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?

• Eufrat

  today at 7:35 AM

  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.

  • robbbbbbbbbbbb

    today at 9:58 AM

    "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.

  • echelon

    today at 8:39 AM

    > 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.

    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r

      today at 9:40 AM

      Yeah, OK. There’s a lot hidden in that word, “pedigree”.

    • nikitau

      today at 9:39 AM

      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.

    • yread

      today at 9:20 AM

      or at least should be

    • imp0cat

      today at 8:46 AM

      So it will be exactly like git, but with a monthly subscription fee.

      • abc123abc123

        today at 9:04 AM

        And AI... always add AI!

        • mcdeltat

          today at 9:36 AM

          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.

        • jordand

          today at 9:52 AM

          And regular subscription price increases. They never forget those!

    • abc123abc123

      today at 9:04 AM

      This is the way!

• braggerxyz

  today at 9:24 AM

  > ... 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

    today at 9:39 AM

    As any DBA worth their salt knows.

    Index the many valued column, not the column with few discrete values.

  • huflungdung

    today at 9:32 AM

    [dead]

• latexr

  today at 8:12 AM

  > 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.

• Fomite

  today at 9:55 AM

  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.

• gyulai

  today at 6:42 AM

  > 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.

  • dirkc

    today at 8:07 AM

    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

      today at 8:43 AM

      Investor narrative pointing out a relationship is not the same as substantive technological overlap.

  • satvikpendem

    today at 6:59 AM

    HN has always been skeptical of VC, ironically, so that's no indication of anything in the overall industry.

    • latexr

      today at 8:22 AM

      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

        today at 8:24 AM

        No, but trends are very prevalent, it is not a uniform random distribution.

        • rwmj

          today at 8:50 AM

          Unless you've done a study of sentiment on HN (please link if so) then you have no idea.

• aleph_minus_one

  today at 9:34 AM

  > 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 $/€ 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

    today at 9:46 AM

    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...

• murukesh_s

  today at 9:52 AM

  >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

• hequmania

  today at 9:31 AM

  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).

• jampekka

  today at 8:06 AM

  > 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.

• raincole

  today at 8:17 AM

  > 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.

• al_borland

  today at 4:50 AM

  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

    today at 4:55 AM

    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

      today at 5:16 AM

      > 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

      today at 7:26 AM

      i noticed the example product page too on their website. But why not make it like a bigger rumba on wheels?

• palata

  today at 9:09 AM

  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).

• debarshri

  today at 6:56 AM

  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

    today at 7:11 AM

    > 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

      today at 7:58 AM

      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

        today at 9:48 AM

        > 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 importance 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.

  • BrenBarn

    today at 9:28 AM

    > 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

      today at 9:33 AM

      If the business is not growing well and VC invests money. I think that gambling and not true venture capital.

  • Imustaskforhelp

    today at 7:20 AM

    > 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

      today at 8:09 AM

      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.

• patates

  today at 7:43 AM

  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

  • secondcoming

    today at 9:46 AM

    I find that sometimes changing the font in my IDE can give me an inexplicable boost

  • internet_points

    today at 7:56 AM

    i may be dense or something but what effect?

    • patates

      today at 8:11 AM

      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 :)

• rhubarbtree

  today at 7:35 AM

  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

    today at 9:00 AM

    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.

• bee_rider

  today at 4:08 AM

  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.

  • tadfisher

    today at 4:25 AM

        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.

  • red_admiral

    today at 9:15 AM

    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.

  • imron

    today at 4:28 AM

    > 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.

  • ngc248

    today at 9:52 AM

    "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

  • grogenaut

    today at 4:26 AM

    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

      today at 4:32 AM

      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

        today at 9:01 AM

        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.

  • thwarted

    today at 4:28 AM

    > 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

      today at 7:33 AM

      People keep saying this but I can't really find much anything social about GitHub.

      • toyg

        today at 8:53 AM

        Some people spend most of their time in issues and PRs, which are social features mapping social interactions.

  • mzi

    today at 4:20 AM

    À 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.

  • throwaway173738

    today at 4:21 AM

    They sure aren’t. Before github you set up remotes or emailed patches.

  • jonhohle

    today at 4:40 AM

    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).

• caycep

  today at 6:58 AM

  granted how much did Linus spend on Git? probably well south of $17M and he's not beholden to the likes of a16z

  • aorloff

    today at 7:59 AM

    at the time he was probably thinking about how much time it would _save_ him

  • pjc50

    today at 7:41 AM

    The first version was written in ten days apparently, so more in the ballpark of $17k.

    • jve

      today at 8:44 AM

      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.

• redog

  today at 9:31 AM

  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

    today at 9:56 AM

    > 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.

• imdsm

  today at 9:40 AM

  I feel exactly this way

  Why are we trying to replace git? What is the problem with git?

  • amoss

    today at 9:48 AM

    It's the old broken. Clearly it must be replaced with the new hotness.

• ludicrousdispla

  today at 8:59 AM

  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.

• mememememememo

  today at 9:57 AM

  17M isn't a lot of money. It is for a person sure. Retire. Cessna. etc. But not to build a butler!

• jatins

  today at 7:26 AM

  > I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money

  Well, cofounding Github helps

• amelius

  today at 8:39 AM

  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

    today at 8:42 AM

    Didn’t dvc try to fill this niche and absolutely fail at it?

• sph

  today at 4:13 AM

  > Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

  Because that’s too risky for investors.

• mxkopy

  today at 9:49 AM

  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).

• today at 9:48 AM

• fontain

  today at 4:28 AM

  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

    today at 4:52 AM

    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

    today at 9:52 AM

    I would use this tool. Ship it

  • bonesss

    today at 7:10 AM

    [dead]

• hsaliak

  today at 9:16 AM

  I've long had the same idea.. this one has legs.

• Aperocky

  today at 4:26 AM

  You see, the actual problem is raising the money.

• sunir

  today at 8:33 AM

  4 McDonalds. That’s a better way of measuring it.

• jiggawatts

  today at 8:49 AM

  > 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.

• rjh29

  today at 7:44 AM

  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/...

• vividfrier

  today at 4:13 AM

  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

    today at 4:15 AM

    You guys cannot be serious, it feels like Poe’s Law day everyday in here!

    • vrganj

      today at 4:25 AM

      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

        today at 4:30 AM

        "Where are we? Are we where we wanted to be?"

        "I'm not sure. But at least we got here fast."

    • jb1991

      today at 4:27 AM

      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

      today at 4:30 AM

      if you can't get ai to handle git, that's certainly a skill issue

  • solid_fuel

    today at 4:30 AM

    Have you considered returning to actual software engineering and workflows that tools were designed to support instead of playing the LLM slot machine?

  • satvikpendem

    today at 7:03 AM

    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

      today at 7:20 AM

      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

        today at 7:35 AM

        Where did I say it was a good idea?

• leptons

  today at 7:06 AM

  >Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

  They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFRzIOna2oQ

  • eastabrooka

    today at 8:42 AM

    GitV2 - It's what Devs Crave.

• gyanchawdhary

  today at 9:14 AM

  @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

• techpression

  today at 4:17 AM

  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.

• majke

  today at 6:29 AM

  I’m also contemplating a lego sorting machine.

  • mkl

    today at 6:41 AM

    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.

  • today at 6:42 AM

• shafyy

  today at 8:07 AM

  You mean the one they try to build in The Office?

• jtfrench

  today at 4:31 AM

  Definitely sounded like a shower gel moment.

• piokoch

  today at 7:54 AM

  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.

• uwagar

  today at 6:24 AM

  i am actually fine with how svn works.

  • hdgvhicv

    today at 6:29 AM

    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

      today at 7:27 AM

      u guessed right. im one of the world's few solo software developers left (behind).

    • rimliu

      today at 8:24 AM

      or using branches.

  • gyulai

    today at 6:31 AM

    > 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

      today at 7:44 AM

      Well, one person did: git exactly replicated the patch email system that Linus Torvalds was using.

• noosphr

  today at 4:04 AM

  I for one can't wait for open Ai to buy them and reroute every git commit to chatgpt.

• smartmic

  today at 6:35 AM

  [dead]

• pbkompasz

  today at 9:08 AM

  Yes, you may be fine with git, but can you say the same thing about AI agents? /s

• aaron695

  today at 5:29 AM

  [dead]

• flomo

  today at 6:55 AM

  > 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.

  • reverius42

    today at 7:07 AM

    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

      today at 7:28 AM

      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

        today at 7:49 AM

        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.

  • choudharism

    today at 7:02 AM

    Replacing git is?

    • flomo

      today at 7:14 AM

      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.

• flohofwoe

  today at 6:39 AM

  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.

  • Borg3

    today at 7:04 AM

    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.

  • roncesvalles

    today at 6:46 AM

    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).

    • operatingthetan

      today at 7:27 AM

      I think they are going to give us _something_. Devs probably won't pick it up though.

    • flohofwoe

      today at 6:55 AM

      Yeah probably right :)

• IanCal

  today at 8:29 AM

  I think it’s always good to dig a bit deeper on these things.

  This seems ridiculous to you, compared to a very obvious win with a Lego sorting vacuum.

  Lego isn’t niche, and the explanation isn’t a weird technical thing that only experts would get and understand how important or valuable it is.

  Yet it’s not being done.

  Is there nobody who has realised this gap but you? Has nobody managed to convince people with money that it’s worthwhile? Have you tried but failed?

  Or is it not many many thousands of people who are wrong but you?

  Is the problem harder than you think? I’ve worked with robotics but not for a long time and I think the core manipulation is either not really solved or not until recently. I don’t know about yours but my kids also don’t fully dismantle their Lego creations either so would the robot need to take them apart too? That’s a lot of force. And some are special.

  How people want Lego sorted is pretty broad. Kids don’t even need it sorted that much. And the volume can be huge for smaller buckets of things.

  Is the market not as big as you think? Is it big enough for the cost, I’d buy one for £100 but £1000? £10,000?

  How does it compare for most people against having the kids play on a blanket and then tipping it into a bucket? Or those ones that are a circle of cloth with a drawstring so it’s a play area and storage all in one? I 3d printed some sieves and that’s most of the issue right there done.

  People are solving actual problems, but lots of problems are hard, and not all of them are profitable.

  As a gut feeling, there is such a large overlap of engineers and large Lego collections and willingness to spend lots of money and time saving some time sorting Lego that the small number of implementations usually split over many years is very telling about the difficulty.

  For what it’s worth I want this too.

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.

• dethos

  today at 9:45 AM

  Bingo

• farouqjalabi

  today at 7:58 AM

  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

    today at 8:12 AM

    What does that even mean? Multiple branches is a git feature.

    • arnvald

      today at 8:28 AM

      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_

        today at 8:32 AM

        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.

      • user34283

        today at 8:56 AM

        That has been implemented 10 years ago:

          git worktree add -b feature-2 ../feature-2

    • rimliu

      today at 8:25 AM

      and worktrees too.

• IshKebab

  today at 7:47 AM

  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.

  • k4rli

    today at 8:25 AM

    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

      today at 9:53 AM

      Rust! it’s written in rust and not javascript!!!!

  • DonThomasitos

    today at 8:41 AM

    „Claude, merge these branches and resolve conflicts. Ask me if unclear.“

    16M$ VC money saved.

    • user34283

      today at 9:00 AM

      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?

  • hk__2

    today at 8:25 AM

    > 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

  • a-french-anon

    today at 8:04 AM

    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).

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.

• heeton

  today at 8:24 AM

  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.

• siquick

  today at 8:26 AM

  It’s just gambling without the stigma of being called an addict.

• repelsteeltje

  today at 8:31 AM

  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.

• foxglacier

  today at 8:19 AM

  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

    today at 8:23 AM

    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

      today at 8:33 AM

      > For every unicorn there are tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands dead horses...

      Nicely put!

      • OtomotO

        today at 8:38 AM

        And it was 100% natural (un)intelligence. No "AI" involved! :)

        So thanks, I take this compliment. You just made my day!

• OtomotO

  today at 8:20 AM

  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

    today at 8:28 AM

    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

      today at 8:38 AM

      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)

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

  today at 6:33 AM

  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

    today at 8:16 AM

    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

• jgauth

  today at 6:35 AM

  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

    today at 7:13 AM

    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

      today at 8:39 AM

      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

        today at 9:56 AM

        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.

• IshKebab

  today at 7:48 AM

  They actually started before the LLM craze. The original pitch was just better Git.

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.

• zelphirkalt

  today at 9:20 AM

  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

    today at 9:46 AM

    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.

• dwb

  today at 7:09 AM

  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

    today at 7:33 AM

    Its VC funded https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2076429/000207642925...

    • mi_lk

      today at 7:48 AM

      that's a company built on top of Jujutsu, not jj itself

      • drcongo

        today at 9:54 AM

        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.

• RickS

  today at 6:33 AM

  I gotta say, jj was not something that interested me before, but that's a compelling pitch.

• dagurp

  today at 9:03 AM

  The biggest problem with Jujutsu is the name. I would love to hear a Swedish person try to pronounce it.

• Imustaskforhelp

  today at 7:37 AM

  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)

• orbifold

  today at 4:27 AM

  is there a jj hosting service?

  • ajkavanagh

    today at 7:12 AM

    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.

  • colinmarc

    today at 6:38 AM

    I know of one: https://lubeno.dev

  • bkolobara

    today at 6:36 AM

    We are working on something https://lubeno.dev

  • pzmarzly

    today at 6:55 AM

    https://tangled.org/ supports many jj features, but they seem to only offer public repos.

  • pkulak

    today at 6:47 AM

    We use GitHub at my work. And I think I’m the only one using JJ.

  • imron

    today at 4:32 AM

    Any service that hosts git?

  • boxed

    today at 6:37 AM

    Isn't jj git compatible so you can just use github?

    • nchmy

      today at 7:15 AM

      Yes.

• rimliu

  today at 8:26 AM

  "I can iterate freely without thinking".

  Vibecoding moto.

Improving something that basically everyone uses is obviously worth money

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

  today at 3:50 AM

  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

    today at 4:02 AM

    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

      today at 7:13 AM

      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?"

  • Defletter

    today at 4:07 AM

    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.

  • altmanaltman

    today at 8:09 AM

    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.

  • irjustin

    today at 4:05 AM

    I'm not sure if I should take these comments seriously or as a joke...

• Ekaros

  today at 7:20 AM

  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.

• ergocoder

  today at 3:56 AM

  Linus built git in 8 days or something.

  • materielle

    today at 6:45 AM

    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

      today at 7:54 AM

      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

        today at 8:40 AM

        The point was only that Linus didn't build git in 8 days and alone.

  • grogenaut

    today at 4:28 AM

    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

      today at 4:58 AM

      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

    today at 6:07 AM

    In a cave, with a box of scraps!

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.

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

  today at 9:58 AM

  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.

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.

• faangguyindia

  today at 8:02 AM

  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.

• esafak

  today at 4:24 AM

  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.

  • satvikpendem

    today at 7:07 AM

    > If you think like that why invest in software at all; the AI will do everything?

    Correct, hence the "SaaSpocalypse" phenomenon in recent weeks. Investors are slowly becoming disinterested in investing in software anymore precisely because models are good enough now to replicate any SaaS pretty easily, which still requires effort but is less so than paying for a SaaS particularly in large organizations which are charged per seat.

  • Aperocky

    today at 4:28 AM

    It does though.. you don't have agents that can connect to github or wherever your git mirrors are and comment on PRs?

    • lan321

      today at 6:37 AM

      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...

    • esafak

      today at 4:46 AM

      Don't you read the PRs?

• ozozozd

  today at 4:50 AM

  git isn’t Saas.

  git ≠ GitHub

  • jillesvangurp

    today at 7:33 AM

    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

      today at 8:43 AM

      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.

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.

Ok, ok, if you give me $16M I'll do it faster.

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.

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

  today at 6:59 AM

  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

  today at 7:45 AM

  > 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

  today at 7:57 AM

  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

    today at 8:22 AM

    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 :)

To all the salty people- the person cofounded GitHub. It's not the product that raised 17M, it's the person.

• petesergeant

  today at 4:08 AM

  I was going to be snarky, but Scott Chacon is a serious person, so we'll see!

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.

> 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

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

  today at 6:52 AM

  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

  today at 7:28 AM

  > 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!

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.

I like what I see in the video, it would solve a lot of problems I end up having with git.

That said, I find the branding confusing. They say this is what comes after git, but in the name and the overall functionality, seems to just be an abstraction on top of git, not a new source control tool to replace git.

i dont get it, watched the video seeing the "power" of using multiple branches at the same workdirectory etc. all i was thinking was ok they want to make it easy for coding agents work with multiple branches / feautres at once... Just that works already pretty well with git and worktrees... and agent uses the tools anyway... dont know what they want to build with 17M

Remind me, how much venture capital did Linus need to raise for building git?

• hk__2

  today at 8:31 AM

  Linus didn’t build git. He built a proof of concept and then handed it over to real maintainers that wrote real code.

  • aoshifo

    today at 9:38 AM

    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.

Great! Instead of solving actual problems we are seeing funding for stuff we don't need.

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?

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

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.

Github fallout effect?

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.

Some others mentioned pijul, but I will put in my two cents about it. I have been looking to make use of it because it seems really nice for working with an agent. Essentially you get patches that are independently and can be applied anywhere instead of commits. If there is ambiguity applying a patch then you have to resolve it, but that resolution is sort of a first class object.

I watched the video but I don't quite get it. I feel like I'm missing something? A nicer git workflow is not what I need because I can ask an LLM to fix my git state and branches. This feels a bit backwards. LLMs are already great at working with raw git as their primitive.

I'm curious what their long term vision they pitched investors is.

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.

I thought gitbutler was not a great name, but then I saw their CLI command name is "but"

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.

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

  today at 7:32 AM

  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.

They need to have a dedicated page explaining me why should I change my current workflow. Else I don't get the point.

• farouqjalabi

  today at 8:00 AM

  https://docs.gitbutler.com/why-gitbutler

Dunno what they’re trying to build, but I encourage everyone to try what they already have built. It helps me work on multiple changesets in parallel. This often just happens, for example you work on something and discover a bug in something else that needs to be fixed. In GitButler, I can just create another branch, drag the changes in there, push and done.

Also, if you ever worked with Perforce, you might be familiar with changelists. It’s kind of like that.

Now, GitButler is by no means perfect. There are many rough edges. It tends to get stuck in unexpected states and sometimes it isn’t easy to rectify this.

It also cannot split changes in a single file, which is a bummer, because that’s something I encounter routinely. But I understand this complicates the existing model tremendously.

I 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

That's a lot of money for something very much not necessary... I'm in the wrong business!

Apparently what comes after git is git

I was skeptical at first, but then I watched the video and it really looks interesting. I wonder if this works with Azure DevOps?

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

  today at 7:02 AM

  There is nothing inherently special about the straw that breaks the camel's back.

• operatingthetan

  today at 7:32 AM

  Why do they need $17m to build this? Vibe code it in a couple weeks, ship it.

Why this and not jujutsu, pijul or sapling? These are all version control systems that are better than git in various ways.

• operatingthetan

  today at 7:19 AM

  This is is made for AI or ... something.

How do you intend to make money ?

Easier Git doesn't translate into something I can get my boss to pay for.

Linus Torvalds was able to build this in a cave!

With a box of scraps!

Linus built git in an afternoon with $17 for snacks

• padjo

  today at 7:15 AM

  It was the early 2000s though, $17 got you like a weeks worth of snacks back then.

I'd like to see some kind of "whitespace aware" smart diff in whatever comes after git

• saint_yossarian

  today at 8:03 AM

  There's `git diff -w`, and most forges expose a setting for that in their diff views.

• jauco

  today at 5:23 AM

  Use difftastic. You can do so with current git :)

There is only a tiny final step left, a real piece of cake, to build the thing.

Wow, very impressive, great job! You mentioned monitoring, I think it might be a very interesting way to see the "ongoing" work of your agents and orchestrate them. Do you have a precise idea on how it's going to happen, or is this already planned?

GitHub CEO also raised 60M for 'entire' to bring agent context to git. The dust is yet to settle here as it's difficult to bring a paridgm shift from today's git workflows

> 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.

"We are going to spend $17M and have nothing to show for it"

For $17 milion there are few thibga without any gui that i couldnt build.

Isn't that jj? Hopefully no one tells the VCs.

• dietr1ch

  today at 3:39 AM

  To me jj is an ok porcelain for git, but I find it worse than magit. Sure, it has some tricks under their sleves for merging, but I just don't run into weird merges and never needed more advanced commands like rerere.

  What I'd would expect of the next vcs is to go beyond vcs of the files, but of the environment so works on my machine™ and configuring your git-hooks and CI becomes a thing of the past.

  Do we need an LSP-like abstraction for environments and build systems instead of yet another definitive build system? IDK, my solution so far is sticking to nix, x86_64, and ignoring Windows and Mac, which is obviously not good enough for like 90%+ of devs.

• stavros

  today at 3:43 AM

  Which version control system should we not tell?

  • f33d5173

    today at 4:56 AM

    Idk if you're joking but I edited to make it clearer...

  • jer0me

    today at 3:56 AM

    a16z

> 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

  today at 9:41 AM

  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

Rather confusing, your name has Git in it, “to build what comes after git”, what comes after your own Git product? Good luck.

Raising a bunch of money to recreate the wheel.

I refuse to use anything other than git for versioning.

gitbutler is actually a great product tbh

Good luck with that, I would still be using subversion if given the choice.

$17m to replace git with but. no fucking way

> 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.

No. Just no.

Leave Git alone.

TL;DR we decided git needs more "ai" and we got money thrown at us!

[flagged]

Pijul?

Git has issues, but it works pretty well once you learn it and it's basically universal. Will be hard to dislodge.

• today at 3:54 AM