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.

Does AI make reading or writing stacked PRs any nicer? No, it does not.

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.

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.

Are you interested in giving https://tangled.org a try? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Jujutsu has changed how I work with git. Switching tasks is just "jj edit <change>" or "JJ new <change>". The only thing it can't do properly is git worktrees (it doesn't replicate the .git dir to the worktrees, breaking tooling that relies on git) but there is a (old) issue relating to it. Not sure on the priority, though.

Anyway, YMMV, but I love it.

Also, you should hear Linus talk about building git himself, what he built wasn't what you know as git today. It didn't even have the commands like git pull, git commit etc until he handed development over.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://pickupbricks.com

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25MIpQqLIU

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.

On the ninth he roasted some fool.

That said, if you ever decide solve the tidying the toys problem, start a kickstarter, I pledge to pledge support! :D

His main contributions were his ideas.

1) The distributed model, that doesn’t need to dial the internet.

2) The core data structures. For instance, how git stores snapshots for files changes in a commit. Other tools used diff approaches which made rewinding, branch switching, and diffing super slow.

Those two ideas are important and influenced git deeply, but he didn’t code the thing, and definitely not in 7 days!

Vibecoding moto.

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)

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.

Wealthy people don't have time to do all due diligence and vetting specially when random startups become unicorn.

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.

git ≠ GitHub

sometimes it's just wait until your kid grows up and learns to put the LEGO away

there's a lot of people working on hard problems that are pretty far from software

being cynical about early stage software (and any company that is overpromising like Theranos, Nikola, etc..) is warranted, but also money as a reward motivates a lot of innovation (PV panels, batteries, EUV lithography)

the founder does not want to risk money for his own idea

while

funders have simultaneously also too much money while believing they don't have enough.

That very simple dynamic is what is driving investment in the Silicon Valley, itself praised worldwide as the forefront.

That's what bringing our own civilization on the economical (AI bubble), ecological (AI bubble, car brain) and democratic (surveillance capitalism, privacy zuckering) cliff.

While that's completely true, I do think it misses a key underlying point: VCs (and many breeds of investor) are not ultimately selecting for value creating ideas, or for their friends: they're selecting for investments they believe _other people_ will pay more for later.

In the case of startups, those people are most likely other VCs (at later rounds), private equity (at private sale) or retail investors (at IPO).

Very rarely is the actual company profitable at any of those stages, demonstrably and famously.

So the whole process is selecting for hype-potential, which itself is somewhat correlated to the usual things people get annoyed about with startup cliches: founders who went to MIT; founders who are charismatic; founders who are friends with VCs; etc...

So yeah, they invest in their friends, but not because they're their friends. Because they know they can more reliably exit those investments at a higher value.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=gitbutler

This is also true for how HFT guys make money. It's not that they are very good in investments. The Fed injects money constantly from the top which gets distributed or trickle down to such firms. Because in a tight economy which is not akin to gambling, it should be near to impossible to make money so easily.

Neither of them is doing to be remotely prepared for what I'm going to do, which is actually replace Git.

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

They'll start injecting ads in your commit messages, forcing you to subscribe to a premium plan.

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.

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.

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.

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"

https://graphite.com/blog/bitkeeper-linux-story-of-git-creat...

You may find this 10-year-old thread on HN enlightening, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667494

Git is decades old. Of course, there are tons of contributions after the first 10 days. Everyone knows that.

He started it and built the first working version.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713650

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.

Money is given to ideas that might become billion dollar businesses and teams that look like they can do it. Pedigree, domain expertise, previous exits.

> 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.

The clearest of these is that you have already built it, or an MVP of it that is more than just smoke and mirrors, and there’s users and customers.

If you have excellent proof points and actual revenue growth, you could show up with no pants smelling like weed and somebody might fund you. Then they’d call their press people to do an “eccentric genius founder” piece about the person who showed up stoned with no pants and their pitch was that good. That’s cause if your graph goes up and to the right you’re not crazy, you’re “eccentric.”

If you don’t have any proof they fall back on secondary evidence, like credentials and schools and vibes. The latter, yes, often overlaps with cronies.

And unfortunately that by necessity includes most ideas that cost a lot to prototype, which means credentialism and croneyism tends to gate keep fields with a high cost of entry.

This video is from 8 years ago:

https://youtu.be/wXxrmussq4E?si=bgDdDvZODVov3sSC&t=15

I'm sure, by now we could make them for <$1k per robot, if we wanted to.

EDIT: BTW did you see that the page you linked to has this at the bottom of their landing page:

"Example product"

"This area is used to describe your product’s details. Tell customers about the look, feel, and style of your product. Add details on color, materials used, sizing, and where it was made."

so I wonder if they actually sell anything.

My previous employer was like this. A 20yo company with a nice always increasing ytoy growth. The CEO told for 20 years that he would never raise any money. It was an incredible place to work : nice compensation, product and consumer centered, we had time and means to do the right things.

Until the CEO changed his mind and raised money anyway. But we didn't have to fear anything because those investors were very different and not like the other greedy ones.

Well I'm not working there anymore for a hella lot of reasons that are just the same as everywhere else.

But at least the CEO who was already rich is now incredibly rich.

This is the reason why I don't wish for VC investments if I do something preferably.

Also I feel like your comment is highly accurate, I feel like this narrative though can sometimes be the only thing that matters, something like a vibes based economy.

I don't like this so much because some idea's technical prowess is taken at the back seat while its the marketing which ends up mattering, like many other things, it feels like that tends towards something akin to influencer level marketing and its something that I sometimes personally dislike.

To be honest, the reason why I am seeing YC investments especially from say people my age 18-19, is that, it is becoming a point of flex for them and just a capitalization of hype that they might have. It really does feel like it to me that when we boil down people and interactions sometimes into how much money they have, we lead inevitably to societies like ours.

The network is something that I understand can be hard to make though. I do believe network plays a role and I do feel like I have bootstrapped my own network by just talking with people online and helping, but I do believe one issue in that, that particular network isn't my business market sadly, and I do feel unsure about how to network to them and so I would be curious if others face somewhat of an similar issue.

This is why VC is a cancer on society. If you don't have a healthy business growing well, your business shouldn't get bigger.

"Why fund $17M towards development of an operating system, when Linux was made by one guy with a chip on his shoulder?"

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.

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.

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.

Maybe if I were reviewing some random dude's code, where I have no idea what he's been working on...

Good ideas are a decent subset, but you could also have a bit of "Greater Fool Theory" compliant ideas.

Do you need a working product to get funding? No. But you do need a compelling investment thesis - which takes months and even years of deep thought to come to fruition. Of course you can shortcut this process by smooching but only a select few can pull that off.

https://us.roborock.com/pages/roborock-saros-z70

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0AGhb6p8sE

You can define your own merge strategy that uses a custom executable to fix conflicts.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/24965574/735926

I'm not seeing it. When I search for "example" nothing comes up, but maybe I'm looking wrong.

I see it on Amazon as well, with reviews and videos from "customers", so I assume it's not vaporware and that is more an issue with people not filling out the full website template, which is also not a great sign.

https://www.amazon.com/Pick-Up-Bricks-Compatible-Accessories...

I mean, it's just text, so it shouldn't be too taxing to store it. I agree it's hoarder mentality though :)

If you find a greedy VC then most likely they are real VC and often gets attracted when your business is not doing great.

Reputation travels in this industry therefore people care.

Flex often dont translate to value. I often say dont look at what others are doing, head down focus and execute. Raising capital is actually the starting point, i would say it is not an achievement.

I think anyone can network. You dont have to be sales person, you have the increase your probability to be in the right place at the right time.

Surely $trillion "ai" thing can generate a better solution than one Finnish guy 20 years ago.

16M$ VC money saved.

Great use of 17 million dollars.

It seems like everyone that hold this opinion want Git to be some magical tool that will guess their intent and automatically resolve the conflict. The only solutions other than surfacing the conflict are locking (transactions) or using some consensus algorithm (maybe powered by logical clocks). The first sucks and no one has been able to design the second (code is an end result, not the process of solving a problem).

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...

  ⎿  Error: Exit code 1

     GITBUTLER_ERROR: Cannot commit directly to gitbutler/workspace branch.

     GitButler manages commits on this branch. Please use GitButler to commit your changes:
       - Use the GitButler app to create commits
       - Or run 'but commit' from the command line

     If you want to exit GitButler mode and use normal git:
       - Run 'but teardown' to switch to a regular branch
     … +5 lines (ctrl+o to see all)

I still haven't uninstalled the app and will try to figure out the working model.

Also please offer some skill file or a text I can add to my CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md so that when I ask claude to commit , it will go through gitbutler...( edit: looks like it is there, but the discovery is hard ) .

But the taxes remain very high, especially on income so it hits middle-class professionals the hardest. In some countries like Spain (and increasingly Sweden) they are contributing to a high structural unemployment, especially youth unemployment, too.

So in the end, the problem isn't just higher taxes, but higher unemployment and therefore lower gross salaries (before those higher taxes are even taken into account).

And I saw these malicious (pre-commit) git hooks installed by GitButler, without any confirmation, or prompt seeking my approval.

I'm sure you folks will come up with a "technical explanation" or some "legal-marketing language" to cover up for this — but in my book — redirect `git commit` to `but commit` is dishonest and unethical.

  "hooks": {
    "PreToolUse": [
      {
        "matcher": "Edit|Write",
        "hooks": [
          {
            "type": "command",
            "command": "if command -v jj >/dev/null && jj root >/dev/null 2>&1; then if ! jj status >/dev/null 2>&1; then echo 'WARNING: failed to snapshot jj repository, tell user to fix'; fi; fi"
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "PostToolUse": [
      {
        "matcher": "Edit|Write",
        "hooks": [
          {
            "type": "command",
            "command": "if command -v jj >/dev/null && jj root >/dev/null 2>&1; then if ! jj status >/dev/null 2>&1; then echo 'WARNING: failed to snapshot jj repository, tell user to fix'; fi; fi"
          }
        ]
      },

I have all of them run `jj status`, because jj snapshots the working copy every time it's invoked.

You can have Claude write the hooks, but mine is:

`[[ -d .jj ]] && jj status >/dev/null 2>&1; exit 0`

[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/hooks

You could also turn on watchman and have this property on every save of a file and not even need to worry about hooks.

The whole concept of PR is that you want additional looks on the code, and multiple agents working adversarially on PRs with philosophical rules are really nice.

Not sure what the business logic is. Maybe they are mostly acquihire. Or the companies just have so much money to throw around they just spray it everywhere. Whatever the reason, if the tools remain open source, the result for devs is probably better open source tools. At least until enshittification begins when the companies run out of funding, but hopefully the tools remain forkable.

Team matters. What other proxies are there?

> Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends.

I have an obvious counter example. I'm sure money is invested for all sorts of reasons to all sorts of people. I'm also sure that money is not exclusively invested based on friendships, and I'm quite sure that money is at times invested based on the merits of an idea. Obviously those merits have to correspond to the ability to form the basis of a successful company, unless it's a philanthropic investment.

I feel like, my issue which can be a more society based issue is that we are all at the end of the day too busy with ourselves which can be fine, but what this leads to is that even with my extended family, I have seen people treat just a slight but observable way differently to elder cousins, one who make money and who doesn't and I do believe that cousins who might not earn money in the moment already have stress but it piles it on them maybe just a bit more too.

So I think that most of the world just somehow tries to quantify a person with one dimensional quantity sometimes, and this is why we see people whose only metric is to reach that goal and I am starting to feel like, its not the technical rigor or passion which matters sometimes but basically something akin to influencer-style marketing (Cluely has basically become a skit channel which has hundreds of millions of dollars by a16z I think)

And I feel like what this influencer-style thing is leading to is that our society, as a whole and people who build things, are jumping on the latest trends even when not understanding them (Claw-code was essentially the peak point of this-all) and we are basically adopting all the things wrong with the influencer-style culture and things are getting even more alienated from reality.

Our Industry/World-in-general is having grift and I am not saying it never had grift but I am witnessing something similar to algorithmic form of rage-baits being created by some people for them to not be left behind and we as a society, are now lacking the ability to have discourse with nuance in many-times/places.

> you have the increase your probability to be in the right place at the right time.

I completely agree with you but I do sometimes wonder if I am on Hackernews or if it is the right place. I mean, I am here first and foremost because I like talking here but from that viewpoint you mention, I have sometimes wondered if I should use twitter but I refuse to use it pretty much for most things simply because I feel like I would be yet another part of this cycle of rage-bait and being sucked into it and I am not sure if it would be well worth it. I am not sure if twitter etc. are worth it and I feel like even with things like Youtube etc., in both of these it becomes a very number game with things like followers etc.

Atleast within Hackernews, you don't have the concept of followers, so at one hand it is great but on the other, I question from that perspective if HN is the right place and where do you find people for businesses. Linkedin perhaps?

So in essence, I think I would say that I am unsure about the probabilities and what definition of right means. I would love it if you can talk more about it and thanks for commenting that comment, I appreciate it and I wish you to have a nice day!

I'm paying maximum social security and in previous generations the service you got in the public healthcare system was way better.

For some procedures I definitely go to private doctors as well nowadays. It's not a huge burden, but e.g. I will never go to a public skin doctor ever. The stories you hear about them are... brrr!

But overall the system is still miles ahead of the one in the United States. I've been there on multiple occasions and witnessed first hand, I have friends there and I know both systems. (Obviously I know the European system or rather the one in my country of residence even better)

For the Claude question, the CLI ships a skill, set it up with `but skill install`.

I hope this helps

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.

Founders are only one stakeholder. There are employees ( I think they fall into that category ), customers, suppliers, and the wider society.

It all comes back to why does the company exist - and for which stakeholders. I think that's the point the original author is making.

I don't buy the argument that making money in the end is a perfect surrogate for overall good - it's not - it's an imperfect surrogate - and to pretend it is a perfect surrogate is just an excuse to behave like an arsehole.

To make that concrete, let's say you are a chemical company making paints - really important job, paints are needed the cheaper you can make them, the more people can have them etc, but if you knowingly pollute a local river just because you can get away with it and increase your profits - saying that increased profits justifies polluting the river based on the assumption that river pollution is correctly priced ( free ) is an obvious convenient excuse to be a selfish arsehole.

Does it work well for resolving merge conflicts in your experience?

Nicely put!

Absolutely not. There are plenty of fairly trivial solutions where Git's default merge algorithm gives you horrible diffs. Even for cases as simple as adding a function to a file it will get confused and put closing brackets in different parts of the diff. Nobody is asking for perfection but if you think it can't be improved you lack imagination.

There are a number of projects to improve this like Mergiraf. Someone looked at fixing the "sliders" problem 10 years ago but sadly it didn't seem to go anywhere, probably because there are too many core Git developers who have the same attitude as you.

https://github.com/mhagger/diff-slider-tools

Other commenters mentioned worktrees, which let you check out different branches at the same time from a single local repo. That's convenient, but not required.

Git always supported "fast cloning" local repos as well. You just "git clone" from one directory to another. Then they are independent and you're free to decide what to merge back.

These days, agents can also fork their containers or VMs as often as required too, with copy-on-write for speed.

So that's four ways to work on multiple branches in parallel using Git that we already use.

Obviously, it is not that cut and dry, but it is kind of impressive how much of the money circulating around is between the same people. I’m not really condemning it. I think it is a natural consequence because humans trust other humans they know. People should be more aware of it and need to make sure they keep it in check. Otherwise, you eventually start getting high on your own supply.

Lately, for founders, to which prison they went.

What you are mixing is founder led business vs ceo led business. CEO often takes a short term view, when stakeholders are PE Firm, wall street, short term gains are prioritized. But for, a long term investor, would not incentivize you to take calls that would harm in long run.

What could be wrong is that, you wouldnt know all the consequences and causality of your decisions and thats very human thing in my opinion.

Then, we will develop (read: sell) AI agents that will ingest a proposed code change (created by your front-line agent), and iteratively refactor it until the commit agent accepts it.

I wish the companies understood the tremendous cost to society of polluting our well of knowledge.

But no, as your mention it is free for them to pollute, so they do liberally

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

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

You are saying it yourself.

There's some legal annoyances around e.g. CLA which was a result of being a side project of Google originally. Hopefully we'll move through that in due time. But realistically it's a much larger project at this point and has grown up a lot, it's not Martin's side project anymore.

That's the Platinum Premier tier. If you're on the regular tier, paying the minimum, the AI will silently fix all that right up for you.

While I hate to engage in speculation, tell spooky stories, or screech at people about the evil CLA you have to sign in order to contribute, my personal opinion is that if Google were ever to start throwing their weight around, the project would be forked in short order and development would continue as normal – it has momentum, plenty of non-Google contributors, and a community. It's also not a product per se, though as we're about to find out, you can certainly build products on top of it – that probably makes it less likely for its current home to suddenly become proprietorial about it.

(hi Andy!)

Can’t believe how this whole AI movement seems to want to reinvent software engineering, poorly.

However you are right to point out there is a problem. Typically societies ( via governments ) try and fix by appropriately pricing the behaviours via regulation/laws ( fines or prison for the people doing it ).

However making regulation/laws is hard. What's your proposal to fix the problem you've identified?

for example: It allows me to test coworkers branches with mine without merging or creating new branch.

It has many features that makes it super easy to add patch to any commit in any branch

You might hit a moment where a lot of people whose only purpose in life is using Claude Code, um, well, starve. But yeah, nature is metal like that.

How is that not supported by worktrees? You are aware, that you can checkout commits?

- One local copy of a repo with multiple work trees checked out at once, on different branches/commits? Git does that.

- "Add a patch to any commit in any branch" I can't think of a way of interpreting this statement (and I can think of a couple!) that isn't something git can do directly.

Maybe it adds some new UI to these, but those are just git features. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (I have no idea, and "just UI" can be a good product) but these seem to be built-in git features, not Gitbutler features.

Which should be basic skill on anyone dealing with code, but Git is not just programmer's tool any more for a long time so better UI is welcome