modernerd wrote:
| For a long time I couldn't decide if Git Butler was a real
| product or a very elaborate joke to get devs to type "but rub"
| into their terminal.
|
| https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/rubbing
|
| I like their vision, though, this is compelling to me:
|
| > What if it was easier to for a team to work together than it is
| to work alone?
|
| It generally _is_ easier to work alone with git. UI and DX
| experiments feel worthwhile. lazygit and Magit are both widely
| used and loved, for example, but largely focus on the single user
| experience.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| How much money did they need to raise to make git?
| joshribakoff wrote:
| "raise 17m to try to kill off and extract value from popular open
| source tool"
|
| Pound foolish and folly
| hakube wrote:
| That money could've gone to something useful instead of building
| "git but better"
| goatking wrote:
| I looked at the demonstration video and closed it after a couple
| of minutes. I don't see how this tool will replace git.
|
| Well, I think it won't
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I really, genuinely, do not want a replacement for git developed
| by a company that raised money to build it, since it will
| inevitably be a walled garden of one kind or another that
| enshittifies as it tries to make the money back. Git is fine and
| there is one thing no VC funded effort can get: freedom from the
| vampires.
|
| Like all I see here is "We want to build a fence around git and
| then charge you to go through it." I mean this as kindly as I can
| mean it: no thank you.
| schacon wrote:
| Hey, this is Scott - the guy in the photo who wrote this post.
| AMA.
| nickgreg wrote:
| I've been using gitbutler since 09/24. It was the first git GUI
| I preferred over the command line. Being able to separate local
| changes into separate branches, drag missed changes into a past
| commit, etc. made tidy development so much easier. It is a
| great tool and the hate here is wild. However, I find it less
| useful when agents code for me. The surgical changes GitButler
| made so easy became less relevant as agents touch so many files
| at once. Have you found the same? Whats your vision for how
| GitButler will make agentic coding better in the way it did
| human coding? Does it move away from the UI you have now to
| something else? Does the UI get relegated and it becomes a tool
| the agent controls? (I liked the agent integration but it
| didn't feel like an improvement over using codex/CC so I went
| back to using them directly)
| troyvit wrote:
| Huh. I look at what it took to build Git to begin with[1] and
| have to wonder if the thing that comes after it is really going
| to be _that much_ better. Git came about because there was a need
| for it. I feel like GitButler came about because there was a need
| for funding. Maybe I just need to have my coffee before
| commenting.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History
| schacon wrote:
| I'm trying not to comment on too many of these, but this one is
| interestingly wrong to me, so why not indeed?
|
| GitButler came about many years ago because I have been using
| Git for almost the full 20 years of it being around and I
| thought there could be a better way to do the things it's
| trying to solve for us. I want version control to do more for
| us, easier, faster and smarter. Git is still pretty dumb. Plus,
| now, everything in the dev workflow is changing - it's an
| interesting problem to think about what a _great_ toolset for
| how we'll all soon be developing software will be.
|
| As a _single_ example - agents can't use interactive editors,
| yet _so many_ of the powerful parts of Git absolutely _require_
| it. Agents can't interactively rebase, meaning they can't very
| effectively squash, amend, reword, reorder, absorb. They can't
| very easily interactively add. They are middling at best when
| it comes to stacking branches. Git is designed to send patches
| over email and agents are not concerned with that.
|
| I would love to debate all of the lessons learned about the
| history of Git, but I was around for all of that. I know why
| Git was started, I know what it was meant to do, I understand
| how it's evolved. I still think there are a lot of interesting
| things that we could have in our change control tooling and Git
| is not the perfect solution.
|
| Nearly everyone in this thread suffers from the same basic
| local maxima blindness that you do. Git is great, GitHub made
| it more valuable. But maybe the answer to the papercuts we've
| constantly been dealing with for decades isn't faster horses.
| (To, you know, mix metaphors)
| troyvit wrote:
| I bet I should've had that coffee first :)
|
| You use git at a level beyond mine; I've been fumbling with
| it for maybe 2/3 of the time you've been actually using it,
| so I appreciate you even taking the time to respond.
|
| I think what gets me is that according to the article,
| GitButler is designed "for the GitHub Flow style" of
| development. git isn't limited to one flow, why should its
| successor be? Git didn't need $17M funding (and the strings
| that come attached to that) to change the world. Why should
| its successor?
|
| But yeah I should've had that coffee first, so thanks for the
| respectful push-back and I hope the rest of the community
| appreciates it.
| dwoldrich wrote:
| There does seem to be a lot of jaded pessimism this morning
| (buck up, fellas!)
|
| I watched a bit of the gitbutler video and I liked the ideas,
| multiple/stacked branches. It felt like a genuine/natural
| extension of git concepts.
|
| Sortof like Typescript vs JavaScript, I worry that the payoff
| of adopting something like Gitbutler would require navigating
| a lot of janky integrations with the rest of my tooling and
| training of the team.
|
| I myself have always resisted mastering the git command line
| because JetBrains' git tooling is so nice, and abstracts just
| the right bits that I haven't had the need. I'm not opposed
| to switching to command line, but that 3-way git merge tool
| that JetBrains has is so good and I'd hate to lose it.
|
| Honestly, I predict the world and its networks and developers
| are going to start cloistering and close themselves off as
| the AI training panopticon is getting nasty.
|
| It would be great for Gitbutler to abstract true
| decentralized version control by offering decentralized/self-
| hosted feature parity with GitHub and remove vendors like
| them from the picture. I'd pay recurring seat licenses for
| something turnkey that I could run privately and securely.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Why is GitButler still using Git if Git is the problem?
|
| > As a _single_ example - agents can't use interactive
| editors, yet _so many_ of the powerful parts of Git
| absolutely _require_ it. Agents can't interactively rebase,
| meaning they can't very effectively squash, amend, reword,
| reorder, absorb. They can't very easily interactively add.
| They are middling at best when it comes to stacking branches.
| Git is designed to send patches over email and agents are not
| concerned with that.
|
| Why aren't these just patches to Git itself? Or a fork of
| Git. You're layering tooling on top instead of fixing the
| foundations? You say stop layering? But you're clearly still
| using Git because you're calling it _Git_ Butler. You're
| another layer, like jj and like GitHub's UI.
| schacon wrote:
| Git is awesome in lots of ways. As a data storage layer and
| as a transport protocol, it's pretty great. The porcelain
| was built for a different era and is slow to adapt.
| Originally, Git was meant to just be these primitives and
| everyone was supposed to write their own "porcelain" or SCM
| on top. We're doing that and then some - creating new
| standards for more metadata, real time communications,
| built in review, etc. If anything, we're going back to the
| original point of git and doing what Linus wanted other
| people to do in the first place - write a good SCM for
| their workflows on top of the foundation he started.
| geooff_ wrote:
| LLMs have solved the Git problem without any need for other
| tooling. There is no learning curve anymore. You don't need to
| know any commands or even look at the CLI. You can explain in
| plain text what you're trying to do.
| thcipriani wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Today, with English, we're all teaching swarms of agents to use a
| language built from scraps of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon Old
| English. That's far from what is needed today.
| permalaise wrote:
| Doesn't jj basically do all this and more?
| purpleidea wrote:
| This will just force them to build in some sort of revenue
| extraction model. Pass! Git and copyleft are fine as is.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > Proprietary git wrapper with pay-to-play "enterprise" gating
|
| Oh boy. Thanks for the nightmares.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| No CLI installer for Windows.
|
| App itself for Windows won't proceed past my selected repo. Said
| something about bad permissions, but I use that repo every day.
| utilize1808 wrote:
| Nowadays I just ask my LLM butler to "organize outstanding
| changes into coherent commits". No new software needed.
| wayeq wrote:
| 'Stacked PRs' are back on the menu with Claude, because
| changing something in PR1 isn't a massive time sync to get
| PR2-5 back in shape, as Claude can usually handle all of that
| for me.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I love how whole article described none of the ideas they have
| for product, just buzzwords
| timmytokyo wrote:
| It's certainly a _choice_ to lead with the funding and a photo
| with a venture capitalist.
| bitbasher wrote:
| Real question--- why does one of the GitHub co-founders need to
| raise 17M for a venture? I'm certain they could fund it
| themselves. Is this more or less a marketing play than anything
| else?
| love2read wrote:
| Why do rich people raise money when they already have money?
|
| 1) because they can
|
| 2) it's their money, not company money, and again, why would
| you risk your own money when someone else wants to risk their
| money?
| estimator7292 wrote:
| So that when the venture inevitably fails, VCs are the ones
| that lose money and the founders get a nice exit.
| andiareso wrote:
| Jesus this website is overstimulating and it's extremely
| difficult to understand. What the hell they are selling other
| than a UI on top of Git? Git works perfectly fine especially if
| you take an hour or two to learn how to do a few more complicated
| but useful workflows (rebasing, cherry-picking).
| itsderek23 wrote:
| How I'm using git/Github has changed with agentic coding.
| However, I'm not using swarms of agents to write code, so it's
| bit hard for me to decipher the JTBD of gitbutler.
|
| Another take I've seen is https://agentrepo.com/, which is light-
| weighted hosted git that's easy for agents to use (no accounts,
| no API keys, public repos are free). There are large parts of the
| GitHub experience I'm no longer using (mostly driving from
| Claude), so I think this is an interesting take.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I wonder what the development of git itself has cost in engineer
| time? Presumably more than $17 million? Assuming a fully loaded
| engineer is 250k, that only amounts to 68 engineer-years over 20
| calendar years, which seems low.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Imagine your version control tool taking what you've worked on
| and helping you craft logical, beautiful changes with proper
| context
|
| This is actually really important/useful, it's just not apparent
| to people who haven't worked on AI agents.
|
| AI agents do a lot of work under the hood to try to save your
| tokens. There are two basic methods: 1) semantic knowledge maps,
| 2) PageRank. Agents like Aider will build a semantic knowledge
| graph of your codebase - the files in it, the functions,
| variables, etc - so that it can tell the agent exactly where
| everything is in a tiny summary. It'll also then use PageRank to
| build a graphed rank of these things, to surface the most
| relevant items first.
| (https://aider.chat/2023/10/22/repomap.html)
|
| A modern VCS could do all of these things for you too, and the
| result should be making it easier to work with code, pulling in
| the related context simultaneously, so your changes make sense.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| From their docs:
|
| > We are creating not only a new kind of Git client,
|
| Nope, not going to be the tool of the future.
|
| The fundamental problem is it is still based on git.
|
| Till this addresses submodules and makes them a first class
| citizen it's just tooling on top of a VCS that still ONLY
| supports single project thinking.
| trashb wrote:
| > The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one
| linear flow. Not only has the problem not been solved well for
| that old model, it's now only been compounded with our new AI
| tools.
|
| A bit of a strange thing to say in my book. Git isn't SVN and I
| think these problems are already solved with git. I agree that
| the interface is not always very intuitive but Git has the
| infrastructure which is very much focused on supporting
| alternatives to "one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear
| flow".
|
| > the problem that Git has solved for the last 20 years is
| overdue for a redesign.
|
| To me it's not clear what the problem is that would require a
| redesign.
| MidnightRider39 wrote:
| The problem is how to make money from something that is more or
| less solved.
| mervz wrote:
| Yep, something that is sadly becoming more and more common.
| People with solutions spending insane money trying to
| convince others that a problem exists.
| luqtas wrote:
| have you heard startups
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| The beauty of it all is one doesn't even have to invent a
| solution... they only have to invent a "problem" to be
| pitched for VC funding.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| It's not solved because it's trash. There's no good interface
| for it and people find it difficult to use.
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| Skill issue. It's the most popular VCS in the world by a
| huge margin, millions of devs use it every day just fine,
| countless forges have been built around it, and there's
| only one semi-compelling alternative frontend (jj). If you
| honestly find Git challenging, how are you coping with
| software engineering? Git is the easy part.
| sethev wrote:
| More power to them for re-visiting this, but agree with you:
|
| > The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal,
| one linear flow.
|
| That sounds exactly like the pre-git model that git solved..
| convolvatron wrote:
| I've always wanted a kind of broader and more integrated
| approach that isn't just about text diffs. the ability to link
| in substantial comments that would be displayed optionally and
| not piss off linear readers. links to design and reference
| documents. bugs and prs that were persistent and linked to the
| versioned code instead of being ephemeral.
|
| think about all of the discussion we have around the code that
| gets lost. we certainly have the ability to keep and link all
| that stuff now. we don't really need to have arguments about
| squashing or not, we can just keep the fine grained commits if
| you really want to dig into them and maybe ask that people
| write a comprehensive summary of the changes in a patch set -in
| addition-.
|
| but I guess none of that has anythig to do with AI
| da_chicken wrote:
| > To me it's not clear what the problem is that would require a
| redesign.
|
| The interface is still bad. Teaching people to use git is still
| obnoxious because it's _arcane_. It 's like 1e AD&D. It does
| everything it might need to, but it feels like every aspect of
| it is bespoke.
|
| It's also relatively difficult to make certain corrections. Did
| you ever accidentally commit something that contains a secret
| that can't be in the repository? Well, you might want to _throw
| that entire repository away_ and restore it from a backup
| before the offending commit because it 's so difficult to fix
| and guarantee that it's not hiding in there somewhere and while
| also not breaking something else.
|
| It's also taken _over 10 years_ to address the SHA-1
| limitation, and it 's still not complete. It's a little
| astonishing that it was written so focused on SHA-1 never being
| a problem that it's taken this long to keep the same basic
| design and just allow a _different_ hashing algorithm.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| > Well, you might want to throw that entire repository away
| and restore it from a backup before the offending commit
| because it's so difficult to fix and guarantee that it's not
| hiding in there somewhere and while also not breaking
| something else.
|
| I'm not a git expert but I cant image that's true
| _3u10 wrote:
| It's not you just need to force push or generate a new
| key...
| gtowey wrote:
| The interface can be independent of the implementation. Under
| the hood git does everything you need. If learning to use it
| at a low level isnt appealing, then you can put an interface
| on top which is more ergonomic.
| ruszki wrote:
| > Did you ever accidentally commit something that contains a
| secret that can't be in the repository?
|
| What do I need to do on top of a git force push, and some
| well documented remote reflog/gc cleanup, which I can't find
| with a single search/LLM request? Are we there, where we
| don't have enough developers who can do this without feeling
| it as a burden? Or are we there where this level of basic
| logic is not needed to implement anything production ready?
| jayd16 wrote:
| Seems fine I guess. I'm not a fan of Perforce but it does have
| some features that git still struggles with and needs to address
| to break into new customers. This Gitbutler seems to address some
| of them but I can't say it really feels next gen.
|
| I like the idea of parallel branches. I feel like you could
| probably get away with just creating multiple, named stages but
| having a full history is nice. P4 has multiple pending CLs and it
| works nicely enough. This sounds a bit better so that's cool.
|
| As far as "social coding" git's design is really at odds with any
| sort of real time communication. I would love to see a first
| class support for file locking, and file status work flows. It's
| not big at all in code dev because code can be merged but for
| non-coders, source controlled assets are often not mergeable. To
| solve this, P4 is often used with heavily integrated tools that
| provide live file status (Locked, out of date, edited by others).
| This way merge conflicts are prevented at author time. Git is
| really lacking here. Is fetching constantly really the best we
| can do?
|
| Then of course... can we get some large file and partial checkout
| workflows that don't feel good?
| devin wrote:
| Could you explain parallel branches vs what git offers today?
|
| If it's to enable multi-agent scenarios, don't worktrees (at
| least in the local sense) allow for this?
| jayd16 wrote:
| My understanding is parallel branches allow multiple
| changelists to be applied to a single workspace. eg you can
| have multiple WIP fix branches active in your feature branch
| workspace and not worry about polluting your feature branch
| with unrelated/duplicated commits.
|
| Worktrees are multiple workspaces, each in their own
| directory, sharing a single git repo. This is helpful because
| you reduce the overhead and the CLI command juggling for
| fully separate clones.
|
| I have no idea what approach is better for your multi-agent
| scenario.
| eximius wrote:
| Looks like almost as good as JJ but with VC money.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| The remaining lifetime of a technology is proportional to how
| long it has already existed.
|
| However good this new thing might be, however much better it
| might be than git - I don't like it's chances.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| If you're building on top Git, you're not really coming after it
| are you - you're coming as well as it.
|
| If you want to come AFTER Git... you need to not use Git.
| vadepaysa wrote:
| No shade on these guys, looks like a cool tool and I'll try it.
| However, I find myself doing large majority of my git operations
| using a an agent[1] or a TUI [2], and I rarely open a git
| interface. I can get everything done straight from the terminal.
|
| I guess I can overcome the "what if I cannot undo" anxiety.
|
| [1] https://getcook.dev [2] lazygit
| joostdevries wrote:
| Maybe the pitch is:
|
| git is distributed. Decentralised improvement. Local computers
| and their users make changes. These steps of local added value
| are then centrally combined into a shared timeline. A single
| product. During the improvement the locus of control is local.
| Which means it is hard to harvest the knowledge of this local
| knowledge and replace it. And it's hard to make local users serve
| the central AI.
|
| Not something you put in the public mission statement. Because
| you might get boycotts.
| qrbcards wrote:
| Genuinely curious about the collaboration model here. Git's
| biggest weakness isn't technical -- it's that merge conflicts are
| a social problem disguised as a technical one. Two people editing
| the same file usually means the ownership boundaries are wrong,
| not that the VCS is.
|
| What does "what comes after Git" look like for a two-person team
| vs. a 200-person org? The pain points are completely different.
| oytis wrote:
| How many millions were raised to build Git?
| Vampyre wrote:
| - leads with amount of money raised - mentions a16z - i use git
| every single day and have no idea what exactly the thing will do
|
| they aren't building something to help you, they're building
| something to trap you. even if it's free, does things you like,
| etc., do not use it. their end goal is to screw you
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| Seeing all of these investments in developer tooling projects
| makes me wonder/skeptical of what the next chapter of
| development looks like when the money spigot runs dry.
|
| I've not used this app, but I wonder how tooling like this
| truly competes against an open source community armed with AI.
| Like where is the moat here, really? I built a personal tool
| that does some of this with a basic Claude subscription over
| the course of a few weeks.
|
| Feels like vibe-coders are the real target market for something
| like this, but if it takes off, would not be that hard to clone
| as a FOSS app.
| bogwog wrote:
| > Feels like vibe-coders are the real target market for
| something like this,
|
| I think this is a potentially giant market: incurious people
| who don't know what they're doing, lack experience and
| wisdom, and are highly susceptible to empty marketing fluff.
| Selling junk to these people can't be very difficult,
| especially if they rely on an LLM (funded by many of the same
| investors) to explain it to them.
| jitl wrote:
| if the cli is open sources and ends up finished i don't see
| what the problem is to let a vc fund them building it
| jakeydus wrote:
| VCs are not particularly well known for their commitment to
| building products that they can't make money off of. They'll
| promise you the OSS world and then as soon as they can
| they'll pull the rug out from under you.
| mentalgear wrote:
| To paraphrase Microslop's "Embrace, extend ... build a
| walled garden around."
| blipvert wrote:
| "enclose"?
| nomel wrote:
| If they release the code with a permissive license, then
| this doesn't matter.
| MidnightRider39 wrote:
| The problem is that they need to find some way to not only
| make the money back but multiply it. That's where the "you're
| getting screwed" comes into play - we don't know yet how they
| will screw us, but it's gonna happen
| atq2119 wrote:
| The problem is in your premise: Software usually does not end
| up finished.
| lispisok wrote:
| They dont want to build the next git they want to build the
| next Github. It will have one of those licenses where you can
| use it but not offer a managed service like the Elastic License
| prepend wrote:
| I thought git didn't allow companies to use git in their name any
| more and grandfathered in girhub, gitlab, etc. How did this
| company get a trademark.
|
| Also, I don't think I would use this and the problems they
| describe aren't really things I care much about.
|
| I wish them the best, but $17m on a devtools company that thinks
| they are replacing git is going to be rough going.
| _blk wrote:
| Getting it is not the hard part. Keeping it in light of an
| adversarial, litigious contender is.
| srameshc wrote:
| I do not understand the problem solution, but if anything with
| git, I would want Codeberg style. I moved to gitlab and they were
| soldout and I am back on github slowly transitioning out. Common
| sentiment I believe is we want git, but on our own terms, not
| another VC funded project to move in.
| gverrilla wrote:
| no mentions of dura by nobody in the comments?
| PeterStuer wrote:
| The only thing I want is an as far as Claude Code can tell 100%
| Github clone running on my $5 Hetzner VPS.
| brockers wrote:
| Honest question. I love some of the additional capabilities and
| specifically the dependency commits, virtual branches, and JSON
| output...
|
| BUT why not just work with the git community to add this
| functionality? It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that needs
| to "replace" git, as opposed to "improve" git?
| philipov wrote:
| Unless one wishes to control the entire ecosystem rather than
| simply participate in it.
| jmount wrote:
| My only issue is the title. It appears they are building a
| replacement for GitHub of which a replacement for Git is just a
| component. Building a replacement for GitHub is going to need at
| least the sort of funding they are mentioning. So once one reads
| the article it makes a bit more sense.
| nine_k wrote:
| The tool that could replace git must free, ubiquitous, and
| arguably open-source. This is why I cannot imagine how raising
| $17M may pay for itself in that case, to say nothing of a 10x
| return.
|
| It may be a great tool, but I'd be _very_ reluctant to use a
| closed-source solution as a cornerstone of infrastructure.
| malicka wrote:
| I would argue it being proprietary would be completely
| unacceptable, for such a position of importance.
|
| In any case, Git has become tremendously entrenched over the
| past couple decades. Anything that hopes to replace it would
| have to be significantly better to break from the inertia Git
| has. I'm honestly skeptical as to whether this is even possible
| in the near future. We're not at all in the same historical
| moment as when SVN was beaten out.
| nine_k wrote:
| JJ has a good chance, because it builds on top of git, not
| replacing it abruptly.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| yeah, it used to be that things like Perforce could still
| exist, because when they were created, they could do things
| that their OSS equivalents could not.
|
| but since then, so many people have gotten used to the basic
| model that git offers (even if they still have issues with
| details of the syntax).
|
| to gain a foothold in this environment is a monumental task,
| and anything that wasn't unambiguously libre and probably
| gratis too has little hope.
| antod wrote:
| git's replacement won't be there because it was better at
| being what git is (too entrenched), but because git became
| redundant as the world changed around it. As agentic
| development takes over and people stop caring about source
| code, all the tooling (including languages themselves) and
| approaches to assist humans will be ripe for replacing with
| those for machines.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| Exactly. Big "generals always prepare to fight the last
| war" energy.
| wraptile wrote:
| I mean it worked out for Astral who made open python tooling
| and got acquired by openai1 maybe it's a new legit strategy now
|
| 1 - https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/
| chadrs wrote:
| surely you've witnessed the backlash to uv as a result though
| nine_k wrote:
| But uv is a (very-) nice-to-have tool, not the foundation.
|
| Also, uv is open source, and can be forked if the company
| behind it decides to close it (see Terraform - OpenTofu,
| etc).
| gervwyk wrote:
| please also build it for easy multimedia management
| knorker wrote:
| But... why? (pun intended)
|
| They raised $17M to build what appears to be solvable by some git
| wrapper scripts that could have been written by AI in 5 minutes?
|
| To me the extra "wat" about this is that if I spend the sub-$1 to
| get the git wrapper scripts, I can get them _exactly_ the way I
| want them, instead of being mandated to use the commands they
| made up. A huge gain for AI is the ability to have _exactly_ the
| software you personally want, even if nobody else wants it just
| so.
|
| So they are building the exact opposite of the need that AI
| brings forward. What they are building is not even median
| software that is in danger of being replaced (e.g. see Cloudflare
| spending a week to build "a wordpress"), but something that's the
| most extreme example of AI-will-replace-this that could possibly
| exist.
|
| Who will buy this?
|
| The only way this makes sense is as a plea for being acqui-hired
| (and the project dropped).
| Suffocate5100 wrote:
| Anything that leads off with how much money you've raised is
| automatically disqualifying.
| crabbone wrote:
| My impression from GitHub was always that it was nice to have
| someone else host Git repositories for free, and that the "added
| value" (the Web view, the user management, the CI, the Wiki) were
| all made by dilettantes: poor quality, mostly useless, never
| doing the right thing.
|
| These people seem to think that their "added value" was the
| selling point of their product... they appear to believe that
| some bad things are actually good and desirable, like, for
| example:
|
| > Heck, it could be argued that development in teams is less
| social than it was when version control was centralized.
|
| > But what if coding was actually social? What if it was easier
| to for a team to work together than it is to work alone?
|
| This reeks of open-space floor office plan all over again! When
| some HR managers decided that programmers need all to sit in the
| same room the size of a basketball court and that would somehow
| help them work together better...
|
| Programming is absolutely an individual activity first, where
| communication helps, but in order to be helpful the communicating
| parties have to have an initial internal process that refines the
| messages s.a. not to waste the other party's time. In practice,
| productive communication may happen once a day... up to once a
| week maybe? Maybe even less frequently? Git, as it is, is
| perfectly fine for this.
|
| > Ok, that's the simple case, pretty straightforward. However,
| GitButler can also do some pretty cool things that Git either
| cannot do or struggles with, namely:
|
| > Having multiple active branches that you can work on in
| parallel.
|
| I'll check out the same Git repository in different directories
| and will have this ability... maybe also add the second checkout
| as a remote to the first... but the number of times I've done it
| in two decades of working with Git is... maybe two? This is an
| extremely unusual need. I think, I've done this when migrating
| from multiple repositories into a monorepo and I had to somehow
| reorganize the history of multiple repositories so that it would
| make sense together. Definitely not a task for every day, not
| even every year.
|
| The whole follow-up demonstration of parallel branches is just...
| Why on earth would I ever want to do that? Why would I want to
| work in such a way that I commit changes to different branches at
| (roughly) the same time? It's kind of like stashing changes, but,
| stashing is the byproduct of "bad planning": I wanted to do one
| thing, and accidentally did another... oh well, let's save the
| change somewhere temporarily! But, ideally, I want this to happen
| as little as possible. Not because it's inconvenient to deal with
| stashed changes, but because I will very quickly lose track of
| what goes where, why any particular branch exists etc.
|
| Similarly, for the stacked branches: I absolutely don't want this
| functionality to exist... if it was already in Git, I'd request
| that it never be used. This complicates the mental model of what
| is even possible in the repository and creates some nightmare
| fuel scenarios: what happens if you stack them sequentially? What
| happens if you stack many branches on the same branch, and then
| want to rebase one of the stacked branches? What happens if you
| rebase the branch on which other branches are stacked? What
| happens if you delete the branch on which other branches are
| stacked? Does the stacked branch have to exist in the local
| checkout, or could it come from a remote?
|
| It's absolutely the case where simple is better (I'd never
| imagine I'd call Git simple, but here we are).
|
| I can't imagine what the workflow of people who want these
| changes must look like. I can't imagine why would anyone want to
| copy that kind of a workflow.
| rokob wrote:
| It's weird because I could see raising money on the premise that
| GitHub is garbage, not git. But then you can't say I co-founded
| GitHub as your bona fides.
| Scarblac wrote:
| The initial version of Git was written in two weeks, what do you
| need $17m for?
| CAP_NET_ADMIN wrote:
| "What comes after Git" _looks inside_
|
| Git CLI with flowers and unicorns.
|
| Is this what gets funded nowadays? I really hope for a gigantic
| mega crash of all the IT companies. This industry deserves it
| like none other.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I don't have to read the article to know that if it not just git
| with fixes and new features, it's not going to pan out. This is
| like building a new house because your current house needs a
| couple of leaks fixed and a coat of paint.
| wooptoo wrote:
| Those who don't understand git are bound to reinvent it. Git is
| fine as it is, with some porcelain and QoL improvements here and
| there. Some of the most capable devs I know use git + cgit for
| collaboration and they manage just fine.
| pojzon wrote:
| Real problem is how to cope with few billion of bots hammering
| APIs 24/7 saturating net cables, physical infrastructure and
| taking down platform with constant DDOS.
|
| Im curious when it will be "SO BAD" we start blocking every AI
| agent on firewall level.
| pedalpete wrote:
| If you are building for what comes after git, why name it git?
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