A bit of a strange thing to say in my book. Git isn't SVN and I think these problems are already solved with git. I agree that the interface is not always very intuitive but Git has the infrastructure which is very much focused on supporting alternatives to "one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow".
> the problem that Git has solved for the last 20 years is overdue for a redesign.
To me it's not clear what the problem is that would require a redesign.
The interface is still bad. Teaching people to use git is still obnoxious because it's arcane. It's like 1e AD&D. It does everything it might need to, but it feels like every aspect of it is bespoke.
It's also relatively difficult to make certain corrections. Did you ever accidentally commit something that contains a secret that can't be in the repository? Well, you might want to throw that entire repository away and restore it from a backup before the offending commit because it's so difficult to fix and guarantee that it's not hiding in there somewhere and while also not breaking something else.
It's also taken over 10 years to address the SHA-1 limitation, and it's still not complete. It's a little astonishing that it was written so focused on SHA-1 never being a problem that it's taken this long to keep the same basic design and just allow a different hashing algorithm.
> The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow.
That sounds exactly like the pre-git model that git solved..
think about all of the discussion we have around the code that gets lost. we certainly have the ability to keep and link all that stuff now. we don't really need to have arguments about squashing or not, we can just keep the fine grained commits if you really want to dig into them and maybe ask that people write a comprehensive summary of the changes in a patch set -in addition-.
but I guess none of that has anythig to do with AI
The problem that requires a redesign is that vcs are unable to extract a subscription rent from some of the people who use git.
- It’s from one of GitHub’s cofounders.
- GitHub had a $7.5B exit.
- And the story is: AI is completely changing how software gets built, with plenty of proof points already showing up in the billions in revenue being made from things like Claude Code, Cusor, Codex, etc.
So the pitch is basically: back the team that can build the universal infrastructure for AI and agentic coding.
I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient, inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years of my life on nothing but this.
My question is: say the investor believes that some new platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that it will be mine over a famous person's?
From git(1):
LOW-LEVEL COMMANDS (PLUMBING)
Although Git includes its own porcelain layer, its low-level commands
are sufficient to support development of alternative porcelains.
Developers of such porcelains might start by reading about git-update-index(1) and git-read-tree(1).
The interface (input, output, set of options and the semantics) to these
low-level commands are meant to be a lot more stable than Porcelain level
commands, because these commands are primarily for scripted use.
The interface to Porcelain commands on the other hand are subject to change
in order to improve the end user experience.
The following description divides the low-level commands into commands that
manipulate objects (in the repository, index, and working tree), commands
that interrogate and compare objects, and commands that move objects and
references between repositories.Once open source spreads into an area, it tends to kill (commodify) commercial software in that space.
For example, with databases, MySQL and Postgres "won". Yes, there are commercial databases like SQL Server and Oracle but they largely exist through regulatory capture and inertia. It's highly unlike anyone will ever make a commercial general purpose database again. There are always niche cases.
Same with operating systems. Yes we have MacOS and Windows but what are the odds we get another commercial mass OS? I'd say almost zero.
It's the same for source control. Git "won". There are a handful of others (eg Mercurial). But gone are the days of, say, Visual Source Safe.
But when people talk about "what comes after Git" they really mean (IMHO) "what comes after Github", which is a completely different conversation. Because Github absolutely can be superseded by something better. Will it though? I don't know. It has an incredible amount of inertia.
As for AI and anything related to source control, I'd have a hard time betting against Anthropic. But remember the exit could be an HN post of "We're joining Anthropic!". Side note: I really hate this "we're joining X" framing. No, you took the bag. That's fine. But let's be honest.
For people with a proven track record, AI is a gold rush of acquisition more than creating a sustainable business, let alone an IPO. I think that's what this bet is.
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.
I'm surprised to read that, because that's how I've always used Git (and GitHub).
That's what I've understood to be good practice with Git, and it was liberating compared with what came before. One of the nicest things about Git is you can throw things in locally without worrying about how it looks, and make it presentable later.
I will admit, I didn't know jj but I wanted snapshots so I used it, so then when AI made some changes and kept on going and I wanted to go back to a particular change and I used ai to do that. It was actually really frustrating. To the point that I think I accidentally lost one of the good files within the project and I had to settle on good-enough which I had to try to get for hours to that particular point.
My point feels like I should either learn jj properly to use it or to at this point, just ask AI agents to git commit. Another point but I was using ghostty and I had accidentally clicked on the title bar and somehow moved the folder to desktop, I wasn't thinking the most accurately and I just decided to delete it thinking that it must have copied it rather than moved it. (Also dear ghostty why do you make it so easy to move folders, it isn't the best of features and can lead to some honest errors)
My face when I realized that I have deleted the project:
Anyhow decided to restore it with ~/Trash but afterwards realized that the .git/.jj history is removed because it deletes hidden folders (from my understanding) so I definitely lost that good snapshot. I do have the binary of the app which worked good but not the source code of it which is a bit frustrating
These were all just an idea of prototyping/checking how far I can move things with AI. Yeah so my experience for that project has been that I could've even learnt a new language (Odin) and the raylib project to fix that one specific bug in lower time than AI which simply is unable to fix the bug without blowing the whole project in foot.
I think the takeaway is to have good backups man. I mean I was being reckless in this project because I had nothing to lose and was just experimenting but there have been cases where people have lost databases in prod. So even backups should be essential if you find any source code which is good to be honest.
I am sure you guys must have lost some source code accidentally which you have worked upon, would love to hear some horror stories to hopefully know that I haven't been the only one who has done some mistake and to also learn something new from these stories. (I am atleast happy in the sense that I learnt the lesson from just an tinkering thing and not something truly prod)
Vibecoding moto.
they aren't building something to help you, they're building something to trap you. even if it's free, does things you like, etc., do not use it. their end goal is to screw you
I've not used this app, but I wonder how tooling like this truly competes against an open source community armed with AI. Like where is the moat here, really? I built a personal tool that does some of this with a basic Claude subscription over the course of a few weeks.
Feels like vibe-coders are the real target market for something like this, but if it takes off, would not be that hard to clone as a FOSS app.
* 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.
It's not difficult to "escape" - using `git checkout` will tear everything down properly - that's the only task of the `post-checkout` - to determine that you want to go back to using vanilla git commit tooling and remove our shims.
We also don't have a prepare-commit-msg hook - our commit tooling will inject an extra Change-Id header (of the same format and interchangeable with Jujutsu) but that affects nothing that vanilla git cares about.
It may be a great tool, but I'd be very reluctant to use a closed-source solution as a cornerstone of infrastructure.
In any case, Git has become tremendously entrenched over the past couple decades. Anything that hopes to replace it would have to be significantly better to break from the inertia Git has. I’m honestly skeptical as to whether this is even possible in the near future. We’re not at all in the same historical moment as when SVN was beaten out.
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.
They'll start injecting ads in your commit messages, forcing you to subscribe to a premium plan.
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?
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.
> The hard problem is not generating change, it’s organizing, reviewing, and integrating change without creating chaos.
Sure, writing some code isn't the bottleneck. Glossed over is the part where the developer determines what changes to make, which in my experience is the most significant cost during development and it dwarfs anything to do with version control. You can spend a lot of energy on the organising, reviewing, patching, etc. stuff -- and you should be doing some amount of this, in most situations -- but if you're spending more of your development budget on metaprojects than you think you should be, I don't think optimising the metatooling is going to magically resolve that. Address the organisational issues first.
> This is what we’re doing at GitButler, this is why we’ve raised the funding to help build all of this, faster.
The time constraint ("faster") is, of course, entirely self-imposed for business reasons. There's no reason to expect that 'high cost + high speed' is the best or even a good way to build this sort of tooling, or anything else, for that matter.
Git's UI has become increasingly friendly over a very long time of gradual improvements. Yes, Mercurial was pretty much ideal out of the gate, but the development process in that case was (AFAIK) a world away from burning money and rushing to the finish.
Maybe going slow is better?
So, I really hope security incidents don't come after 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.
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.
This doesn't seem to be the direction these guys are going though, it looks like they think Git should be more social or something.
but if not just your own work flow, have a dir dedicated to storing prompt history and then each file is titled with the commit id.
As for the flag just agree to some convention and toss it in the commit message
Keep an eye on our blog to see how we're doing this, and how we're doing it in a way that hopefully the entire community joins us in a way where we're not all reinventing the same wheels.
Yes, it could have syntax like
git notes add -m "Claude prompt: foo fee faa foo" <commit-hash>
OH WAIT YOU CAN DO THAT ALREADY SINCE 2009
Seriously, the 90% complaints about git not being able to do something is just either RTFM or "well, it can, but could use some better porcelain to present to user"
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.
https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/rubbing
I like their vision, though, this is compelling to me:
> What if it was easier to for a team to work together than it is to work alone?
It generally _is_ easier to work alone with git. UI and DX experiments feel worthwhile. lazygit and Magit are both widely used and loved, for example, but largely focus on the single user experience.
I was really hoping we'd see some competition to Github, but no, this is competition for the likes of the Conductor App. Disappointed, I must say. I am tired of using and waiting for alternatives of, Github.
The diff view in particular makes me rage. CodeMirror has a demo where they render a million lines. Github starts dying when rendering a couple thousand. There are options like Codeberg but the experience is unfortunately even worse.
Are you interested in giving https://tangled.org a try? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
BUT why not just work with the git community to add this functionality? It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that needs to "replace" git, as opposed to "improve" git?
Yes you could add all these things to git, but no, nobody will give you $17M to do it, nor will you find competent engineers who are willing to work for whatever funding they can find for “improving git”, which in all reality will probably round down to 0 in comparison to several software engineer’s salaries.
If you raise money for this project, you probably intend to make money in the near future. I don’t think anyone here wants ads on Git or to argue with a manager to get the premium version of GitButler just because you reached the commit limit.
These $17M should go to the Git maintainers.
What does "what comes after Git" look like for a two-person team vs. a 200-person org? The pain points are completely different.
FTFY. I don't understand how anyone could think to replace git by raising money. The only way to truly do this is grassroots iteration. You can build the software, but the distribution will never reach the same network size as git before your investors start asking "When do I get my return?"
> Imagine your tools telling you as soon as there are possible merge conflicts between teammates, rather than at the end of the process.
So you're centralizing a fully distributed process because grepping for "<<<<<<<" and asking your teammate the best way to merge is too hard? I thought coding was supposed to be social?
I mean, honestly, go for it and build what you want. I'm all for it! But maybe don't compare it to git. It's tone deaf.
Yeah, that is also my take. I'm biased of course since I'm someone working on replacing git through grassroots iteration, but I've been around this block a few times though and I never saw blasting money at a problem produce real innovation.
We have AI now. AI tools are pretty handy with Git. I've not manually resolved git conflicts in months now. That's more or less a solved problem for me. Mostly codex creates and manages pull requests for me. I also have it manage my GitHub issues on some projects. For some things, I also let it do release management with elaborate checklists, release prep, and driving automation for package deployment via github actions triggered via tags, and then creating the gh release and attaching binaries. In short, I just give a thumbs up and all the right things happen.
To be blunt, I think a SAAS service that tries to make Git nicer to use is a going to be a bit redundant. I don't think AI tools really need that help. Or a git replacement. And people will mostly be delegating whatever it is they still do manually with Git pretty soon. I've made that switch already because I'm an early adopter. And because I'm lazy and it seems AI is more disciplined at following good practices and process than I am.
Wealthy people don't have time to do all due diligence and vetting specially when random startups become unicorn.
Does AI make reading or writing stacked PRs any nicer? No, it does not.
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.
Gitbutler virtual branches OTOH appear to provide branch independence for agents/commits, while simultaneously allowing me to locally verify all branches together in a single local env. This seems quite a bit nicer than checking out worktree branches in the primary workspace for verification, or trying to re-run local setup in each worktree.
1) because they can
2) it's their money, not company money, and again, why would you risk your own money when someone else wants to risk their money?
However good this new thing might be, however much better it might be than git - I don't like it's chances.
The line-based diff(1)/diff3(1)/patch(1) kit often works, and that mindset thrives and gets carried till today. Many toolkits and utilities have been designed to make it more ergonomic, and they are good. Jujutsu is an example. We also have different theories and implementations, some even more algebraically sound like Darcs and Pijul.
But GitHub the Platform is another story, given that they struggled to achieve 90% availability these days.
As others alluded, JJ already exists and is a credible successor to Git for the client side.
Technical desides aside though: how is this supposed to make money for the investors?
I like the idea of parallel branches. I feel like you could probably get away with just creating multiple, named stages but having a full history is nice. P4 has multiple pending CLs and it works nicely enough. This sounds a bit better so that's cool.
As far as "social coding" git's design is really at odds with any sort of real time communication. I would love to see a first class support for file locking, and file status work flows. It's not big at all in code dev because code can be merged but for non-coders, source controlled assets are often not mergeable. To solve this, P4 is often used with heavily integrated tools that provide live file status (Locked, out of date, edited by others). This way merge conflicts are prevented at author time. Git is really lacking here. Is fetching constantly really the best we can do?
Then of course... can we get some large file and partial checkout workflows that don't feel good?
If it's to enable multi-agent scenarios, don't worktrees (at least in the local sense) allow for this?
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.
This is actually really important/useful, it's just not apparent to people who haven't worked on AI agents.
AI agents do a lot of work under the hood to try to save your tokens. There are two basic methods: 1) semantic knowledge maps, 2) PageRank. Agents like Aider will build a semantic knowledge graph of your codebase - the files in it, the functions, variables, etc - so that it can tell the agent exactly where everything is in a tiny summary. It'll also then use PageRank to build a graphed rank of these things, to surface the most relevant items first. (https://aider.chat/2023/10/22/repomap.html)
A modern VCS could do all of these things for you too, and the result should be making it easier to work with code, pulling in the related context simultaneously, so your changes make sense.
Also, I don’t think I would use this and the problems they describe aren’t really things I care much about.
I wish them the best, but $17m on a devtools company that thinks they are replacing git is going to be rough going.
They raised $17M to build what appears to be solvable by some git wrapper scripts that could have been written by AI in 5 minutes?
To me the extra "wat" about this is that if I spend the sub-$1 to get the git wrapper scripts, I can get them exactly the way I want them, instead of being mandated to use the commands they made up. A huge gain for AI is the ability to have exactly the software you personally want, even if nobody else wants it just so.
So they are building the exact opposite of the need that AI brings forward. What they are building is not even median software that is in danger of being replaced (e.g. see Cloudflare spending a week to build "a wordpress"), but something that's the most extreme example of AI-will-replace-this that could possibly exist.
Who will buy this?
The only way this makes sense is as a plea for being acqui-hired (and the project dropped).
I'm reminded of a comedy album, "The First Family", from the 1960s where Bobby Kennedy impersonator wanted to form a new political party. He named it something like "Major Affiliate For an Independent America" (I might have that wrong.) Or the M-A-F-I-A.
He said their first order of business was to change the name of the organization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwu8S6Ekx9w
EDIT: I'm not positive that's the correct album but have a good laugh anyway.
But you also get an idea of the average reading skill of people based on the top 3 comments: "I don't want a replacement for Git!"
I'm not blaming anyone, or maybe both the readers and the authors.
People now write something that could've been published as a short story 30 years ago, for something that could be a paragraph in length, detailing their emotional state, minute background information, their hopes and dreams.
The adaptive response to this by humans and society is to read the headline and ignore the prose, as the prose is so god damn long.
"Gitbutler is a UI for Git" would've been more suitable than hype about replacing git.
I don't know the answer, but I think it could easily be three times as good and I would still stick with git
Another take I've seen is https://agentrepo.com/, which is light-weighted hosted git that's easy for agents to use (no accounts, no API keys, public repos are free). There are large parts of the GitHub experience I'm no longer using (mostly driving from Claude), so I think this is an interesting take.
1. git is not going away 2. git UX is not great
So i appreciate their effort to manage development better as agents make it possible to churn out multiple features and refactors at once.
BUT, I reject this premise:
3. Humans will review the code
As agents make it possible to do so much more code (even tens of files sucks to review, even if it’s broken into tiny PRs), I don’t want to be the gatekeeper at the code review level.
I’d rather some sort of policy or governance tooling that bullies code to follow patterns I’ve approved, and force QA to a higher abstraction or downstream moment (tests?)
4. GitButler is a terrible name for this
5. No one will use the "but" command over "git"
6. The founder needs to learn to enunciate the name of his new product better
And also, your central premise is exactly right. The solution to agents and humans working faster will not be better manual oversight of what they're doing. It's like missing the most important principle of agentic development. Supervise, don't gatekeep.
Alternatively I had the idea of something that automatically syncs your current working progress similar to how Word and Excel autosave work. With a main "branch" thats never developed in and will only be merged into from synced streams. But that idea is nowhere near cooked out yet.
Git CLI with flowers and unicorns.
Is this what gets funded nowadays? I really hope for a gigantic mega crash of all the IT companies. This industry deserves it like none other.
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.
git is distributed. Decentralised improvement. Local computers and their users make changes. These steps of local added value are then centrally combined into a shared timeline. A single product. During the improvement the locus of control is local. Which means it is hard to harvest the knowledge of this local knowledge and replace it. And it's hard to make local users serve the central AI.
Not something you put in the public mission statement. Because you might get boycotts.
GitButler came about many years ago because I have been using Git for almost the full 20 years of it being around and I thought there could be a better way to do the things it's trying to solve for us. I want version control to do more for us, easier, faster and smarter. Git is still pretty dumb. Plus, now, everything in the dev workflow is changing - it's an interesting problem to think about what a _great_ toolset for how we'll all soon be developing software will be.
As a _single_ example - agents can't use interactive editors, yet _so many_ of the powerful parts of Git absolutely _require_ it. Agents can't interactively rebase, meaning they can't very effectively squash, amend, reword, reorder, absorb. They can't very easily interactively add. They are middling at best when it comes to stacking branches. Git is designed to send patches over email and agents are not concerned with that.
I would love to debate all of the lessons learned about the history of Git, but I was around for all of that. I know why Git was started, I know what it was meant to do, I understand how it's evolved. I still think there are a lot of interesting things that we could have in our change control tooling and Git is not the perfect solution.
Nearly everyone in this thread suffers from the same basic local maxima blindness that you do. Git is great, GitHub made it more valuable. But maybe the answer to the papercuts we've constantly been dealing with for decades isn't faster horses. (To, you know, mix metaphors)
I think that's something I don't want to imagine
I guess I can overcome the "what if I cannot undo" anxiety.
[1] https://getcook.dev [2] lazygit
https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/operation...
and git's reflog:
App itself for Windows won't proceed past my selected repo. Said something about bad permissions, but I use that repo every day.
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.
With a box of scraps!
I'm curious what their long term vision they pitched investors is.
> We are creating not only a new kind of Git client,
Nope, not going to be the tool of the future.
The fundamental problem is it is still based on git.
Till this addresses submodules and makes them a first class citizen it's just tooling on top of a VCS that still ONLY supports single project thinking.
Im curious when it will be “SO BAD” we start blocking every AI agent on firewall level.
But then it's the github cofounder- well, github did add a lot of stuff onto git I didn't know I needed, so I'm curious.
Pound foolish and folly
The Github PR flow is second nature to me, almost soothing.
But it's also entirely unnecessary and sometimes even limiting to the agent.
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.
If you want to come AFTER Git... you need to not use Git.
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.
Sus.
Well, I think it won't
does not takeaway the interest and funding they are able to bring. raising money is not always a bad thing, if say, there will be a webapp to go alongside their approach to workflows.
Easier Git doesn't translate into something I can get my boss to pay for.
Drop the “fundamentally”.
“It’s cleaner that way.”
We’re building the infrastructure for how software gets built next."
Dude, aside from this type of phrasing being cringe, it's such blatantly obvious LLM induced psychosis phrase... ridiculous.
I didn't even read that insanely long article explaining why one would need this (the necessity should have rang one or two bells for the author)... but all i could think of before reading that cringe ending, was: you're building what comes after git, but carry "git" in your name seems kinda odd... already revealing you either don't believe your own claims, or you do, but don't really mean what you're claiming... either way: WTF. Insane what's getting funded.
Also: the trend of companies overly feeling the need to explain they're not just X + AI (which also means LLM API), should really ring a lot of other bells to everyone else... god damn, too many bells to ring... and it seems like there is only AI chatbots left, that respond to anyone ringing the bell... god damn... they already took over & infected the human brain...
buthub has a nice ring to it
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.
No thanks.
Was their series A pitch also written by llm?
Quite an understatement. I'm pretty sure GitHub is the primary reason that Git took off like it did.
Refreshing. I am so tired of the usual PR-approved phrases that you read in every announcement.
Other than that, I agree with other comments: not sure what Git's problem is, and what they are supposed to solve. Star Wars' "it's a trap" vibes.
Like all I see here is "We want to build a fence around git and then charge you to go through it." I mean this as kindly as I can mean it: no thank you.
Git has issues, but it works pretty well once you learn it and it's basically universal. Will be hard to dislodge.
> 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.
Oh boy. Thanks for the nightmares.
These people seem to think that their "added value" was the selling point of their product... they appear to believe that some bad things are actually good and desirable, like, for example:
> Heck, it could be argued that development in teams is less social than it was when version control was centralized.
> But what if coding was actually social? What if it was easier to for a team to work together than it is to work alone?
This reeks of open-space floor office plan all over again! When some HR managers decided that programmers need all to sit in the same room the size of a basketball court and that would somehow help them work together better...
Programming is absolutely an individual activity first, where communication helps, but in order to be helpful the communicating parties have to have an initial internal process that refines the messages s.a. not to waste the other party's time. In practice, productive communication may happen once a day... up to once a week maybe? Maybe even less frequently? Git, as it is, is perfectly fine for this.
> Ok, that’s the simple case, pretty straightforward. However, GitButler can also do some pretty cool things that Git either cannot do or struggles with, namely:
> Having multiple active branches that you can work on in parallel.
I'll check out the same Git repository in different directories and will have this ability... maybe also add the second checkout as a remote to the first... but the number of times I've done it in two decades of working with Git is... maybe two? This is an extremely unusual need. I think, I've done this when migrating from multiple repositories into a monorepo and I had to somehow reorganize the history of multiple repositories so that it would make sense together. Definitely not a task for every day, not even every year.
The whole follow-up demonstration of parallel branches is just... Why on earth would I ever want to do that? Why would I want to work in such a way that I commit changes to different branches at (roughly) the same time? It's kind of like stashing changes, but, stashing is the byproduct of "bad planning": I wanted to do one thing, and accidentally did another... oh well, let's save the change somewhere temporarily! But, ideally, I want this to happen as little as possible. Not because it's inconvenient to deal with stashed changes, but because I will very quickly lose track of what goes where, why any particular branch exists etc.
Similarly, for the stacked branches: I absolutely don't want this functionality to exist... if it was already in Git, I'd request that it never be used. This complicates the mental model of what is even possible in the repository and creates some nightmare fuel scenarios: what happens if you stack them sequentially? What happens if you stack many branches on the same branch, and then want to rebase one of the stacked branches? What happens if you rebase the branch on which other branches are stacked? What happens if you delete the branch on which other branches are stacked? Does the stacked branch have to exist in the local checkout, or could it come from a remote?
It's absolutely the case where simple is better (I'd never imagine I'd call Git simple, but here we are).
I can't imagine what the workflow of people who want these changes must look like. I can't imagine why would anyone want to copy that kind of a workflow.
But even with all the Git tooling under my belt, I seem to have all but concluded that Git's simplicity is its biggest strength but also not a small weakness. I wish I didn't have to account for the fact that Git stores snapshots (trees), after all -- _not_ patch-files it shows or differences between the former. Rebasing creates copies or near-copies and it's impossible to isolate features from the timeline their development intertwines with. Changes in Git aren't commutative, so when my human brain naively things I could "pick" features A, B, and C for my next release, ideally with bugfixes D, E and F too, Git just wants me a single commit, except that the features and/or bugfixes may not all neatly lie along a single shared ancestral stem, so either merging is non-trivial (divergence of content compounded with time) or I solve it by assembling the tree _manually_ and using `git commit-tree` to just not have to deal with the more esoteric merge strategies. All these things _do_ tell me there is something "beyond Git" but it's just intuition, so maybe I am just stupid (or too stupid for Git)?
I started looking at [Pijul](https://pijul.org/) a while ago, but I feel like a weirdo who found a weird thing noone is ever going to adopt because it's well, weird. I thought relying on a "theory of patches" was more aligned with how I thought a VCS may represent a software project in time, but I also haven't gotten far with Pijul yet. It's just that somewhere between Git and Pijul, somewhere there is my desired to find a better VCS [than Git], and I suspect I am not the only one -- hence the point of the article, I guess.
Leave Git alone.
It’s 17m for a tool which hopes to serve companies and charge money and make more than 17m in profit as a result.
If you look at the set of dev tooling, teams will frequently pay many hundreds per dev on things like CI, Git tools, code review, etc.
And to be fair, GitHub is really quite bad for a lot of workflows. I haven’t used gitbutler, but my team pays ~$30 a month per dev for tools which literally just provide a nicer interface for stacking PRs, because it saves us WAY more than that in time.
This isn’t even an egregious example of VC, it’s just an enterprise dev tooling bet.
Use value != sales value; hype sells.
Ps. not too sure how far $17M gets you toward mini nuclear power plants, but I catch your drift.
What’s the problem?
Do you think less money should be going into VC?
Just some numbers ~1.5M housing units are built in the US with an approx cost of $300k - $400k. That is $450B to $600B going into housing units construction every year.
On the other hand VC has maybe $1T AUM in the US. Maybe 10%-20% of that is deployed every year? So $100b to $200B.
What is wrong with that ratio? Could there be better solutions to make more housing cheaper? (lower regulations, efficient permitting, etc)
Money moving from VC to housing seems without a first principled approach on what problem your solving and how is silly.
There's gobs of amazing technology being built by people who just love to build, have great ideas, and huge talent (now exponentially compounded by LLM assistance, even) -- and 99% of it is ignored by people with $$ and none of them will be paid to work on these things -- let alone get funded to build a business around them -- and the reason isn't the inadequacy of the technology or "lack of a workable business plan": it's lack of social connections or pedigree.
And what this tells me is two things
1. there's a fundamentally sickness to the VC culture coming out of Silicon Valley and it's gotten worse not better with the new restraints in the post-ZIRP era. It's an echo chamber and a social circle, not a means for creating new profitable companies or good infrastructure, and it serves mainly just to feed a pipeline of acquisitions into much bigger fish rather than building tomorrow's new businesses or ideas. This is very different from 80s, 90s tech culture that I grew up in.
2. there's clearly a desperate need for more actual incubators or labs for actual technology, paying people to build "good stuff" independent of the vagaries of what VCs and their ivy league friends are able to pitch.
Frankly: The $$ out there in heavy circulation has been mostly corrosive, not helpful.
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.
Today, with English, we're all teaching swarms of agents to use a language built from scraps of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon Old English. That's far from what is needed today.
But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has roughly the same priority as “try out a more exciting shower gel”. But did you ever step on a LEGO brick while walking to the bathroom at night? That pain is immediately obvious.
Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?
It reminds me how the Bohemian Club’s slogan, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is a bit farcical given that it is impossible for the club members not to engage in commerce.
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.
Because solving problems isn’t the goal, the goal is money (and sometimes a little fame) with the least possible effort, and software can be changed on a whim and is very cheap to manufacture and distribute and “fix in flight”, it’s the perfect vehicle for those who are impatient and don’t really care about understanding and studying a need.
People complaining about investors throwing stupid sums of money at stupid or trivial things unrelated (or only marginally related) to AI? ...sounds to me like the first glimpse of hope I have come across in this industry for half a decade.
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.
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.
The world doesn’t need this. It would just be more plastic and electronic trash.
You and your kids have hands. Pick them up. It’s what we do in my house.
If you don’t have hands, use your feet.
That said, if you ever decide solve the tidying the toys problem, start a kickstarter, I pledge to pledge support! :D
I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.
Irony of thr market is, just like tinder 20% of the companies attract all the attention rest of them try to gran the attention. Those who need capital get the capital, those who need the capital die trying.
Enough friday pessimisim.
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.
They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".
I just looked into this out of idle curiosity, after watching some guy build a LEGO sorting machine. (They work in a warehouse that sells used bricks for model builders.)
Interestingly, this is on the cusp of viability, but training the ML model would still be cost-prohibitive (for me). With $17M, it's within reach, but there's still the obvious mechanical hurdles: Kids don't disassemble their Lego, the conditions are "less than ideal", and even vibrating belts in a warehouse scenario have a lot of trouble keeping bricks separated for the camera to get a clear image.
Robot hands are nowhere near the point where they can reliably (or even unreliably!) take apart two arbitrary Lego bricks that are joined, let alone anything of even mild complexity. This is hard for most humans, and often requires the use of tools! See: https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/help-topics/article/lego-...
The machine vision part is... getting there! You could pull some clever tricks with modern hardware such as bright LED lights, multi-spectral or even hyper-spectral sensors, etc. The algorithms have improved a lot also. Early attempts could only recognise a few dozen distinct shapes, and the most recent models a few hundred, but they're about 2-3 years old, which means "stone ages".
A trick several Lego recognition model training runs used was to photo realistically render 3D models of bricks in random orientations and every possible color, which is far faster than manually labelling photos of real bricks.
These days you could use the NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to heavily accelerate and automate this.
Solving actual problems are hard, and even harder to get money for (see research). Most VC’s are in it for the returns only, not actually making a change, there are some exceptions but they are far and few apart.
Because that’s too risky for investors.
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).
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.
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
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
Well, cofounding Github helps
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.
Just write down how you'll spend the money to make that, what it'll eventually cost to produce, what the market size will be, and what the price will be, and if it's enough return you can easily convince someone to give you $17m to do it all.
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.
We've strayed really far from where technical innovation began
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.
Why are we trying to replace git? What is the problem with git?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toy-Storage-Organizer-Lego-Play/dp/...
For example, instead of building a robot to pick up Lego bricks, say you’re building a platform for personal robotics, and it’ll cook you food, do your laundry, repair your fridge. It doesn’t matter if you have any idea how to do this, just say you need $50M and you’ll hire some robotics and vision guys to figure it out. The bigger and bolder the lie, the better.
I mean who tf gives some small team millions to put some Nvidia GPU into space and thinking we will have market disrupting GPU clusters in space in 10 years?!
There are so many low hanging fruits in IT Industry to just being solved.
Even just having something like well build, open smart home products whould have been disruptive years ago (until someone like ikea decides to enter that space).
All you need is a camera pointing at the floor with image detection... when there's legos on the floor it triggers a video playing that explains how the kids need to pick up the legos. /s
Let me just state the obvious. Of all the major problems of society, sorting legos isn't one. If you disagree, try emerging from the cellar.
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.