today at 8:38 PM
Sometimes I think back to Google Wave, that beautiful glimmer of real-time collaborative canvases, announced in 2009 when Angular and Backbone hadn't even been invented, and think it launched almost two decades too early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berli...
We're now in a world where we expect real-time interfaces to be developed and immediately deployed for our feedback by agents, in business-critical settings where classic SDLC timelines are far too slow, but code quality is becoming more difficult to manage at scale.
Git, at its core, is a fundamental notion that behavior is an auditable tree of immutable changes, where any participant can rearrange or rewind or remix this sequence on a local machine to show, and interact with, a provisional combination of those changes.
Google Wave, with its operational transformation (OT) and federation systems, was similar in many regards. We have CRDTs now, and far better techniques for auto-merging workstreams - including agentic systems that can resolve conflicts intelligently!
Wave fundamentally had a concept that people would come together and evolve a simple chat interface, into a customized real-time application for their use cases, and that that iteration could happen in real-time, with data and behavior both evolving in collaboration with bots. Wherever Git and the broader notion of SDLC goes, I hope it brings the best of this thinking.
today at 9:38 PM
The Wave release was the event that really kicked off my starting to rethink my own framing of what Google's engineering culture actually produces. I was so excited for its release, possibly moreso than any major innovation before then, & what was delivered was pure crap implementation wise. The idea was brilliant, & open, so theoretically someone could have done it well, but Google poisoned the well by releasing such a turd.
Throughout it's existence Google has been revered as a company for its engineering output, but if you interrogate that even a little bit, you end up with a very small minority of gems among a massive ocean of over engineered crap. Even the huge objective open successes like k8s are to this day sold with the massive caveat of "it's heavy & over engineered, but": nobody's calling k8s elegant. Pretty much all of their good products are acquisitions, many of which they've subsequently degraded.
One can certainly make this argument about almost any large corporation, but I do think there's very few with such a stark divide between how the quality of their engineering work is revered & the reality.
today at 9:44 PM
Wave's failure and that of Google+ might have been the turning point for Google, never really to return to its former glory.
today at 10:09 PM
Consider if they had focused on it instead of Android. Maybe we would still have Windows phones. Such are the tides of time. I think their present, malignant glory eclipses it financially but never will romantically.
today at 10:28 PM
Most of the tech unicorns are like this. Zuckerberg caught lightning in a bottle one single time and everything they’ve tried since has sucked. Instagram was an acquisition. So were oculus and WhatsApp. By contrast their next in-house flagship was temu Wii avatars.
Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle.
Surely it’s a consequence of being publicly traded that these companies cease to be able to develop good novel products rather than acquire competitors or iterate on past successes.
today at 9:18 PM
When I tried out Delta by zed in Private alpha my first feedback was "wow this reminds me of Google Wave"
today at 9:08 PM
We want to have less, not more, dependence on Cloudflare.
Single point of failure, for both technical and political failures.
today at 9:22 PM
Cloudflare wants all dependence on Cloudflare they can get.
today at 9:46 PM
I agree with both you and the person you’re responding to.
today at 10:12 PM
Same, but the real question is how. At this point, the things they are proposing are genuinely useful for the environment that we are finding ourselves in? How does one even begin to allow for less dependency here without appropriate substitute/mitigation for what cloudflare renders relatively painless.
today at 8:29 PM
$25k to build the next GitHub for $125B company? How generous.
today at 8:39 PM
And not even cold hard cash but “Cloudflare credits.”
What an offensive slap in the face.
today at 9:28 PM
And only if you are a US or Canadian citizen/team and doubly so only if you use a permissive license like MIT, Apache-2.0 or BSD-2/3. Having even a moderate degree of control over your project is too much to ask for. But you do get a dinner, which might make it all worth it.
Tone deaf to the nth degree.
today at 8:48 PM
It's SCRIP!!!
today at 9:21 PM
I”m so sick of all these weird credits and points. Can’t pay food or bills with it.
today at 9:27 PM
They don't want to own the next GitHub. They want people to build the next GitHub on Artifacts (and pay Cloudflare for storage and compute).
I don't have a strong opinion here, but giving away compute as a prize for hackathons isn't anything new.
today at 10:13 PM
Well, kinda, but usually the compute is given away as part of the hackaton. Even AWS hackaton did expect you to buy AWS credits..
today at 8:42 PM
The whole thing seems a bit uncouth. I get a real gross feeling from it.
today at 9:25 PM
That was my reaction. I was expecting, "The winner receives $500,000 in cash, $1M in Cloudflare credits, and an introduction to our venture team."
today at 9:37 PM
On brand for Cloudflare which is typically a cheap company.
today at 9:23 PM
I agree that the compensation was a miss.
today at 9:43 PM
I really hope that was a purposeful understatement.
today at 8:23 PM
If it’s for agents why don’t you make this a challenge towards them? What sort of human element is desired here?
today at 9:10 PM
> What sort of human element is desired here?
The human wallet
today at 8:27 PM
The element of irony.
today at 9:11 PM
Who said it’s for humans?
I’m tempted to ask an agent to submit an entry for me.
today at 9:13 PM
Why do they need others to ask their agents to do it? Why can't they ask their own agents?
today at 9:33 PM
Tokens be too expensive. Outsource to subs of all the devs over the world. OpenAI inverstors gonna take the inference L on subsidized tokens.
today at 10:15 PM
Yeah, but at the same time compensation is meager enough that they won't get as much of a response. I am only kinda considering it and that is mostly, but the more I am reading through the details the more of a turn off the whole thing is.
today at 9:22 PM
You don't get infinite monkeys writing Hamlet with just a few monkeys
today at 9:24 PM
Free marketing
today at 8:59 PM
today at 10:33 PM
I build things.
I build them on machines I own placed in racks I have they key to.
There aren't any resource limits to hit and legal service is brought directly to me - not to a provider nor middleman.
There also isn't a global MITM inserting itself between me and my users.
I can't imagine doing it any other way and I implore you not to build things on complex, fragile, highly abstracted foundations.
today at 9:10 PM
The next platform for Agentic SCM is just… Fossil. Fossil is an SQLite database that can store anything an agent would ever need.
today at 9:26 PM
I use beads + git; you just need to put the bead id at the beginning of the commit msg. The agents do the rest.
today at 10:32 PM
What is beads?
I am curious what people think about the use case that is different for AI agents compared to humans. Aside from the things people use SCM for already that is.
Fossil fits the bill if you ask me because it has built in forum and stuff too, so Agentic discourse can happen there, commits happen in the SCM history. And it has auto sync so they can automatically sync their state.
today at 9:09 PM
Centralization is antithetical to the whole idea of the internet
today at 10:04 PM
After reading the rules and thinking about what I can use it finally hit me: https://entire.io/ this is basically design a better entire.io system using CF and NOT git but they want multi agents and they want that history of what and why the agents did that really isn't source code. And doesn't belong in git.
today at 10:05 PM
It could live in git commit comments, though.
today at 10:13 PM
it COULD but should it. I guess that's the contest. Fun.
today at 9:29 PM
Right, because I want a stupid Cloudflare captcha before every git operation.
today at 9:44 PM
I can see that blogpost: "flashcha - ssh extension for Cloudflare CAPTCHA during git operations"
today at 8:33 PM
Us? Ask the agents.
today at 9:23 PM
> We want you to build
Strangest tech announcement ever.
today at 9:51 PM
I wonder if they still use Bitbucket internally.
today at 10:00 PM
I want you to stop donating to Omarchy.
today at 8:38 PM
Have to point this out because it annoys me every time:
Cloudflare is perhaps most famously and most significantly an international, global platform. That's kind of the whole point.
Only in the smallprint does it mention you must be a United States or Canada resident to enter.
today at 9:27 PM
I'll be honest: I saw the prize was a trip to SF and — while I was vanishingly unlikely to enter anyway — that was enough to kill any idea of entering. It's been over 20 years since I was last in the USA, and I have no intention of visiting again any time soon.
today at 8:52 PM
Thank you for pointing this out! I always love a good competition and since I already have a workers paid plan it seemed fun. But I'm not eligible, so I guess I'll rebuild github without giving any IP to Cloudflare
today at 9:23 PM
Of course cloudflare wants you to bring more data and money to cloudflare. Is any of this actually useful though? Do agents need git? Are agents even useful?
today at 9:37 PM
"The first-place team will also receive $25,000 in Cloudflare credits, along with invitations to the VIP speaker dinner on Monday night at Connect."
Whoever in Cloudflare thought that this is an appropriate compensation for the work is delusional. This is insulting.
today at 10:23 PM
:D Please rewrite the current foundation for how programmers across the world cooperate. Should be easy.
today at 9:39 PM
Git, as a protocol, is probably part of the problem for the scale that they are talking about here (1000s of agents). You probably want something between multiplayer editing and commits. That being said, I am terrified about the degree of slop that would be generated with 1000s of agents actually working on a codebase.
today at 8:44 PM
lol, spec work anyone? For maybe-maybe-not $25k, you build something that could create millions in enterprise value.
Advice for everyone considering this: if you're passionate about ideas in this space and have access to an LLM — build it yourself and start your own company. In fact, message me easting.exe [at] gmail. I'll throw in $25k to get us started. I'm a prior founder with an exit. Because this offer from Cloudflare is ridiculous.
today at 9:23 PM
Badass offer and even badder gmail address
today at 9:28 PM
Lololol. This is probably the dumbest sounding competition I've ever heard. Git for bots? Uhhhh ok, whatever.
today at 9:41 PM
No, thank you.
today at 8:29 PM
> So in this new world where you have hundreds, or even thousands, of agents working on the same codebase at the same time, what does the foundation look like?
So, would it maybe make sense to question this whole bit, before we starting creating platforms for something like that?
Why do you need hundreds of thousands of agents working on the same codebase? In my experience, and what I see around me, quality code that actually works in production isn't produced by "software factory autonomously run by 1337 agents", but instead one human sitting and interacting with maybe 1-3 agents max, back and forth, pair programming rather than letting hundreds of them output million of tokens over hours.
Are others seeing the same thing, or am I in my own little bubble here? All the "software factory with agents" approaches I've spent time looking into, literally produces trash on top of trash, while I see senior developers 10x their productivity while producing better code than before and they have one terminal open with three panes, a text editor, a agent TUI and a general shell, that's it. Is what I'm seeing (and doing myself) not the typical situation out there in the wider world?
today at 8:38 PM
It would make sense for a monorepo at big tech company, where a single source control system contains many thousands of common libraries and the apps that use them. And now with AI, maybe a small company could build a large, sprawling monorepo?
But I don't think it's actually a good idea. Keeping everything on the same version is difficult. We have package managers that do a better job.
today at 9:14 PM
There is that, there are a handful of companies with mono repo they have solved the checkout build deploy test cycle. The other approach is the separate the monorepo for build deploy and test loop.
today at 8:49 PM
Similar experiences here
today at 8:33 PM
That's my experience as well
today at 8:20 PM
There remain fundamental patterns for the future of software development that are missing.
Orchestrating an agent free for all tends to invite more chaos management.
At the same time there’s folks who quietly have this working.
25k seems like a small bounty for such a large prize.
https://www.cloudflare.com/git-competition/?cf_page=next-git...
today at 9:16 PM
Me too, dont have enough tokens.
today at 9:00 PM
Not even for 25 millions
today at 8:36 PM
No thanks. No more US based infrastructure for me.
today at 9:25 PM
Fuck everything about this.
today at 9:31 PM
So they want to take someone’s idea for peanuts and then vibecode it later.. also, any word on training AI on the code there?
today at 9:24 PM
“We want you to use our product” said every SaaS company ever. “Our product is designed for AI” says every SaaS for the last two years.
None of this is very clever or very compelling.
today at 9:10 PM
today at 8:20 PM
> We want you to build the next Git platform on
the computer under your desk!
Roll your Own, don't depend on billionaire platforms to get your work done...
today at 8:36 PM
There is no computer under my desk
today at 9:27 PM
Put a computer under your desk then use it to host your git repos.
today at 9:06 PM
Ok the computer on your desk then? I guess it’s probably a laptop and not on all the time, but that shouldn’t prevent it from working for you when you need it. Probably want a good backup strategy though
today at 8:20 PM
Can we please have it decentralised and without any single entity having control over the lifecycle of a product ? Lessons learnt.
today at 8:54 PM
Git is already decentralised, just stop using platforms and self host
today at 8:48 PM
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