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We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
- hakube 5mo agoThat money could've gone to something useful instead of building "git but better"
- maxehmookau 5mo agoOk, ok, if you give me $16M I'll do it faster.
- ddtaylor 5mo agoRaising a bunch of money to recreate the wheel.
- BIG-TRVKE 5mo ago[flagged]
- al_borland 5mo agoI like what I see in the video, it would solve a lot of problems I end up having with git. That said, I find the branding confusing. They say this is what comes after git, but in the name and the overall functionality, seems to just be an abstraction on top of git, not a new source control tool to replace git.
- f33d5173 5mo agoIsn't that jj? Hopefully no one tells the VCs.
- stavros 5mo agoWhich version control system should we not tell?
- dietr1ch 5mo agoTo 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.
- tormeh 5mo agoPijul? Git has issues, but it works pretty well once you learn it and it's basically universal. Will be hard to dislodge.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- MBCook 5mo agoWhy 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 5mo agoApparently 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.
- irjustin 5mo agoI'm not sure if I should take these comments seriously or as a joke...
- bee_rider 5mo agoOn 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 5mo agoYeah, it's really burying the lede to call Linus Torvalds "one guy with a chip on his shoulder". "Why fund $17M towards development of an operating system, when Linux was made by one guy with a chip on his shoulder?"
- Orygin 5mo agoWhile he's technically excellent (or so it seems on the outside) he's still just, like, a guy
- paradox460 5mo agoZaphod iz just zis guy, you know
- alexpadula 5mo agoRather confusing, your name has Git in it, “to build what comes after git”, what comes after your own Git product? Good luck.
- monooso 5mo agoClearly butler comes after git.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 5mo agoTo all the salty people- the person cofounded GitHub. It's not the product that raised 17M, it's the person.
- petesergeant 5mo agoI was going to be snarky, but Scott Chacon is a serious person, so we'll see!
- pistoriusp 5mo agoScott is brilliant, funny, and kind, and maybe he could be serious if he ever needed to be serious... But I've never seen that in him.
- schacon 5mo agoI'm seriously funny...
- gen2brain 5mo agoHe is Super Cereal.
- clusmore 5mo agoThe issue is that the investors will want a return on that $17M at some point, so they're going to need to charge money for something eventually. If the revenue model is not obvious now, that only means they'll be pressured into something non-obvious later.
- fxtentacle 5mo agoI 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?
- hsaliak 5mo agoI've long had the same idea.. this one has legs.
- skyberrys 5mo agoHasn't someone already built that robot? At least my kids tell me this exists every time I tell them to clean up their Legos. Actually it just does Legos, not the general toys.
- noosphr 5mo agoI for one can't wait for open Ai to buy them and reroute every git commit to chatgpt.
- bee_rider 5mo agoI 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.
- ngc248 5mo ago"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
- anishgupta 5mo agoGitHub CEO also raised 60M for 'entire' to bring agent context to git. The dust is yet to settle here as it's difficult to bring a paridgm shift from today's git workflows
- Meleagris 5mo agoI recently switched to Jujutsu (jj) and it made me realize that “what comes after Git” might already exist. It turns out the snapshot model is a perfect fit for AI-assisted development. I can iterate freely without thinking about commits or worrying about saving known-good versions. You can just mess around and make it presentable later, which Git never really let you do nicely. Plus there’s essentially zero learning curve, since all the models know how to use JJ really well.
- orbifold 5mo agois there a jj hosting service?
- imron 5mo agoAny service that hosts git?
- bkolobara 5mo agoWe are working on something https://lubeno.dev https://lubeno.dev
- Vinnl 5mo agoLooks like still a bit early for me, but if you add an RSS feed to your blog, I would at least be reminded to check it out again later :)
- boxed 5mo agoIsn't jj git compatible so you can just use github?
- nchmy 5mo agoYes.
- colinmarc 5mo agoI know of one: https://lubeno.dev https://lubeno.dev
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- yellow_lead 5mo agoI thought gitbutler was not a great name, but then I saw their CLI command name is "but"
- charlesfries 5mo agoI'd like to see some kind of "whitespace aware" smart diff in whatever comes after git
- jauco 5mo agoUse difftastic. You can do so with current git :)
- saint_yossarian 5mo agoThere's `git diff -w`, and most forges expose a setting for that in their diff views.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agoyou can literally plug in any diff program you like into git and even make it extension-aware
- jillesvangurp 5mo agoWhy are investors still investing in SAAS products like this? I've heard some investors made rather blunt statements about such investments being a very hard sell to them at this point. Clearly somebody believes differently here. We have AI now. AI tools are pretty handy with Git. I've not manually resolved git conflicts in months now. That's more or less a solved problem for me. Mostly codex creates and manages pull requests for me. I also have it manage my GitHub issues on some projects. For some things, I also let it do release management with elaborate checklists, release prep, and driving automation for package deployment via github actions triggered via tags, and then creating the gh release and attaching binaries. In short, I just give a thumbs up and all the right things happen. To be blunt, I think a SAAS service that tries to make Git nicer to use is a going to be a bit redundant. I don't think AI tools really need that help. Or a git replacement. And people will mostly be delegating whatever it is they still do manually with Git pretty soon. I've made that switch already because I'm an early adopter. And because I'm lazy and it seems AI is more disciplined at following good practices and process than I am.
- esafak 5mo agoIf you think like that why invest in software at all; the AI will do everything? Does AI make reading or writing stacked PRs any nicer? No, it does not.
- Aperocky 5mo agoIt does though.. you don't have agents that can connect to github or wherever your git mirrors are and comment on PRs?
- steelbrain 5mo agoThe source code is hosted on Github: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/gitbutler 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 5mo agoI'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 5mo ago> I am tired of using and waiting for alternatives of, Github. Are you interested in giving https://tangled.org https://tangled.org a try? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
- everybodyknows 5mo agoI can't see any significant difference between their "Operations Log": https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/operations-log https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/operation... and git's reflog: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reflog https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reflog
- tiffanyh 5mo agoA 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 5mo agoI 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 5mo agoAnother 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713650
- oofbey 5mo agoAgreed. Although I’m not sure what’s nicer about it. It’s in color. But I failed to understand why I’d want any of those features.
- Sharlin 5mo ago> We need a solution to all these 10k loc PRs. One of the most idiotic things about the whole LLM craze is the idea that we have to change all of our infrastructure to accommodate LLMs instead of figuring out how to train LLMs to make better commits.
- jgauth 5mo agoMakes 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- politelemon 5mo agoThe 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 5mo agoYes, I think that “after git” claim is just marketing. This is indeed just a nice frontend to git. It looks interesting and seems to solve real problems, in the same way that jj already does. But it is not a radical change. Also if they really wanted to “replace git” I think that would be much more difficult due to network effects. Everybody is already using git.
- hdgvhicv 5mo agoLinus built git in an afternoon with $17 for snacks
- padjo 5mo agoIt was the early 2000s though, $17 got you like a weeks worth of snacks back then.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoWhy this and not jujutsu, pijul or sapling? These are all version control systems that are better than git in various ways.
- operatingthetan 5mo agoThis is is made for AI or ... something.
- aleksanb 5mo agoLinus Torvalds was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!
- ultrablack 5mo agoFor $17 milion there are few thibga without any gui that i couldnt build.
- olalonde 5mo ago> 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 5mo agoCould be I live in a bubble, but I don't use git because of GitHub or with GitHub that much. No doubt, GitHub is/was great for distributing software but I feel we'd still all be using git without GitHub
- olalonde 5mo agoPractically no one was using Git before GitHub (except Linux). Subversion was much more widespread.
- NateEag 5mo agoSubversion was (and is) an admirable project, and filled a void by being much better than CVS. When I discovered git, I couldn't go back to svn - git fit my mind _so_ much better. It might not have seen the meteoric rise without GitHub, but just like it's weird to find servers running an OS other than Linux these years, I suspect there would have been a steady growth that eventually made it dominant. I suspect it will be very hard to unseat git at this point - for all its untuitive UI it's good enough for most things, and it's been slowly improving for the use cases where it's weak.
- olalonde 5mo agoSure, my point was simply that many people discovered Git because of GitHub.
- pu_pe 5mo agoI 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 5mo agoIdk 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 5mo ago> 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 5mo agoWhat 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 5mo agoFor 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 :)
- hmontazeri 5mo agoi 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
- nottorp 5mo agoHumm 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.
- rsanheim 5mo agoWow. 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 5mo agoThere is nothing inherently special about the straw that breaks the camel's back.
- operatingthetan 5mo agoWhy do they need $17m to build this? Vibe code it in a couple weeks, ship it.
- love2read 5mo agoNothing in this project looks vibecoded. I compel you to try vibecoding this in a couple weeks if you think it’s possible, and then after that to build a business out of it. If the only thing stopping you is the code, you should give it a try.
- pjmalandrino 5mo agoWow, very impressive, great job! You mentioned monitoring, I think it might be a very interesting way to see the "ongoing" work of your agents and orchestrate them. Do you have a precise idea on how it's going to happen, or is this already planned?
- cocodill 5mo agoThere is only a tiny final step left, a real piece of cake, to build the thing.
- fuzzy2 5mo agoDunno what they’re trying to build, but I encourage everyone to try what they already have built. It helps me work on multiple changesets in parallel. This often just happens, for example you work on something and discover a bug in something else that needs to be fixed. In GitButler, I can just create another branch, drag the changes in there, push and done. Also, if you ever worked with Perforce, you might be familiar with changelists. It’s kind of like that. Now, GitButler is by no means perfect. There are many rough edges. It tends to get stuck in unexpected states and sometimes it isn’t easy to rectify this. It also cannot split changes in a single file, which is a bummer, because that’s something I encounter routinely. But I understand this complicates the existing model tremendously.
- voidUpdate 5mo agoIs 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
- loveparade 5mo agoI 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.
- bob1029 5mo agoGit is pretty close to ideal for the distributed model. I think the real money is in figuring out a centralized model that doesn't suck. Explicitly locking things has certain advantages. Two people working on the same file at the same time is often cursed in some way even if a merge is technically possible. Especially if it's a binary asset. Someone is going to lose all of their work if we have a merge conflict on a png file. It would be much better to know up front that the file is locked by some other artist on the team.
- TRCat 5mo agoI was skeptical at first, but then I watched the video and it really looks interesting. I wonder if this works with Azure DevOps?
- johntopia 5mo agogitbutler is actually a great product tbh
- nikolay 5mo agoThe 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 5mo agoJust a reminder that even if you managed to amend those commits and force-push, the commits would still exist and will be addressable given the hash is known.
- Orygin 5mo agoCan't they be purged if they are dangling and the housekeeping is ran?
- ivanjermakov 5mo agohttps://stackoverflow.com/a/47771133/8662097 https://stackoverflow.com/a/47771133/8662097
- password4321 5mo agorelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41060102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41060102 Anyone can access deleted and private repository data on GitHub
- mauzybwy 5mo agoCouldn’t you expire the reflog entry and prune the db to remove it entirely?
- nikolay 5mo agoI am fully aware of that. Rewriting commits of code already pushed to production with container images, etc., is just crazy. And GitHub charges an arm and a leg for Advanced Security. And it ignored my pre-commit Git hooks, which include GitLeaks.
- admiralrohan 5mo agoThey need to have a dedicated page explaining me why should I change my current workflow. Else I don't get the point.
- farouqjalabi 5mo agohttps://docs.gitbutler.com/why-gitbutler https://docs.gitbutler.com/why-gitbutler
- admiralrohan 5mo agoThanks for sharing. Parallel git branching seems to be a useful feature for me, given AI agents can be used work on multiple features at same time.
- tmountain 5mo agoI 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 5mo agoBingo
- IshKebab 5mo agoGit is fine. I would like something better than fine though, especially for dealing with rebase/merge conflicts where I would say Git is mediocre.
- a-french-anon 5mo agoWell, yeah, but Git is basically UNIX/POSIX or JPEG. Good enough to always win against better like Plan 9 or JPEG XL (though I think this one may win in the long term).
- k4rli 5mo agoWhat 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 5mo agoRust! it’s written in rust and not javascript!!!!
- dare944 5mo agoLol. Unfortunately VCs and ever-so-ernest founders are impervious to irony. Best to just let them get their grift on and just be happy it isn't your money they're boondoggling.
- foota 5mo agoSome others mentioned pijul, but I will put in my two cents about it. I have been looking to make use of it because it seems really nice for working with an agent. Essentially you get patches that are independently and can be applied anywhere instead of commits. If there is ambiguity applying a patch then you have to resolve it, but that resolution is sort of a first class object.
- pjmlp 5mo agoGood luck with that, I would still be using subversion if given the choice.
- 999900000999 5mo agoHow do you intend to make money ? Easier Git doesn't translate into something I can get my boss to pay for.
- burnerRhodov2 5mo ago$17m to replace git with but. no fucking way
- orthecreedence 5mo ago> We've raised $17M to build something like git and bait-and-switch it later because VCs only exist to extract value and anything we end up building will be a shadow of a fart of how useful git actually is FTFY. I don't understand how anyone could think to replace git by raising money. The only way to truly do this is grassroots iteration. You can build the software, but the distribution will never reach the same network size as git before your investors start asking "When do I get my return?" > Imagine your tools telling you as soon as there are possible merge conflicts between teammates, rather than at the end of the process. So you're centralizing a fully distributed process because grepping for "<<<<<<<" and asking your teammate the best way to merge is too hard? I thought coding was supposed to be social? I mean, honestly, go for it and build what you want. I'm all for it! But maybe don't compare it to git. It's tone deaf.
- conartist6 5mo ago> I don't understand how anyone could think to replace git by raising money. The only way to truly do this is grassroots iteration. Yeah, that is also my take. I'm biased of course since I'm someone working on replacing git through grassroots iteration, but I've been around this block a few times though and I never saw blasting money at a problem produce real innovation.
- callamdelaney 5mo agoApparently what comes after git is git
- solidarnosc 5mo agoThat's a lot of money for something very much not necessary... I'm in the wrong business!
- ekjhgkejhgk 5mo agoI refuse to use anything other than git for versioning.
- thiht 5mo agoStandard is better than better. For all of its flaws, I’ll take Git any day over any (better) alternative, because the value is in the absence of fragmentation. If a repo doesn’t use Git, I’m out.
- aoshifo 5mo agoRemind me, how much venture capital did Linus need to raise for building git?
- hk__2 5mo agoLinus didn’t build git. He built a proof of concept and then handed it over to real maintainers that wrote real code.
- aoshifo 5mo agoFair enough, but he created it and I don't know the names of the real maintainers (sorry). And I don't think these two are writing the code for GitButler tbh. Anyhow, main point still stands: git is used by millions with no venture capital funding.
- grugdev42 5mo agoNo. Just no. Leave Git alone.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- znnajdla 5mo agoI continue to be amazed at American capital allocation. $17M for an idea to improve Git? For a fraction of that money Ukrainian housewives build anti-drone air defence systems in their garage that protect their country. For that kind of money you could build an apartment block to ease the housing shortage. You could invest in electricity resilience and build mini nuclear power plants or a small wind farm. Soviet capital allocation: while they were pouring money into their space program and building the "biggest baddest military helicopters" there wasn't enough bread in grocery stores.
- foxglacier 5mo agoYou'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 5mo agoBack 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 5mo ago> For every unicorn there are tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands dead horses... Nicely put!
- OtomotO 5mo agoAnd it was 100% natural (un)intelligence. No "AI" involved! :) So thanks, I take this compliment. You just made my day!
- foxglacier 5mo agoThere are dead horses and unicorns, which turns out to be better than just living horses and no unicorns like Ukraine and Europe are more like.
- factorialboy 5mo agoInstalled GitButler to try it out — and realized it installs malicious Git hooks to take over the git commit workflow: * pre-commit — The malicious one. It intercepted every `git commit` attempt and aborted it with that error message, forcing you to use `but commit` instead. Effectively a commit hijack — no way to commit to your own repo without their tool. * post-checkout — Fired whenever you switched branches. GitButler used it to track your branch state and sync its virtual branch model. It cleaned this one up itself when we checked out. * There's also typically a prepare-commit-msg hook that GitButler installs to inject its metadata into commit messages, though we didn't hit that one. * The pre-commit hook is the aggressive one — it's a standard git hook location, so git runs it unconditionally before every commit. GitButler installs it silently as part of "setting up" a repo, with no opt-in. The only escape (without their CLI) is exactly what we did: delete it manually.
- ivanjermakov 5mo agoSo they decided to start "embrace, extend, and extinguish" directly with with "extinguish".
- factorialboy 5mo agoPretty much, yes.
- schacon 5mo agoJust to clarify (and we do say this when you run `but setup`), the `pre-commit` hook is needed because of the way that we manage commits - we allow for multiple parallel applied branches, which Git cannot do. The way we accomplish this is to maintain a hidden 'megamerge' commit (as JJ would say). All Git commands work fine the way we're doing it except 'git commit', which is not aware of our operating model and will commit on top of our megamerge, which is problematic. So we install pre-commit to protect against getting yourself in a poor situation by using both Git and GitButler interchangeably. It's not difficult to "escape" - using `git checkout` will tear everything down properly - that's the only task of the `post-checkout` - to determine that you want to go back to using vanilla git commit tooling and remove our shims. We also don't have a prepare-commit-msg hook - our commit tooling will inject an extra Change-Id header (of the same format and interchangeable with Jujutsu) but that affects nothing that vanilla git cares about.
- danpalmer 5mo agojj is what comes after git. It can back on to git if you want, so a migration doesn't have to be all-at-once. It already has all of these features and more. It's stable, fast, very extensible. jj truly is the future of version control, whereas git plus some loosely specified possibly proprietary layer is not. I'm excited to see what ersc.io produces for a jj hosting service and hopefully review UI.
- throwaway290 5mo agoTL;DR we decided git needs more "ai" and we got money thrown at us!
- latexr 5mo ago> I know what you’re thinking. You’re hoping that we’ll use phrases such as “we’re excited,” “this is just the beginning,” and “AI is changing everything”. While all those things are true Superbly tone deaf. The only people who might possibly want to read that are those already drinking your Kool-Aid, most everyone else can already smell the bullshit.
- schacon 5mo agoAh, I see. You missed the part where that was funny.
- hanwenn 5mo agoIs anyone from GitButler reading this? As others alluded, JJ already exists and is a credible successor to Git for the client side. Technical desides aside though: how is this supposed to make money for the investors?
- ojura 5mo agoMmmh. git is perfect as it is. It does one thing and does it really well: version control. Exact bits that go in come out. And it reconciles different versions and handles transferring them to remotes. The need for exactly this is not ever going away, and its ubiquity proves that Linus nailed something that is truly fundamental. This is like saying we need a new alphabet because of AI. That is VC hype, even if it comes from a Github founder.
- tankenmate 5mo agoAs long as this tool doesn't break "fast forward merge" and proper linear history and allows you do delete PRs unlike its GitHub progenitor then I'm happy. I have found that a number of times GitHub's idea of "convenient" comes either from 1) not understanding git fundamentals such that it closes off possible workflows, or 2) pushing a philosophy on users, i.e. I know better than you, so I'm going to block you.
- red_admiral 5mo agoI'm still not convinced we need a replacement for git. > The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow. Um, there's more than one flow out there? Feature branches are usually "one person, lots of branches, squish at the end". Since when is Git linear? Some of them even come with their own scripts or GUIs. I'm even less convinced that something that's raised $17M already will provide a free-as-in-beer solution.
- kshri24 5mo agoGreat! Instead of solving actual problems we are seeing funding for stuff we don't need.
- dhruv3006 5mo agoGithub fallout effect?
- ltbarcly3 5mo ago"We are going to spend $17M and have nothing to show for it"
- rohitpaulk 5mo agoMost of the comments here are clearly from people who haven't used GitButler. Try it out and it's a very sticky product, clearly superior workflow to vanilla Git.
- jumploops 5mo agoI 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.
- mhh__ 5mo agoImproving something that basically everyone uses is obviously worth money
- secondcoming 5mo ago> 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
- weedhopper 5mo agoThe amount of ~skepticism~ hate is astounding here!! People don’t even acknowledge that it’s written in RUST!!!!
- philipwhiuk 5mo agoThe lesson is quite simple... don't over promise in the title.
- momocowcow 5mo agoBlog post written by llm. No thanks. Was their series A pitch also written by llm?
- schacon 5mo agoI would like to take this opportunity to kindly inform you that I wrote that post, as I write all of the blog posts on our blog (and everywhere else I write). You will never see something with my name on it that was written by AI. Thanks.
- qwery 5mo agoFirst off, I'm of course interested to see what the future infrastructure of software building next looks like. > The hard problem is not generating change, it’s organizing, reviewing, and integrating change without creating chaos. Sure, writing some code isn't the bottleneck. Glossed over is the part where the developer determines what changes to make, which in my experience is the most significant cost during development and it dwarfs anything to do with version control. You can spend a lot of energy on the organising, reviewing, patching, etc. stuff -- and you should be doing some amount of this, in most situations -- but if you're spending more of your development budget on metaprojects than you think you should be, I don't think optimising the metatooling is going to magically resolve that. Address the organisational issues first. > This is what we’re doing at GitButler, this is why we’ve raised the funding to help build all of this, faster. The time constraint ("faster") is, of course, entirely self-imposed for business reasons. There's no reason to expect that 'high cost + high speed' is the best or even a good way to build this sort of tooling, or anything else, for that matter. Git's UI has become increasingly friendly over a very long time of gradual improvements. Yes, Mercurial was pretty much ideal out of the gate, but the development process in that case was (AFAIK) a world away from burning money and rushing to the finish. Maybe going slow is better?
- 0xy4sh 5mo agoMakes sense. Git solved versioning, not collaboration at scale. Most real pain today is juggling context across PRs, tools, and now agents not writing code.
- hotgeart 5mo agoGit just works. If you're not really familiar with it, you can use a free UI. If you don't know anything about it, AI like ChatGPT or Claude can help you commit or even teach you Git. If you raise money for this project, you probably intend to make money in the near future. I don’t think anyone here wants ads on Git or to argue with a manager to get the premium version of GitButler just because you reached the commit limit. These $17M should go to the Git maintainers.
- love2read 5mo agoGit does not ‘just work’, hence the creations of jj and every git wrapper cli/ui in the past N years with serious traction (>100).
- nacozarina 5mo agoIs $17M private equity enough to poison the initiative? Or is software-by-committee still the real project killer? Let’s find out…
- ivanjermakov 5mo agoX is hard to use because when something goes wrong you need to have a deep knowledge to figure it out! Let's build Y on top of X to make this easy! Now you just need to have deep knowledge of both Y and X to figure problems out. And it's gonna cost $17M to build Y. Deal?
- gcr 5mo agojj is rapidly becoming the new standard for post-git VCS in my circles. I’d love to see more startups working on that.
- treeblah 5mo agoClaims about “what comes after git” aside, I really like the idea of virtual branches. Worktrees have a pitfall IMO that they don’t allow you to test changes in a running local env, meaning I need to commit the changes, close the worktree, and checkout the branch on my primary workspace to verify. Gitbutler virtual branches OTOH appear to provide branch independence for agents/commits, while simultaneously allowing me to locally verify all branches together in a single local env. This seems quite a bit nicer than checking out worktree branches in the primary workspace for verification, or trying to re-run local setup in each worktree.
- mblode 5mo agoI created a cli called spotlight-testing to solve this pitfall with worktrees. I hope it helps! https://github.com/mblode/spotlight-testing https://github.com/mblode/spotlight-testing
- hansmayer 5mo ago"Gitbutler", really rolls off the tongue, doesn´t it :) Oh and the irony of raising $17M to "replace" a tool which kinda...does not need replacing at all? How about replacing some of the entshittified services, like Google Workspace? Now that would be worth the $17M raised.
- mort96 5mo agoWhat "comes after Git" is not a proprietary solution developed by a VC-backed company.
- assanineass 5mo ago[dead]
- itsfridaythen 5mo agoThe title is misleading, it's not a git replacement
- itsfridaythen 5mo agoThe title is misleading and click bait perhaps. But you also get an idea of the average reading skill of people based on the top 3 comments: "I don't want a replacement for Git!" I'm not blaming anyone, or maybe both the readers and the authors. People now write something that could've been published as a short story 30 years ago, for something that could be a paragraph in length, detailing their emotional state, minute background information, their hopes and dreams. The adaptive response to this by humans and society is to read the headline and ignore the prose, as the prose is so god damn long. "Gitbutler is a UI for Git" would've been more suitable than hype about replacing git.
- lawgimenez 5mo agoFirst time I heard of gitbutler, is this like gitk? If anyone remembers gitk
- myst 5mo agoBros wanted to work on dev tools. They sold it to VCs as "AI tools" to get easy money. Well played!
- csmantle 5mo agoI failed to see why this would be something that "comes after Git" from a VCS perspective. The line-based diff(1)/diff3(1)/patch(1) kit often works, and that mindset thrives and gets carried till today. Many toolkits and utilities have been designed to make it more ergonomic, and they are good. Jujutsu is an example. We also have different theories and implementations, some even more algebraically sound like Darcs and Pijul. But GitHub the Platform is another story, given that they struggled to achieve 90% availability these days.
- assimpleaspossi 5mo agoGit isn't that old. I find it interesting people want to replace it by big money. Does this say something about the quality of git? Enough people also complain about that. I'm reminded of a comedy album, "The First Family", from the 1960s where Bobby Kennedy impersonator wanted to form a new political party. He named it something like "Major Affiliate For an Independent America" (I might have that wrong.) Or the M-A-F-I-A. He said their first order of business was to change the name of the organization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwu8S6Ekx9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwu8S6Ekx9w EDIT: I'm not positive that's the correct album but have a good laugh anyway.
- michaelashley29 5mo agoI feel like we’re over-capitalizing a problem that could be solved with better protocols. If the "Git successor" is just a wrapper to help agents not hallucinate their own worktrees, it feels like a very expensive solution to a context-window management problem.
- rainmaking 5mo agoI was thinking- why on earth raise 17M for that, it sounds like something you make in a basement with a few friends, if that. But then it's the github cofounder- well, github did add a lot of stuff onto git I didn't know I needed, so I'm curious.
- hackrmn 5mo agoI started using Git around 2008, if memory serves. I have made myself more than familiar with the data model and the "plumbing" layer as they call it, but it was only a year ago -- after more than two decades of using Git, in retrospect -- that a realisation started downing on me that most folks probably have a much easier time with Git than I do, _due_ to them not caring as much about how it works _or_ they just trust the porcelain layer and ignore how "the sausage is made". For me it was always either-or situation -- I still don't trust the high-level switches I discover trawling Git's manpages, unless I understand what the effect is on the _data_ (_my_ data). Conversely, I am very surgical with Git treating it as a RISC processor -- most often at the cost of development velocity, for that reason. It's started to bug me really bad as in my latest employment I am expected to commit things throughout the day, but my way of working just doesn't align with that it seems. I frequently switch context between features or even projects (unrelated to one another by Git), and when someone looks at me waiting for an answer why it takes half a day to create 5 commits I look back at them with the same puzzled look they give me. Neither of us is satisfied. I spend most of the development time _designing_ a feature, then I implement it and occasionally it proves to be a dead-end so everything needs to be scrapped or stashed "for parts", rinse, repeat. At the end of the road developing a feature I often end up with a bunch of unrelated changes -- especially if it's a neglected code base, which isn't out of ordinary in my place of work unfortunately. The unrelated changes must be dealt with, so I am sitting there with diff hunks trying to decide which ones to include, occasionally resorting to hunk _editing_ even. There's a lot of stashing, too. Rebasing is the least of my problems, incidentally (someone said rebasing is hard on Git users), because I know what it is supposed to do (for me), so I deal with it head on and just reduce the whole thing to a series of simpler merge conflict resolution problems. But even with all the Git tooling under my belt, I seem to have all but concluded that Git's simplicity is its biggest strength but also not a small weakness. I wish I didn't have to account for the fact that Git stores snapshots (trees), after all -- _not_ patch-files it shows or differences between the former. Rebasing creates copies or near-copies and it's impossible to isolate features from the timeline their development intertwines with. Changes in Git aren't commutative, so when my human brain naively things I could "pick" features A, B, and C for my next release, ideally with bugfixes D, E and F too, Git just wants me a single commit, except that the features and/or bugfixes may not all neatly lie along a single shared ancestral stem, so either merging is non-trivial (divergence of content compounded with time) or I solve it by assembling the tree _manually_ and using `git commit-tree` to just not have to deal with the more esoteric merge strategies. All these things _do_ tell me there is something "beyond Git" but it's just intuition, so maybe I am just stupid (or too stupid for Git)? I started looking at [Pijul](https://pijul.org/ 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.
- ggrab 5mo agoThere's definitely a need for this, but the underlying reason there's a need for this is so beyond me. I've worked with a lot of Software Engineers over the years, even at FAANG, that didn't have a good technical understanding of git (basically, your repo is a tree structure, most commands are just about manipulating that tree in some way). I mean, just spend the hour to go through a git tutorial. There's so many great ones like the interactive one that shows the tree as you go through the levels. It's your profession. Also, I think another layer on top of Git as this seems to propose won't fix it -- once something non-obvious happens, these people continue to be stuck.
- internet_points 5mo agoJumping on the bandwagon, Magit is raising $$$ to Keep Version Control Magical https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/5555 https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/5555
- dirtbag__dad 5mo agoI watched the demo video on the git butler home page and agree with the premises that: 1. git is not going away 2. git UX is not great So i appreciate their effort to manage development better as agents make it possible to churn out multiple features and refactors at once. BUT, I reject this premise: 3. Humans will review the code As agents make it possible to do so much more code (even tens of files sucks to review, even if it’s broken into tiny PRs), I don’t want to be the gatekeeper at the code review level. I’d rather some sort of policy or governance tooling that bullies code to follow patterns I’ve approved, and force QA to a higher abstraction or downstream moment (tests?)
- secstate 5mo agoI also concluded based on the video: 4. GitButler is a terrible name for this 5. No one will use the "but" command over "git" 6. The founder needs to learn to enunciate the name of his new product better And also, your central premise is exactly right. The solution to agents and humans working faster will not be better manual oversight of what they're doing. It's like missing the most important principle of agentic development. Supervise, don't gatekeep.
- dboreham 5mo ago$17M doesn't seem like enough for this. Perhaps for a prototype.
- dbvn 5mo agoNothing needs to come after git. its perfect.
- ipsento606 5mo agoI'm trying to estimate how much better than git a new system would have to be to convince me to abandon git and learn the new system I don't know the answer, but I think it could easily be three times as good and I would still stick with git
- alper 5mo agoA lot of blood in the water for Github.
- exe34 5mo agoYou could have given Linus the weekend off.
- sourcegrift 5mo agoI like pijul's mental model much more but it's a single developer who's slightly prone to getting sidetracked.
- bullen 5mo agoMeanwhile CVS just keeps working fine...
- modernerd 5mo agoFor a long time I couldn't decide if Git Butler was a real product or a very elaborate joke to get devs to type "but rub" into their terminal. https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/rubbing https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/rubbing I like their vision, though, this is compelling to me: > What if it was easier to for a team to work together than it is to work alone? It generally _is_ easier to work alone with git. UI and DX experiments feel worthwhile. lazygit and Magit are both widely used and loved, for example, but largely focus on the single user experience.
- groundzeros2015 5mo agoHow much money did they need to raise to make git?
- joshribakoff 5mo ago“raise 17m to try to kill off and extract value from popular open source tool” Pound foolish and folly
- avoidyc 5mo ago[dead]
- goatking 5mo agoI looked at the demonstration video and closed it after a couple of minutes. I don't see how this tool will replace git. Well, I think it won't
- nathan_compton 5mo agoI really, genuinely, do not want a replacement for git developed by a company that raised money to build it, since it will inevitably be a walled garden of one kind or another that enshittifies as it tries to make the money back. Git is fine and there is one thing no VC funded effort can get: freedom from the vampires. Like all I see here is "We want to build a fence around git and then charge you to go through it." I mean this as kindly as I can mean it: no thank you.
- schacon 5mo agoHey, this is Scott - the guy in the photo who wrote this post. AMA.
- nickgreg 5mo agoI've been using gitbutler since 09/24. It was the first git GUI I preferred over the command line. Being able to separate local changes into separate branches, drag missed changes into a past commit, etc. made tidy development so much easier. It is a great tool and the hate here is wild. However, I find it less useful when agents code for me. The surgical changes GitButler made so easy became less relevant as agents touch so many files at once. Have you found the same? Whats your vision for how GitButler will make agentic coding better in the way it did human coding? Does it move away from the UI you have now to something else? Does the UI get relegated and it becomes a tool the agent controls? (I liked the agent integration but it didn't feel like an improvement over using codex/CC so I went back to using them directly)
- damnnigga 5mo ago[dead]
- damnnigga 5mo ago[dead]
- troyvit 5mo agoHuh. I look at what it took to build Git to begin with[1] and have to wonder if the thing that comes after it is really going to be _that much_ better. Git came about because there was a need for it. I feel like GitButler came about because there was a need for funding. Maybe I just need to have my coffee before commenting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History
- schacon 5mo agoI'm trying not to comment on too many of these, but this one is interestingly wrong to me, so why not indeed? GitButler came about many years ago because I have been using Git for almost the full 20 years of it being around and I thought there could be a better way to do the things it's trying to solve for us. I want version control to do more for us, easier, faster and smarter. Git is still pretty dumb. Plus, now, everything in the dev workflow is changing - it's an interesting problem to think about what a _great_ toolset for how we'll all soon be developing software will be. As a _single_ example - agents can't use interactive editors, yet _so many_ of the powerful parts of Git absolutely _require_ it. Agents can't interactively rebase, meaning they can't very effectively squash, amend, reword, reorder, absorb. They can't very easily interactively add. They are middling at best when it comes to stacking branches. Git is designed to send patches over email and agents are not concerned with that. I would love to debate all of the lessons learned about the history of Git, but I was around for all of that. I know why Git was started, I know what it was meant to do, I understand how it's evolved. I still think there are a lot of interesting things that we could have in our change control tooling and Git is not the perfect solution. Nearly everyone in this thread suffers from the same basic local maxima blindness that you do. Git is great, GitHub made it more valuable. But maybe the answer to the papercuts we've constantly been dealing with for decades isn't faster horses. (To, you know, mix metaphors)
- troyvit 5mo agoI bet I should've had that coffee first :) You use git at a level beyond mine; I've been fumbling with it for maybe 2/3 of the time you've been actually using it, so I appreciate you even taking the time to respond. I think what gets me is that according to the article, GitButler is designed "for the GitHub Flow style" of development. git isn't limited to one flow, why should its successor be? Git didn't need $17M funding (and the strings that come attached to that) to change the world. Why should its successor? But yeah I should've had that coffee first, so thanks for the respectful push-back and I hope the rest of the community appreciates it.
- geooff_ 5mo agoLLMs have solved the Git problem without any need for other tooling. There is no learning curve anymore. You don't need to know any commands or even look at the CLI. You can explain in plain text what you're trying to do.
- thcipriani 5mo ago> Today, with Git, we're all teaching swarms of agents to use a tool built for sending patches over mailing lists. That's far from what is needed today. Today, with English, we're all teaching swarms of agents to use a language built from scraps of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon Old English. That's far from what is needed today.
- permalaise 5mo agoDoesn't jj basically do all this and more?
- purpleidea 5mo agoThis will just force them to build in some sort of revenue extraction model. Pass! Git and copyleft are fine as is.
- otabdeveloper4 5mo ago> Proprietary git wrapper with pay-to-play "enterprise" gating Oh boy. Thanks for the nightmares.
- kordlessagain 5mo agoNo CLI installer for Windows. App itself for Windows won't proceed past my selected repo. Said something about bad permissions, but I use that repo every day.
- utilize1808 5mo agoNowadays I just ask my LLM butler to "organize outstanding changes into coherent commits". No new software needed.
- wayeq 5mo ago'Stacked PRs' are back on the menu with Claude, because changing something in PR1 isn't a massive time sync to get PR2-5 back in shape, as Claude can usually handle all of that for me.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agoI love how whole article described none of the ideas they have for product, just buzzwords
- timmytokyo 5mo agoIt's certainly a choice to lead with the funding and a photo with a venture capitalist.
- bitbasher 5mo agoReal question--- why does one of the GitHub co-founders need to raise 17M for a venture? I'm certain they could fund it themselves. Is this more or less a marketing play than anything else?
- love2read 5mo agoWhy do rich people raise money when they already have money? 1) because they can 2) it's their money, not company money, and again, why would you risk your own money when someone else wants to risk their money?
- estimator7292 5mo agoSo that when the venture inevitably fails, VCs are the ones that lose money and the founders get a nice exit.
- andiareso 5mo agoJesus this website is overstimulating and it's extremely difficult to understand. What the hell they are selling other than a UI on top of Git? Git works perfectly fine especially if you take an hour or two to learn how to do a few more complicated but useful workflows (rebasing, cherry-picking).
- itsderek23 5mo agoHow I'm using git/Github has changed with agentic coding. However, I'm not using swarms of agents to write code, so it's bit hard for me to decipher the JTBD of gitbutler. Another take I've seen is https://agentrepo.com/ https://agentrepo.com/, which is light-weighted hosted git that's easy for agents to use (no accounts, no API keys, public repos are free). There are large parts of the GitHub experience I'm no longer using (mostly driving from Claude), so I think this is an interesting take.
- ElevenLathe 5mo agoI wonder what the development of git itself has cost in engineer time? Presumably more than $17 million? Assuming a fully loaded engineer is 250k, that only amounts to 68 engineer-years over 20 calendar years, which seems low.
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago> Imagine your version control tool taking what you’ve worked on and helping you craft logical, beautiful changes with proper context This is actually really important/useful, it's just not apparent to people who haven't worked on AI agents. AI agents do a lot of work under the hood to try to save your tokens. There are two basic methods: 1) semantic knowledge maps, 2) PageRank. Agents like Aider will build a semantic knowledge graph of your codebase - the files in it, the functions, variables, etc - so that it can tell the agent exactly where everything is in a tiny summary. It'll also then use PageRank to build a graphed rank of these things, to surface the most relevant items first. (https://aider.chat/2023/10/22/repomap.html https://aider.chat/2023/10/22/repomap.html) A modern VCS could do all of these things for you too, and the result should be making it easier to work with code, pulling in the related context simultaneously, so your changes make sense.
- zer00eyz 5mo agoFrom their docs: > We are creating not only a new kind of Git client, Nope, not going to be the tool of the future. The fundamental problem is it is still based on git. Till this addresses submodules and makes them a first class citizen it's just tooling on top of a VCS that still ONLY supports single project thinking.
- trashb 5mo ago> The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow. Not only has the problem not been solved well for that old model, it’s now only been compounded with our new AI tools. A bit of a strange thing to say in my book. Git isn't SVN and I think these problems are already solved with git. I agree that the interface is not always very intuitive but Git has the infrastructure which is very much focused on supporting alternatives to "one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow". > the problem that Git has solved for the last 20 years is overdue for a redesign. To me it's not clear what the problem is that would require a redesign.
- MidnightRider39 5mo agoThe problem is how to make money from something that is more or less solved.
- mervz 5mo agoYep, something that is sadly becoming more and more common. People with solutions spending insane money trying to convince others that a problem exists.
- luqtas 5mo agohave you heard startups
- BobbyTables2 5mo agoThe beauty of it all is one doesn’t even have to invent a solution… they only have to invent a “problem” to be pitched for VC funding.
- bloppe 5mo agoI'm gonna go out on a limb and say these guys would never have raised if they didn't have "GitHub co-founder" on the first slide of the pitch deck
- 5mo ago
- jayd16 5mo agoSeems fine I guess. I'm not a fan of Perforce but it does have some features that git still struggles with and needs to address to break into new customers. This Gitbutler seems to address some of them but I can't say it really feels next gen. I like the idea of parallel branches. I feel like you could probably get away with just creating multiple, named stages but having a full history is nice. P4 has multiple pending CLs and it works nicely enough. This sounds a bit better so that's cool. As far as "social coding" git's design is really at odds with any sort of real time communication. I would love to see a first class support for file locking, and file status work flows. It's not big at all in code dev because code can be merged but for non-coders, source controlled assets are often not mergeable. To solve this, P4 is often used with heavily integrated tools that provide live file status (Locked, out of date, edited by others). This way merge conflicts are prevented at author time. Git is really lacking here. Is fetching constantly really the best we can do? Then of course... can we get some large file and partial checkout workflows that don't feel good?
- devin 5mo agoCould you explain parallel branches vs what git offers today? If it's to enable multi-agent scenarios, don't worktrees (at least in the local sense) allow for this?
- jayd16 5mo agoMy understanding is parallel branches allow multiple changelists to be applied to a single workspace. eg you can have multiple WIP fix branches active in your feature branch workspace and not worry about polluting your feature branch with unrelated/duplicated commits. Worktrees are multiple workspaces, each in their own directory, sharing a single git repo. This is helpful because you reduce the overhead and the CLI command juggling for fully separate clones. I have no idea what approach is better for your multi-agent scenario.
- eximius 5mo agoLooks like almost as good as JJ but with VC money.
- Nifty3929 5mo agoThe remaining lifetime of a technology is proportional to how long it has already existed. However good this new thing might be, however much better it might be than git - I don't like it's chances.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- philipwhiuk 5mo agoIf you're building on top Git, you're not really coming after it are you - you're coming as well as it. If you want to come AFTER Git... you need to not use Git.
- vadepaysa 5mo agoNo shade on these guys, looks like a cool tool and I'll try it. However, I find myself doing large majority of my git operations using a an agent[1] or a TUI [2], and I rarely open a git interface. I can get everything done straight from the terminal. I guess I can overcome the "what if I cannot undo" anxiety. [1] https://getcook.dev https://getcook.dev [2] lazygit
- joostdevries 5mo agoMaybe the pitch is: git is distributed. Decentralised improvement. Local computers and their users make changes. These steps of local added value are then centrally combined into a shared timeline. A single product. During the improvement the locus of control is local. Which means it is hard to harvest the knowledge of this local knowledge and replace it. And it's hard to make local users serve the central AI. Not something you put in the public mission statement. Because you might get boycotts.
- qrbcards 5mo agoGenuinely curious about the collaboration model here. Git's biggest weakness isn't technical — it's that merge conflicts are a social problem disguised as a technical one. Two people editing the same file usually means the ownership boundaries are wrong, not that the VCS is. What does "what comes after Git" look like for a two-person team vs. a 200-person org? The pain points are completely different.
- oytis 5mo agoHow many millions were raised to build Git?
- Vampyre 5mo ago- leads with amount of money raised - mentions a16z - i use git every single day and have no idea what exactly the thing will do they aren't building something to help you, they're building something to trap you. even if it's free, does things you like, etc., do not use it. their end goal is to screw you
- CodingJeebus 5mo agoSeeing all of these investments in developer tooling projects makes me wonder/skeptical of what the next chapter of development looks like when the money spigot runs dry. I've not used this app, but I wonder how tooling like this truly competes against an open source community armed with AI. Like where is the moat here, really? I built a personal tool that does some of this with a basic Claude subscription over the course of a few weeks. Feels like vibe-coders are the real target market for something like this, but if it takes off, would not be that hard to clone as a FOSS app.
- bogwog 5mo ago> Feels like vibe-coders are the real target market for something like this, I think this is a potentially giant market: incurious people who don't know what they're doing, lack experience and wisdom, and are highly susceptible to empty marketing fluff. Selling junk to these people can't be very difficult, especially if they rely on an LLM (funded by many of the same investors) to explain it to them.
- jitl 5mo agoif the cli is open sources and ends up finished i don't see what the problem is to let a vc fund them building it
- prepend 5mo agoI thought git didn’t allow companies to use git in their name any more and grandfathered in girhub, gitlab, etc. How did this company get a trademark. Also, I don’t think I would use this and the problems they describe aren’t really things I care much about. I wish them the best, but $17m on a devtools company that thinks they are replacing git is going to be rough going.
- _blk 5mo agoGetting it is not the hard part. Keeping it in light of an adversarial, litigious contender is.
- srameshc 5mo agoI do not understand the problem solution, but if anything with git, I would want Codeberg style. I moved to gitlab and they were soldout and I am back on github slowly transitioning out. Common sentiment I believe is we want git, but on our own terms, not another VC funded project to move in.
- gverrilla 5mo agono mentions of dura by nobody in the comments?
- PeterStuer 5mo agoThe only thing I want is an as far as Claude Code can tell 100% Github clone running on my $5 Hetzner VPS.
- brockers 5mo agoHonest question. I love some of the additional capabilities and specifically the dependency commits, virtual branches, and JSON output... BUT why not just work with the git community to add this functionality? It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that needs to "replace" git, as opposed to "improve" git?
- philipov 5mo agoUnless one wishes to control the entire ecosystem rather than simply participate in it.
- love2read 5mo agoThere’s no business in working with an existing community to add functionality. And hence, where do you think the full time developers working on the project would get their livelihood? 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.
- jmount 5mo agoMy only issue is the title. It appears they are building a replacement for GitHub of which a replacement for Git is just a component. Building a replacement for GitHub is going to need at least the sort of funding they are mentioning. So once one reads the article it makes a bit more sense.
- nine_k 5mo agoThe tool that could replace git must free, ubiquitous, and arguably open-source. This is why I cannot imagine how raising $17M may pay for itself in that case, to say nothing of a 10× return. It may be a great tool, but I'd be very reluctant to use a closed-source solution as a cornerstone of infrastructure.
- malicka 5mo agoI would argue it being proprietary would be completely unacceptable, for such a position of importance. In any case, Git has become tremendously entrenched over the past couple decades. Anything that hopes to replace it would have to be significantly better to break from the inertia Git has. I’m honestly skeptical as to whether this is even possible in the near future. We’re not at all in the same historical moment as when SVN was beaten out.
- nine_k 5mo agoJJ has a good chance, because it builds on top of git, not replacing it abruptly.
- jasomill 5mo agoI was just thinking that. I first started using Git to interact with Subversion repositories as a better svn than svn, and I'm surely not the only one.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5mo agoyeah, it used to be that things like Perforce could still exist, because when they were created, they could do things that their OSS equivalents could not. but since then, so many people have gotten used to the basic model that git offers (even if they still have issues with details of the syntax). to gain a foothold in this environment is a monumental task, and anything that wasn't unambiguously libre and probably gratis too has little hope.
- sasham 5mo ago
- gervwyk 5mo agoplease also build it for easy multimedia management
- knorker 5mo agoBut… why? (pun intended) They raised $17M to build what appears to be solvable by some git wrapper scripts that could have been written by AI in 5 minutes? To me the extra "wat" about this is that if I spend the sub-$1 to get the git wrapper scripts, I can get them exactly the way I want them, instead of being mandated to use the commands they made up. A huge gain for AI is the ability to have exactly the software you personally want, even if nobody else wants it just so. So they are building the exact opposite of the need that AI brings forward. What they are building is not even median software that is in danger of being replaced (e.g. see Cloudflare spending a week to build "a wordpress"), but something that's the most extreme example of AI-will-replace-this that could possibly exist. Who will buy this? The only way this makes sense is as a plea for being acqui-hired (and the project dropped).
- Suffocate5100 5mo agoAnything that leads off with how much money you've raised is automatically disqualifying.
- crabbone 5mo agoMy impression from GitHub was always that it was nice to have someone else host Git repositories for free, and that the "added value" (the Web view, the user management, the CI, the Wiki) were all made by dilettantes: poor quality, mostly useless, never doing the right thing. These people seem to think that their "added value" was the selling point of their product... they appear to believe that some bad things are actually good and desirable, like, for example: > Heck, it could be argued that development in teams is less social than it was when version control was centralized. > But what if coding was actually social? What if it was easier to for a team to work together than it is to work alone? This reeks of open-space floor office plan all over again! When some HR managers decided that programmers need all to sit in the same room the size of a basketball court and that would somehow help them work together better... Programming is absolutely an individual activity first, where communication helps, but in order to be helpful the communicating parties have to have an initial internal process that refines the messages s.a. not to waste the other party's time. In practice, productive communication may happen once a day... up to once a week maybe? Maybe even less frequently? Git, as it is, is perfectly fine for this. > Ok, that’s the simple case, pretty straightforward. However, GitButler can also do some pretty cool things that Git either cannot do or struggles with, namely: > Having multiple active branches that you can work on in parallel. I'll check out the same Git repository in different directories and will have this ability... maybe also add the second checkout as a remote to the first... but the number of times I've done it in two decades of working with Git is... maybe two? This is an extremely unusual need. I think, I've done this when migrating from multiple repositories into a monorepo and I had to somehow reorganize the history of multiple repositories so that it would make sense together. Definitely not a task for every day, not even every year. The whole follow-up demonstration of parallel branches is just... Why on earth would I ever want to do that? Why would I want to work in such a way that I commit changes to different branches at (roughly) the same time? It's kind of like stashing changes, but, stashing is the byproduct of "bad planning": I wanted to do one thing, and accidentally did another... oh well, let's save the change somewhere temporarily! But, ideally, I want this to happen as little as possible. Not because it's inconvenient to deal with stashed changes, but because I will very quickly lose track of what goes where, why any particular branch exists etc. Similarly, for the stacked branches: I absolutely don't want this functionality to exist... if it was already in Git, I'd request that it never be used. This complicates the mental model of what is even possible in the repository and creates some nightmare fuel scenarios: what happens if you stack them sequentially? What happens if you stack many branches on the same branch, and then want to rebase one of the stacked branches? What happens if you rebase the branch on which other branches are stacked? What happens if you delete the branch on which other branches are stacked? Does the stacked branch have to exist in the local checkout, or could it come from a remote? It's absolutely the case where simple is better (I'd never imagine I'd call Git simple, but here we are). I can't imagine what the workflow of people who want these changes must look like. I can't imagine why would anyone want to copy that kind of a workflow.
- rokob 5mo agoIt’s weird because I could see raising money on the premise that GitHub is garbage, not git. But then you can’t say I co-founded GitHub as your bona fides.
- Scarblac 5mo agoThe initial version of Git was written in two weeks, what do you need $17m for?
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 5mo ago"What comes after Git" looks inside Git CLI with flowers and unicorns. Is this what gets funded nowadays? I really hope for a gigantic mega crash of all the IT companies. This industry deserves it like none other.
- stronglikedan 5mo agoI don't have to read the article to know that if it not just git with fixes and new features, it's not going to pan out. This is like building a new house because your current house needs a couple of leaks fixed and a coat of paint.
- prima-facie 5mo agoThose who don't understand git are bound to reinvent it. Git is fine as it is, with some porcelain and QoL improvements here and there. Some of the most capable devs I know use git + cgit for collaboration and they manage just fine.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pojzon 5mo agoReal problem is how to cope with few billion of bots hammering APIs 24/7 saturating net cables, physical infrastructure and taking down platform with constant DDOS. Im curious when it will be “SO BAD” we start blocking every AI agent on firewall level.
- pedalpete 5mo agoIf you are building for what comes after git, why name it git?
- endofreach 5mo ago"We’re not building some “better git”. 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...
- cawksuwcka 5mo agothose hairlines. like father and son.
- jasonvorhe 5mo agoSo they're looking to replace something Torvalds built while steering the Linux kernel with no financial backing but they somehow need 17 million? Sus.
- jtesp 5mo agothis is cool. i don't understand why the word git is in the name if they are trying to get (pun intended) away from git. buthub has a nice ring to it
- fireant 5mo agoSo many people in this thread started commenting before trying the product or even watching a simple video of what it does. It's like reddit, commenting based on title without any actual comprehension of the content. Shameful really.
- feelamee 5mo agothe one feature which I have never seen in VCS is ability to stick commit message not just to all changes, but specifically to line/hunk. It looks like very intuitive for me - I don't want to invent "references style" to say something about specific changed line in my commit - I want comment this line directly.
- fennu637 5mo ago[dead]
- mastermage 5mo agoI think Git specifically with jj is still a massively good tool. There are some interesting alternatives happening like Fossil with its auto commit which for single devs is probably realy nice. Or Pijul but thats very early stage. 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.
- simonebrunozzi 5mo ago> 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, I’ll try to avoid them and instead make this announcement a little more personal. 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.
- leoh 5mo agoIt’s called jj
- DANmode 5mo ago> That’s fundamentally what is behind this round. Drop the “fundamentally”. “It’s cleaner that way.”
- sailingcode 5mo ago[dead]
- firemelt 5mo agoidk what this guys can come up with, i mean anything beyond git is a bloated mess that no one wanted to use, just look at gitlab
- rldjbpin 5mo agobuilding the future of source control over the incumbent tech does not bring much excitement personally. 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.