But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has roughly the same priority as “try out a more exciting shower gel”. But did you ever step on a LEGO brick while walking to the bathroom at night? That pain is immediately obvious.
Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
It reminds me how the Bohemian Club’s slogan, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is a bit farcical given that it is impossible for the club members not to engage in commerce.
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.
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.
Good ideas are a decent subset, but you could also have a bit of "Greater Fool Theory" compliant ideas.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Team matters. What other proxies are there?
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.
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.
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.
Index the many valued column, not the column with few discrete values.
Anyone have a solution for another annoying problem: 1 missing piece.
Somehow got lost halfway through the build.
Also, Lego will send you any missing pieces for free.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
People complaining about investors throwing stupid sums of money at stupid or trivial things unrelated (or only marginally related) to AI? ...sounds to me like the first glimpse of hope I have come across in this industry for half a decade.
> Today, with Git, we're all teaching swarms of agents to use a tool built for sending patches over mailing lists. That's far from what is needed today.
This video is from 8 years ago:
https://youtu.be/wXxrmussq4E?si=bgDdDvZODVov3sSC&t=15
I'm sure, by now we could make them for <$1k per robot, if we wanted to.
EDIT: BTW did you see that the page you linked to has this at the bottom of their landing page:
"Example product"
"This area is used to describe your product’s details. Tell customers about the look, feel, and style of your product. Add details on color, materials used, sizing, and where it was made."
so I wonder if they actually sell anything.
I'm not seeing it. When I search for "example" nothing comes up, but maybe I'm looking wrong.
I see it on Amazon as well, with reviews and videos from "customers", so I assume it's not vaporware and that is more an issue with people not filling out the full website template, which is also not a great sign.
https://www.amazon.com/Pick-Up-Bricks-Compatible-Accessories...
Perhaps you should have. Based on the link it seems like it's more an extension to than replacement for Git.
The page is mostly sort of fluffy AI hype, but the concrete bits are things like integrating issue tracking and PR logic in one tool/repo, like e.g. fossil does.
Also git proper could use some love too. The UI is still a mess. And the large file support and the submodule/subtree/subrepo situations are quite dismal.
> $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size.
Doing this robustly is probably quite far from robotics SOTA.
Neither of them is doing to be remotely prepared for what I'm going to do, which is actually replace Git.
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.
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.
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
Which lets you provide a "cover letter" (PR description), and formats each commit as a diff that can be quoted inline in an email reply for code review.
I would argue that it was purposefully designed in contrast against that model.
GitHub is full of git anti patterns.
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.
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.
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.
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.
GitHub is a social networking site that just so happens to have code hosting related features.
It's as much a social network/collaboration tool as it is place to store your code these days.
So the maintainer adds you as a remote and pulls from you.
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.
That said, if you ever decide solve the tidying the toys problem, start a kickstarter, I pledge to pledge support! :D
I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
Irony of thr market is, just like tinder 20% of the companies attract all the attention rest of them try to gran the attention. Those who need capital get the capital, those who need the capital die trying.
Enough friday pessimisim.
My previous employer was like this. A 20yo company with a nice always increasing ytoy growth. The CEO told for 20 years that he would never raise any money. It was an incredible place to work : nice compensation, product and consumer centered, we had time and means to do the right things.
Until the CEO changed his mind and raised money anyway. But we didn't have to fear anything because those investors were very different and not like the other greedy ones.
Well I'm not working there anymore for a hella lot of reasons that are just the same as everywhere else.
But at least the CEO who was already rich is now incredibly rich.
If you find a greedy VC then most likely they are real VC and often gets attracted when your business is not doing great.
Reputation travels in this industry therefore people care.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
This is the reason why I don't wish for VC investments if I do something preferably.
Also I feel like your comment is highly accurate, I feel like this narrative though can sometimes be the only thing that matters, something like a vibes based economy.
I don't like this so much because some idea's technical prowess is taken at the back seat while its the marketing which ends up mattering, like many other things, it feels like that tends towards something akin to influencer level marketing and its something that I sometimes personally dislike.
To be honest, the reason why I am seeing YC investments especially from say people my age 18-19, is that, it is becoming a point of flex for them and just a capitalization of hype that they might have. It really does feel like it to me that when we boil down people and interactions sometimes into how much money they have, we lead inevitably to societies like ours.
The network is something that I understand can be hard to make though. I do believe network plays a role and I do feel like I have bootstrapped my own network by just talking with people online and helping, but I do believe one issue in that, that particular network isn't my business market sadly, and I do feel unsure about how to network to them and so I would be curious if others face somewhat of an similar issue.
Flex often dont translate to value. I often say dont look at what others are doing, head down focus and execute. Raising capital is actually the starting point, i would say it is not an achievement.
I think anyone can network. You dont have to be sales person, you have the increase your probability to be in the right place at the right time.
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!
> 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.
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).
Per Matt Levine, the optimum amount of fraud is non-zero. Tune your detector too loosely or too tightly and you'll miss out.
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" :-).
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 $/€ 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.
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...
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.
You can do it with 0-3 digits of license cost too.
There's no sane way the business overhead more than doubles things.
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.
Not be tied to Microslop and migrated to Azure?
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.
"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."
Because that’s too risky for investors.
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.
Well, cofounding Github helps
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
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.
Missing socks (and containers or their lids) are still great unsolved problems in 2026. Solving this issue is like fusion, always 10 years away.
Why are we trying to replace git? What is the problem with git?
I fought for years trying to convince my colleagues to write good commit messages. Now Claude is writing great commit messages but since I'm no longer looking at code - I never see them. I don't think Claude uses them either.
Branches are now irrelevant since all agents work in worktrees by default. But worktrees are awkward since you run out of disk space fast (since we're in a monorepo).
There is a constant discussion ongoing whether we commit our plans or not. Some argue that the whole conversation leading up to the PR should be included (stupid imo).
The game changed completely. It isn't weird that people are wondering if the tools should as well.
Definitely feels like there's opportunity to build something better
What GP wrote sounds like an absolute nightmare of tech debt and unmaintainable spaghetti code that nobody understands anymore to me.
But I guess for some people the increased speed outweighs all other concerns?
"I'm not sure. But at least we got here fast."
I thought the consensus what that vibe coding is a bad idea and you're supposed to review whatever is machine-generated, however "good enough" you believe it to be.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toy-Storage-Organizer-Lego-Play/dp/...
They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".
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.
Solving actual problems are hard, and even harder to get money for (see research). Most VC’s are in it for the returns only, not actually making a change, there are some exceptions but they are far and few apart.
It doesn't solve the picking-up-off-the-floor problem.
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).
So, even though Git seems to be ok (people who store large binary files or who run huge monorepos would probably disagree), maybe we can do better.
Altavista was kind of okeish for search, yet Google managed to figure out something that was (at that time) way better.
I came here to say precisely that. I was on svn before git was a thing, and I've never moved off it for any projects where I get to decide such things.
To a first approximation, one could say that distributed version control is a problem nobody ever had, and nobody ever intends to have. (GitHub is the world's centralized monorepo.)
Yet, distributed version control is the majority of the reason why git's mental model is so overcomplicated.
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.
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
Let me just state the obvious. Of all the major problems of society, sorting legos isn't one. If you disagree, try emerging from the cellar.
Kids face a lot of new problems these days. They also face some old one, like sorting their legos.
Then you step on a lego.
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.
Who really wants cheap lego vacuums? Basement-dwellers who are getting yelled at by their mom? Not a good market.
If you need (D)VFS aka Distributed Versioned Filesystem, grab right tool. Or write one.
This is exacly way I wrote DOT (Distributed Object Tracker). Its pure DVFS repo manager, to handle binary blobs and that it.. Nothing more.
People complaining about GIT not working well w/ big data just handling GIT wrong. Linus said it from the begining, its NOT tool for such datasets. Just move along.
There are some things that need to come from a place of manic self-motivated genius. It's not something that you can buy with money. The money is really just there to help you shove a mediocre solution down everyone's throats (which is exactly what's going on here).
This seems ridiculous to you, compared to a very obvious win with a Lego sorting vacuum.
Lego isn’t niche, and the explanation isn’t a weird technical thing that only experts would get and understand how important or valuable it is.
Yet it’s not being done.
Is there nobody who has realised this gap but you? Has nobody managed to convince people with money that it’s worthwhile? Have you tried but failed?
Or is it not many many thousands of people who are wrong but you?
Is the problem harder than you think? I’ve worked with robotics but not for a long time and I think the core manipulation is either not really solved or not until recently. I don’t know about yours but my kids also don’t fully dismantle their Lego creations either so would the robot need to take them apart too? That’s a lot of force. And some are special.
How people want Lego sorted is pretty broad. Kids don’t even need it sorted that much. And the volume can be huge for smaller buckets of things.
Is the market not as big as you think? Is it big enough for the cost, I’d buy one for £100 but £1000? £10,000?
How does it compare for most people against having the kids play on a blanket and then tipping it into a bucket? Or those ones that are a circle of cloth with a drawstring so it’s a play area and storage all in one? I 3d printed some sieves and that’s most of the issue right there done.
People are solving actual problems, but lots of problems are hard, and not all of them are profitable.
As a gut feeling, there is such a large overlap of engineers and large Lego collections and willingness to spend lots of money and time saving some time sorting Lego that the small number of implementations usually split over many years is very telling about the difficulty.
For what it’s worth I want this too.
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.
Can’t believe how this whole AI movement seems to want to reinvent software engineering, poorly.
git worktree add -b feature-2 ../feature-2Surely $trillion "ai" thing can generate a better solution than one Finnish guy 20 years ago.
16M$ VC money saved.
Does it work well for resolving merge conflicts in your experience?
You can define your own merge strategy that uses a custom executable to fix conflicts.
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).
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.
Great use of 17 million dollars.
Use value != sales value; hype sells.
Ps. not too sure how far $17M gets you toward mini nuclear power plants, but I catch your drift.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon all were founded years or decades before Git was created and money had a different value back then. (Inflation)
For every unicorn there are tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands dead horses...
Nicely put!
So thanks, I take this compliment. You just made my day!
Yes, we have higher taxes, yes, we pay more in social security... but in the end we have far less "Working Poor" and I know very, very, very, very few people who have more than 1 job.
But I guess that's just socialist bullshit.
What I am trying to convey is: The US lives in its own bubble, just like the rest of us does.
The difference is that the US hears the US propaganda and the rest of us heard the US propaganda for decades as well, through Hollywood and media.
But the taxes remain very high, especially on income so it hits middle-class professionals the hardest. In some countries like Spain (and increasingly Sweden) they are contributing to a high structural unemployment, especially youth unemployment, too.
So in the end, the problem isn't just higher taxes, but higher unemployment and therefore lower gross salaries (before those higher taxes are even taken into account).
I'm paying maximum social security and in previous generations the service you got in the public healthcare system was way better.
For some procedures I definitely go to private doctors as well nowadays. It's not a huge burden, but e.g. I will never go to a public skin doctor ever. The stories you hear about them are... brrr!
But overall the system is still miles ahead of the one in the United States. I've been there on multiple occasions and witnessed first hand, I have friends there and I know both systems. (Obviously I know the European system or rather the one in my country of residence even better)
- It’s from one of GitHub’s cofounders.
- GitHub had a $7.5B exit.
- And the story is: AI is completely changing how software gets built, with plenty of proof points already showing up in the billions in revenue being made from things like Claude Code, Cusor, Codex, etc.
So the pitch is basically: back the team that can build the universal infrastructure for AI and agentic coding.
I'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?
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.
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.
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!)
You can definitely use git as a backend for building such a system, but some extra tooling is necessary.
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
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.
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.
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)
Vibecoding moto.
* 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.
> 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?
How will you ever get the network effects needed to get sustained users with a commercial tool?
Given Git was created because BitKeeper, a commercial tool, pulled their permission for kernel developers to use their tool aren’t we ignoring a lesson there?
"Why fund $17M towards development of an operating system, when Linux was made by one guy with a chip on his shoulder?"
Also, you should hear Linus talk about building git himself, what he built wasn't what you know as git today. It didn't even have the commands like git pull, git commit etc until he handed development over.
To build better tool than git, probably a few months by tiny team of good developers. Just thinking of problem and making what is needed... So either free time or few hundred thousand at max.
On other hand to replace GitHub. Endless millions will be spend... For some sort of probable gains? It might even make money in long run... But goal is probably to flip it.
His main contributions were his ideas.
1) The distributed model, that doesn’t need to dial the internet.
2) The core data structures. For instance, how git stores snapshots for files changes in a commit. Other tools used diff approaches which made rewinding, branch switching, and diffing super slow.
Those two ideas are important and influenced git deeply, but he didn’t code the thing, and definitely not in 7 days!
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.
On the ninth he roasted some fool.
We have AI now. AI tools are pretty handy with Git. I've not manually resolved git conflicts in months now. That's more or less a solved problem for me. Mostly codex creates and manages pull requests for me. I also have it manage my GitHub issues on some projects. For some things, I also let it do release management with elaborate checklists, release prep, and driving automation for package deployment via github actions triggered via tags, and then creating the gh release and attaching binaries. In short, I just give a thumbs up and all the right things happen.
To be blunt, I think a SAAS service that tries to make Git nicer to use is a going to be a bit redundant. I don't think AI tools really need that help. Or a git replacement. And people will mostly be delegating whatever it is they still do manually with Git pretty soon. I've made that switch already because I'm an early adopter. And because I'm lazy and it seems AI is more disciplined at following good practices and process than I am.
Wealthy people don't have time to do all due diligence and vetting specially when random startups become unicorn.
Does AI make reading or writing stacked PRs any nicer? No, it does not.
Correct, hence the "SaaSpocalypse" phenomenon in recent weeks. Investors are slowly becoming disinterested in investing in software anymore precisely because models are good enough now to replicate any SaaS pretty easily, which still requires effort but is less so than paying for a SaaS particularly in large organizations which are charged per seat.
Maybe if I were reviewing some random dude's code, where I have no idea what he's been working on...
git ≠ GitHub
Not sure what the business logic is. Maybe they are mostly acquihire. Or the companies just have so much money to throw around they just spray it everywhere. Whatever the reason, if the tools remain open source, the result for devs is probably better open source tools. At least until enshittification begins when the companies run out of funding, but hopefully the tools remain forkable.
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?)
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.
So, I really hope security incidents don't come after Git!
I don't know the answer, but I think it could easily be three times as good and I would still stick with 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.
This doesn't seem to be the direction these guys are going though, it looks like they think Git should be more social or something.
but if not just your own work flow, have a dir dedicated to storing prompt history and then each file is titled with the commit id.
As for the flag just agree to some convention and toss it in the commit message
Only useful if it can be reliably verified, which is challenging at best.
The point of git is that it has strong authentication built into the fabric of the thing.
I mean, it's just text, so it shouldn't be too taxing to store it. I agree it's hoarder mentality though :)
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.
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.
That said, I find the branding confusing. They say this is what comes after git, but in the name and the overall functionality, seems to just be an abstraction on top of git, not a new source control tool to replace git.
I was really hoping we'd see some competition to Github, but no, this is competition for the likes of the Conductor App. Disappointed, I must say. I am tired of using and waiting for alternatives of, Github.
The diff view in particular makes me rage. CodeMirror has a demo where they render a million lines. Github starts dying when rendering a couple thousand. There are options like Codeberg but the experience is unfortunately even worse.
Are you interested in giving https://tangled.org a try? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Github PR flow is second nature to me, almost soothing.
But it's also entirely unnecessary and sometimes even limiting to the agent.
I'm curious what their long term vision they pitched investors is.
Also if they really wanted to “replace git” I think that would be much more difficult due to network effects. Everybody is already using git.
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?
https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/operation...
and git's reflog:
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.
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.
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.
With a box of scraps!
No thanks.
Was their series A pitch also written by llm?
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.
Easier Git doesn't translate into something I can get my boss to pay for.
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.
What I'd would expect of the next vcs is to go beyond vcs of the files, but of the environment so works on my machine™ and configuring your git-hooks and CI becomes a thing of the past.
Do we need an LSP-like abstraction for environments and build systems instead of yet another definitive build system? IDK, my solution so far is sticking to nix, x86_64, and ignoring Windows and Mac, which is obviously not good enough for like 90%+ of devs.
> 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.
Quite an understatement. I'm pretty sure GitHub is the primary reason that Git took off like it did.
I think that's something I don't want to imagine
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.
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.
Git has issues, but it works pretty well once you learn it and it's basically universal. Will be hard to dislodge.
Leave Git alone.