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.
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 supposted "fast cloning" local repos as well. You just "git clone" from one directory to another. Then they are indepedendent 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.
I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient, inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years of my life on nothing but this.
My question is: say the investor believes that some new platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that it will be mine over a famous person's?
I badly want someone to take that deep dive given the work I've put in to be ready for it
By the way it finally occurred to me who I should ask to do the deep dive: Gary Bernhardt
Note that if you want to be the answer, then you have to prioritize other things than the technology. You can have the best product, but if nobody knows about it you're stuck.
The nature of developing standards is that you can't have people start adopting them until they're done.
It's pretty easy to find out who I am in the real world too. For one thing I'm a private pilot and for 10 years I had an airplane personally registered to me, making my name and address a matter of (open) public record.
But fundraising is a game to be played, and part of playing the game is building credibility with VCs. It may be that a quirky name helps with that, but probably not.
From the classic baseball movie Bull Durham, where the old veteran is explaining to the newbie how to be successful:
"Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You'll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you'll be classy. If you win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press'll think you're colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it means you are a slob."
If you already have a track record, then you can have a quirky name or personality. Until then, you've got to play the game.
Sure some people will rule me out for superficial reasons, but I also get some benefit in screening out people who want to kick the tires but aren't interested in building a real relationship, just like companies do when they screen job candidates.
I may not have any money at the moment, but what I do have cannot be bought.
Look, I'm not wanting to be rude here, and this is obviously all hypothetical since you're likely not actively pitching to investors, but if you were, being stubborn in this way would be a deal breaker for me as an investor.
I see all the reasons you have for keeping it, and they're reasonable, but the mere idea that that's a hill you're willing to die on is a red flag. I'd see this as one of many potential points of friction. Where else will you choose to not make compromises?
Maybe it's not rational on my part, but you're trying to convince irrational entities to part with their money.
You could look at it this way: if someone offered $17M to change it, would you?
I wouldn't say the username is a hill to die on. I can't hide that this is the online identity I used while working on this project. Trying to hide it would just feel sketchier, no?
And yeah, for 17 mil I'm willing to talk about most anything, but I still see a conversation with investors like going on a date. The red flags can go both ways...
Github itself basically followed this route. They didn't built Git on top of SVN. They built a much better product (than Sourceforge) and they used network effects (particularly their free-for-OSS offer) to grow their userbase until they could start to land corporate contracts.
I don't know if they were the first git forge, but they were certainly among the first.
The specific problem is that all the competitors to Github have to use git, and that limits how different they can really be than Github and thus how aggressively they can compete to win users
Problem for whom? Users who are happy using git? Or conartist86 who is thinking about how to get money?
> the competitors to Github have to use git
Why? Syncing between various VCSes has been a thing since forever. If you can't handle a compatibility layer to support git+new-better-thing, you don't have the technical chops to build new-better-thing in the first place.
The way I think about it, if I make a backwards compatible product I might end up with users who never really wanted any change at all, and those people would be almost impossible to make happy. Those are the "faster horse" users. What I need is to find the people whose life would be changed by a car!
If you would like me to list a single concrete technical idea, I am pleased to oblige. The idea is: universal gaps. Our syntactic-semantic documents can have holes in them, places where we know some content is missing. That allows a document to behave like a template which lets us fill in the blanks. In a text-editor-based IDE there is no equivalent, which means that when I go to make a new sticky regex in Javascript I type //y and the IDE thinks I meant to comment out the rest of the line. It has no way of expressing the concept that between those two slashes something is known to be missing, which is exactly what I want to be able to tell it so that it can understand the difference between the state when I'm about to write a regex body and the state where I'm about to write a comment body
A TODO comment can't do that because the syntax conflicts. For a regex the conflict would look like `//* TODO *//`, and for a comment it would look like `// /* TODO */`. Both have an existing meaning, and in neither case is that the meaning I want.
If I could have a magic "stuff goes here" character this would be solved. I often use · to represent the idea of this magic character. That gives you /·/ and //· at least, but of course it isn't safe to assume that no language will ever assign meaning to the · character so we can't literally use it as the universal gap. To get something universal, you need to move from using a sentinel token to using embedded/encoded data.
Your syntax assertion doesn't make sense. Commented code is supported without interference in every common language I'm aware of.
> I often use · to represent the idea of this magic character
You can configure JetBrains to treat that character the same as a TODO.
(Not sure why I'm replying to what is probably AI-generated nonsense rambling, but hope that's helpful in case you're being earnest.)
Have you built a prototype and tried to pitch any VCs? Or are you just asking rhetorical questions?
It's a pretty serious claim to know what comes after git, and I have a whole array of criteria I evaluate claimants on:
- Will their version control solution fall apart if there are not enough line breaks in the code?
- Can they solve the rename-function/add-usage conflict? Git normally can't surface this conflict at all.
- Can the system maintain authorship attribution at a fine-grained level (per-second resolution)
- Will their solution's performance break down if there is too much code in one file?
- How will the solution handle change notifications? Is the filesystem watcher the de-facto coordinator?
This GitButler thing fails all my tests for a thing that's serious about replacing git; it just seems like they haven't thought about any of that stuff, well, at all.
The reality is that you can make a successful business with okay engineering and great product insight. It's much more difficult to build a successful business with great engineering and poor product insight. Getting people to use and pay for what you've built gives you the product insight that you need.
If yes, and you’ve solved them, people should be very interested in using what you’ve built. If people are using what you’ve built and are willing to pay for it, VCs will be interested.
If you haven’t solved them, but can validate they are real problems people care about, and have a path towards solving them, this should make a compelling VC pitch.
If they are real engineering problems but no one seems to care much about them, then it’s just a hobby.
The problem they have is that they're betting git is a solid foundation to build on. A tectonic change like git actually being replaced wouldn't just eliminate their moat, it would leave them trapped on the wrong side of it.
I can't win their game, so I'm changing the game.
This sounds like one of those "Hacker News Dropbox" comments...
This might sound like a joke or overly cynical but I'm being totally serious. Merit and product quality are only very loosely correlated with funding success at this stage.
The vast majority of projects don't get VC funded and of the small number that do most have some sort of relationship or other in into the funding world.
This doesn't mean you can't get funded, but it's a huge longshot. If you already have an income and some savings consider bootstrapping the project yourself, at least until you have some traction in the market.
And fortunately I don't need anyone's permission. It's just too late to stop the wave of change that's coming now. After 5 decades, the punchcard is finally going to be retired as the primitive at the heart of all programming.
Open source is a bit like the opposite of a plague. It's a plague but it's good instead of bad. What I mean is that once open source moves into an area, it stymies or even kills that entire sector by making it a commodity.
For example, with databases, MySQL and Postgres "won". Yes, there are commercial databases like SQL Server and Oracle but they largely exist through regulatory capture and inertia. It's highly unlike anyone will ever make a commercial general purpose database again. There are always niche cases.
Same with operating systems. Yes we have MacOS and Windows but what are the odds we get another commercial mass OS? I'd say almost zero.
It's the same for source control. Git "won". There are a handful of others (eg Mercurial). But gone are the days of, say, Visual Source Safe.
But when people talk about "what comes after Git" they really mean (IMHO) "what comes after Github", which is a completely different conversation. Because Github absolutely can be superseded by something better. Will it though? I don't know. It has an incredible amount of inertia.
As for AI and anything related to source control, I'd have a hard time betting against Anthropic. But remember the exit could be an HN post of "We're joining Anthropic!". Side note: I really hate this "we're joining X" framing. No, you took the bag. That's fine. But let's be honest.
For people with a proven track record, AI is a gold rush of acquisition more than creating a sustainable business, let alone an IPO. I think that's what this bet is.
From git(1):
LOW-LEVEL COMMANDS (PLUMBING)
Although Git includes its own porcelain layer, its low-level commands
are sufficient to support development of alternative porcelains.
Developers of such porcelains might start by reading about git-update-index(1) and git-read-tree(1).
The interface (input, output, set of options and the semantics) to these
low-level commands are meant to be a lot more stable than Porcelain level
commands, because these commands are primarily for scripted use.
The interface to Porcelain commands on the other hand are subject to change
in order to improve the end user experience.
The following description divides the low-level commands into commands that
manipulate objects (in the repository, index, and working tree), commands
that interrogate and compare objects, and commands that move objects and
references between repositories.
- 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.