Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by warkdarrior on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:19PM
(#50347613)
> Technical details aside, this volume is ridiculous. How on earth do they see this kind of "growth" as an asset and not a liability?
That coding volume is a liability only for human engineers, with their limited memory, short attention span, tiredness, and quirky coding preferences. LLMs don't have any of those problems.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by simianwords on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:33AM
(#50348775)
And that some one can be an LLM. Frankly, these discussions are tiring because there's a false notion that humans have to be in the loop 100% of the time. This is untrue. LLMs are accurate enough that they can be left to do things on their own and human intervention is needed only for out of distribution instances.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by skydhash on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:52AM
(#50350852)
> Does your manager at your job review every line of code you wrote or trust you based on your competence and reviews only a compressed portion?
The manager always has a very good stick: “Do a good job or you will be fired”. And me wanting food is well aligned to not produce buggy code. Or make my job harder in the future by writing unmaintainable code.
> Frankly, these discussions are tiring because there's a false notion that humans have to be in the loop 100% of the time
The code is written to process data. Someone needs to be aware of how it’s processed, so that when malformed data appears, we can collectively find where it happens. You can always play around with your own data (if regulation allows) but you need to respect your customers’ data. Not looking at the code jis just negligence.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by simianwords on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:23AM
(#50351139)
> The manager always has a very good stick: “Do a good job or you will be fired”. And me wanting food is well aligned to not produce buggy code. Or make my job harder in the future by writing unmaintainable code.
You are welcome to not use the model if it makes mistakes. Its weird that you are cooking up some edge case scenario to make your argument strong - everyone is incentivised to make things work well. Anthropic wants their models to perform well because that's why you will buy it.
> Someone needs to be aware of how it’s processed, so that when malformed data appears
Eh no. You need to know about only a compressed part of it, not 100%. Do you really claim that you need to know 100% of the code? This is not true today and certainly won't be true in the future. Hardly any code will be looked at by humans in the same way my manager doesn't look at my code.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by skydhash on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:38AM
(#50351278)
> Anthropic wants their models to perform well because that's why you will buy it.
What Anthropic wants and what happens in reality are two different things. But with code I write, I do control the process.
> Eh no. You need to know about only a compressed part of it, not 100%. Do you really claim that you need to know 100% of the code?
I know the code I write, and I know how it interfaces with external modules. When those interfaces don’t function as described, I look at the code if I have access to it. When I don’t, the party in control has always good incentives to produce good documentation. That knowledge is usually good for some time (years even)
> my manager doesn't look at my code
Because that’s not his responsibility, just like he’s not responsible for bugs and crashes. He’s responsible for the project and the team and you can be pretty sure that he’s looking at all at the information about those. Imagine if his own manager ask him about some details and he answers: “I don’t know, Claude is doing it”.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by Tadpole9181 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:36AM
(#50349153)
Didn't the Postgres team just have to stop a release because the agents found a slew of bugs in human code from domain experts that "understood and verified it"?
Perhaps I'm being overly generous to the parent's point, but it stands to reason that we make a lot of choices of where and how much trust we give away. This is just another one of those points.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by Skinney on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:22AM
(#50349439)
I would say that a calculator and a database like postgres differ quite significantly, though. How many PRs are merged per month on your average calculator? How many lines of code is in that firmware?
Trusting that a calculator works is like trusting that there will be another day tomorrow, while trusting the code of an LLM is like trusting that the current weather will hold for the next hour.
Also, LLM finding bugs in human written code doesn't mean it wouldn't find much more in LLM generated code, and spend much more money doing so. That is, of course, after ruling out the false positives (of which there are a few, judging by the PRs I've received on my open source projects)
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by mrbungie on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:34PM
(#50347727)
Not necessarily. High LoC software is a potential bad design smell (without a counterfactual for the same level of functionality it might not be easy to tell though). Badly designed code entering an agent context is always a liability, because it contaminates decisions down the road.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by zdragnar on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:25PM
(#50348054)
Every bit of code is more context getting soaked up in future agent runs. More context used = worse output. More tests need to be written, then fixed, using up more compute, time and context without adding value compared to a more thoughtful, efficient implementation.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by zdragnar on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @12:52AM
(#50348561)
It's not just the GPUs that I was referring to, but also the time spent in test runners locally and in CI. There's also the possible runtime cost of extraneous abstractions, but that's beside the point I was getting at.
Thoughtful developers do take money, but so too does shitty code that reaches a point LLMs struggle to maintain. Having both- with the thoughtful developers in charge- is better than just throwing more LLMs at it and hoping for the best.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by eddythompson80 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:53AM
(#50348890)
You can't make these argument against the position that all these problems will be solved. Any problem you point to, someone would argue that an LLM can solve. Expensive compute? costs could get 1000x cheaper. Longer context gets worse output? Newer models would solve that. Ever increasing massive codebase? We'll get a 1B or a 1T context window. Time spent in test runners? parallelize, or selectively select tests, or even better; ask the LLM to optimize the tests or develop a 100x faster chips. Runtime cost of extraneous abstractions? Ask the LLM to keep functionality and focus on performance.
If you seriously believe we have "solved coding" or achieved AGI in coding, what is not possible? Any argument you can come up with will be easily dismissed with "we'll just ask the AGI to solve that problem".
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by simianwords on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:32AM
(#50348769)
I'm not sure why this is downvoted. This is the correct answer. Code is mostly written by and for agents with the option for humans to read it from time to time.
This kind of fallacy keeps repeating time and time again. Another version of this fallacy goes like this: "agents can create a lot of code but humans have to review each PR anyway so reviewing is a massive bottleneck". This doesn't make sense because reviewing is also done by agents and humans don't have to read every line.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by anal_reactor on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:28AM
(#50349108)
It's an asset because it's a demonstration that their technology works. It would be stupid for them not to tokenmaxx even if that was more efficient. Kinda like you don't want an Apple salesman to be using an Android device.
This thing aside... IDK, I used to think that there's no way to manage such a mess but apparently there is. Or rather, it starts to seem plausible that models will evolve faster than this mess, and once it becomes unmanageable, you can simply ask AI "make it better, no bugs please" and it'll mostly work.
It's becoming harder and harder to justify my own existence as a software engineer. It's surreal that that I dedicated years of study to prepare myself for a job that's being automated away.
Of course the demand for human developers won't drop to 0 but it'll be limited to a handful of industries where even small mistakes are costly, like aerospace. But then let's be real - what percentage of currently employed devs are competent enough to write such code?
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by throwaway27448 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:34AM
(#50352492)
I have full faith in LLMs to produce code that does something (whether or not it's desired or expected). I have little faith that the engineers (or MBAs) have any clue what they're doing. It'll be interesting to see what parts still exist in ten years and what parts they'll have to light on fire to contain bad assumptions.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by rfgplk on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:11AM
(#50350092)
Not really. In fact it's fairly mild given OpenAI's size. For my personal work I've stopped even counting code changes in locs/commits and started looking at disk size changes.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by paxy on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:00PM
(#50347475)
While I don't have any particular interest in the topic this is a great blog post. No AI in every second line, no needless marketing or hype. Just a bunch of engineers talking in their own voice about a topic in great detail with numbers, charts, visualizations.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by bigmadshoe on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:21PM
(#50347625)
Can anyone explain to me what this massive volume of code could actually be doing? They obviously have variations of model architectures, training infrastructure, serving infrastructure, and the source for their apps.
Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially? And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model quality) their products don't seem to be changing very much?
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by 7e on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:24PM
(#50347654)
It's AI slop. AI coding agents write much more voluminous code, in my experience. The base code is more expansive, and there are more tests, and there are many, many more commits as you keep fixing and fixing and fixing over and over and over.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by piyh on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:39PM
(#50347756)
If they allocate more compute internally than they sell on subs & APIs, then they should be generating more code than all the customers they sell to combined.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by rogerrogerr on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:39PM
(#50347757)
I'd bet money they're capturing every change made by any agent, not just at the end of a 'task' (or even a turn). Free training material volume to see what was changed and then what was changed later in the same turn to fix the mistakes introduced.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by O5vYtytb on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:28PM
(#50347680)
At some point I imagine they will be writing their own software for the entire training and inference stack. Kernels, libraries, why not? With compute so constrained it must be beneficial to optimize everything as much as possible
I’m not buying this argument, the apps of the LLM providers are some of the most wasteful apps that exist. Have you ever looked at how much memory / CPU Claude and Codex use? They ship with entire virtual machine hypervisors for sandboxing.
I think it’s simply a matter of dogfooding and new feature development, they do have much higher velocity than companies of equivalent size and an unlimited token budget helps as well.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by tokioyoyo on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:33AM
(#50349862)
Different metrics. You measure how many users you have, whether they’re closing the app and etc. when it comes to consumer level apps. ChatGPT/Claude is heavily used, not a problem for an average user, so no need to improve that.
Kernels, performance-required stacks etc. is different, so you optimise them for that.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by reacharavindh on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:34AM
(#50349520)
I think Deepseek did this in the most focussed way.. their own optimization (key value caches, downscaled images for vision support etc) in their inference stack to push the boundaries in favor at a time of hardware scarcity.
It feels like OpenAI and Anthropic have a ton of room to optimizing that regard, but they choose to rather focus on moving the frontier forward than doing things that are already possible in a more efficient way.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by jrflo on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:51PM
(#50347840)
For one, they have the internal models that us normies don't have. Also, machine learning as a field is probably the most automate-able field for AI. It's 100% on computers without "real world" collisions at all, AI can do the whole stack today even with publicly available models. And since it's so empirical, you can make a lot of progress by just running more experiments with more compute.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by antupis on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:12AM
(#50349007)
I think it's more that agents gaslight you to believing that timezone from Baker Island and Howland Island is most important issue ever and needs that 1k exception.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by amluto on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:50PM
(#50348223)
What they do not have is a version of chatgpt.com that is not a slow, awkward, glitchy mess.
As a user of Astra, it writes code that appears to work. It does not necessarily write sensible code that is architected in a way that makes sense based on what it does. I just watched it do a major rework of a couple thousand lines of code by keeping the original organization and kludging up an adapter to make old code have new semantics.
I would expect that this approach, coupled with lots of fun asking for changes and none of the grunt work of actually thinking about the result, could result in exponentially increasing amounts of mess.
I haven’t used a recent Anthropic model - maybe it’s better at this.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by bix6 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @12:04AM
(#50348298)
Nah I made a workout app with Claude code. Today it loaded the same warmup exercise as my main block 3 times in a row. The program does not call AI to make the plan so that’s the code it wrote lol. In general though the app is good enough if you know what you’re doing which seems to be the theme with AI.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by Zambyte on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:39AM
(#50349914)
"AGI" is an expression on how widely the intelligence can be applied, not how effective that intelligence is. I think it's hard to argue that current (as of the last few years) intelligence tools cannot be applied generally. What can be easily argued is that we have not achieved superintelligence (where AI is better, faster, and cheaper than any human at all intelligence related tasks).
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by syngrog66 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:58AM
(#50349284)
a real "galaxy brain" epiphany might come when one considers idea that perhaps we dont need software to exercise
just exercise. it will be ok, really. somehow we managed for millions of years, kiddos, and both gravity and the human body are unchanged in any relevant way since which suddenly requires "an app". I can get out of bed without an app, or an AI. I can prepare a meal and eat without any kind of app, or any kind of AI or LLM. its a true and real thing, in the real world, promise!
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by ylk on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:25AM
(#50349468)
I guess by that account: somehow we managed without computers for millions of years. Get off the internet, please.
There are tons of different conditions people are in, with different histories of injuries, etc. and even people without any issues benefit massively from having a sensible, well structured workout plan that ensures their weaknesses are addressed and they work towards their personal goals. You don't need AI, an app or a personal trainer for that but while many people do enjoy learning a lot about exercising in their (often limited) free time, many don't and it's great if they have an affordable/free option. Why do you think physiotherapy exists?
Additionally, studies have proven that progressive overload is a really important aspect for progressing, so you should be tracking your workouts in some way, in an app or on paper, to ensure you really are challenging yourself.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by yxhuvud on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:20AM
(#50349050)
Strangler pattern can make sense for that, and that may involve that kind of adapters. But it also involves actually finishing the job and make certain new semantics go through the whole thing and restructuring until it makes sense.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by written-beyond on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:48AM
(#50349966)
I don't know what curse is on my openai account. Since ChatGPT 4o their desktop app does that weird extreme lag slow down in almost any sized chat other than completely new, like 1-2 messages deep. I changed some settings, the problem got better and then immediately broke after they released the codex app(new chatgpt app). It is literally completely unusable on Windows, apparently works fine on mac for my friend. Never had this issue with anthropics desktop app.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by tom1337 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:10AM
(#50350506)
Do you have a lot of past chats? The desktop app has been unusable for me when I had more than 20 chats in the side bar. Deleting / archiving fixed most of the lags for me.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by StilesCrisis on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:55AM
(#50350873)
It really depends, right? For some code bases, the author would be pissed if the agent started ripping up all the existing classes. This is where judgment comes in and why you and I are still employable.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by chr15m on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @12:17AM
(#50348378)
> Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially?
Surely it's obvious?
Slop cannons firing at a rate so high no human can hope to restrain them.
Such a colossal volume of slop that even the most well engineered, efficient technology on the planet, written by one of the greatest coders of all time, is no longer sufficient to contain it.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by skydhash on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @12:30AM
(#50348449)
> Such a colossal volume of slop that even the most well engineered, efficient technology on the planet, written by one of the greatest coders of all time, is no longer sufficient to contain it.
And git is enough to version control some of the most complex software like the Linux Kernel, the FreeBSD operating system, QEMU, browsers like Firefox,... Git was insufficient for Facebook and Google because they wanted to put the whole org inside a single repo, which broke the assumption where decentralization in git would happen (repo level, not subtree level). Now it seems that another assumption is broken, that you wanted a version control system, not a snapshot or a rolling log.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by jsnell on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @12:43AM
(#50348523)
> Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially?
Because the limiting factor for software has always been the supply, not the demand. When the average human engineer would ship 100 lines of production code / week, you could only afford to do the most critical things. But if code gets cheaper to produce, the projects that were marginal become worth doing, and the projects that were obviously insane become marginal. And that's exactly what is happening as models get cheaper and better, leading to the frontier of worthwhile projects expanding rapidly.
> And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model quality) their products don't seem to be changing very much?
That's got some nice But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? energy to it!
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by bijowo1676 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @12:54AM
(#50348577)
becuase devs stop coding by hand and start prompting AI even for smallest of tasks, for example "hey codex, check grafana alerts and tell me x, y, z" instead of navigating it by hand and figuring out in grafana UI
This wouldn't generate more lines of git tho, unless if they are committing markdown documents of everything. With images. Which... Why? Why be so ludicrously wasteful?
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by xarope on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:40AM
(#50349174)
They are using one of the oldest tricks in the book, rapid evolution as per Nature's handbook for how to constantly improve. By allowing the millions of monkeys^W AI agents total autonomy to "Throw Things at the Wall and See What Sticks"(TTWSWS, TM), this has lead to unprecedented and amazing progress towards AGI.
In doing so, they obviously need to keep track of the myriad of changes, hence the requirement to ensure Git can scale up.
(I'd like to think /s, but you know what, maybe not)
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by Sol- on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:59AM
(#50349668)
Realistically, lots of it is probably also just duplication. Why adhere to KISS and abstractions if the LLM can just regenerate relatively low level code whenever I need it? I don't even mean this in a disparaging way or anything, I found myself falling into the same habit of just generating very problem-specific tools and processing pipelines.
Of course, then the question is if it's even worth committing them - you might as well just commit the design spec and let the model generate ephemeral code to run this whenever you need it. For now, I almost consider committing generated code a caching step in some sense, so you don't have to spend the tokens and time to generate it again.
Once super fast and super cheap tokens become more ubiquitous, however, I expect this to change.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by NetOpWibby on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:42PM
(#50348163)
Haha, I'm also building a code forge (at eol.sh, just a placeholder is there now). I like that you don't look like yet another Github clone, which is my primary frustration with the alternatives.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by pksunkara on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:55AM
(#50349273)
Jujutsu is mentioned as one of the features we support down the page. And since we plan to support both git and jujutsu, there's no specific mention on VCS
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by bhouston on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:45PM
(#50347798)
Another way to avoid having to maximize download speed is to use a global git cache per machine in a similar way that pnpm optimizes installing packages:
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by eddythompson80 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:40AM
(#50348811)
There is always something useful to learn, even if it's a mistake. pnpm in particular centralizes your packages, and symlinks them to each project that needs them, which cuts down on file copy and disk usage significantly. The same principle could be applied to cargo/rust, python venvs, dotnet, or even large C++ projects could improve their disk usage and file copy significantly if they followed the same idea. Why do you have to have a massive target folder in every rust project if all that could live in a hash addressable shared store. Its the same basic idea of CoW or deduping file systems, but done in the application for far better result.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by bhouston on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:42AM
(#50351874)
> This doesn't work if the pulls are happening in swarms of ephemeral sandboxes.
This is incorrect.
It actually will work if you mount a drive. Github mirrors can be on separate drives. Now I haven't fully tested it safety in that situation yet, like I have with local dev on Windows and MacOS.
> Also, maybe FUD, but is there anything useful to learn from (p)npm other than cautionary tales?
This is also incorrect. Denigrating pnpm's well regarded optimizations because NPM packages have vulnerabilities unrelated to NPM is missing the point.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by 3pm on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:50PM
(#50347832)
> We built Pando with Codex, moving from kick-off to production, in just 10 weeks. The core of Pando was designed by a single engineer, implemented by teams of agents, and deployed by a handful of engineers. Pando began serving production traffic in April of this year, and is one part of a larger system of source control management tools used at OpenAI.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by Tadpole9181 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @12:51AM
(#50348559)
It is truly a strange time to be alive. I've made systems in the past month that I've wanted to do for years, and they're astronomically better than I would have been able to rush together had I found the time. And I'm even trying to be tempered and work out more careful approaches to some of the folks I've seen.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by rheisen_ on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:46PM
(#50348187)
Scaling Git Operations at Xavi Group /s
Over the last few months at Xavi Group, our team of one engineer has gone from ~1k commits a day to ~100k commits per day as a result of debilitating financial decisions and exponentially increasing agentic workflow capability. Our internal Gitea services began to get bogged down by our proprietary frontier coding agent (internal codename `xavi-polaris`) refactoring the monorepos comprising our three flagship projects, one of which of course is our widely unknown RSI harness project.
(At this time we are not accepting any additional requests for our closed private beta, unless you ask reaaaalllyyy nicely $$$)
These demands were increasingly straining our S3 bucket capacity (petabyte scale), our CI/CD pipelines (3 DO droplets, a macbook mini, and a legacy windows server possibly compromised). Most critically it was straining the agentic wellfare of Xavi sessions themselves, which began to flag push/pull latencies that were taking so long their caches would go cold between tool calls, resulting in even greater financial hardship.
`xavi-polaris` sess-3LQGgyUxLGXiV7OTTIMo4TWm0a6 is credited with identifying that this unprecedented pace was unsustainable, with projections that by mid 2027, commits per day could be north of 1 billion as monorepo sizes increased and refactoring became increasingly challenging despite the profound software engineering capabilities unlocked by the RSI harness project.
To identify solutions, we first looked to ensure we wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. We noted projects at Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI that recently aimed to address the very same challenges, but after ~20k USD in session research that incidentally solved an open conjecture in statistical analysis, we decided that adopting any of these existing protocols would limit Xavi sessions in our internal promotion benchmarks that enable “contributor” sessions to progress to “lead” sessions, irrevocably inhibiting our expansion of upper agentic management.
AGIt is a drop in replacement for Git, which we identified as being critically important because xavi sessions are deeply familiar with git commands as a result of a massive distillation and theft of proprietary data. AGIt utilizes novel CRDT and distributed systems technology built from our extensive experience with scaling distributed systems off the back of YJS. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, it didn’t make any sense to the individual human engineer at Xavi Group either.
Importantly, we don’t believe it needs to. The future is agentic workflows, and we’re excited to continue giving back to the nursery that birthed our projects and has delivered at scale for almost every other software company on the planet. We’ll be donating five `xavi-polaris` teams to pumping PRs as fast as possible to these open source projects. As we enter this new era we’d like to thank contributing sessions sess-3LQKRQrJUyAvYHlUDJcjos2CInf and sess-3LQKRnqna2emLvyUyPUqSEIaUh0, their teams were instrumental in this endeavor, and both will be promoted from “lead” to “steward” to reflect their tenacity in building this system over the last few hours.
I'm wondering how much cross-pollination of ideas and subsequent implementation details there are between people working at these companies. It does seem like all of this could potentially converge.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by anthonyskipper on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:24AM
(#50351152)
I would disagree. The size doesn't matter that much. The main metric is just number of commits, because that is what drives the flow. Not saying size doesn't have an effect, just saying number of commits is the primary signal.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by juliusdavies on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @10:04AM
(#50352911)
Average number of files changed per commit is going to have a huge impact on performance since that’s a huge part of what the “git push” handshake is trying to figure out regarding what to upload.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by rfgplk on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:58AM
(#50350033)
Not even close. The rate of code development nowadays far exceeds what Meta _and_ Google combined could output during the early-to-mid 2010s. I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI is committing over a billion loc a day.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by gritzko on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:32AM
(#50348767)
I remember sharing packlog ideas on the Git Discord. God knows whom I cross-pollinated then.
I think Git is becoming a protocol and that is good. Let a thousand flowers bloom. On the other hand, would any of the parties mentioned share their code with anyone? If so, would anyone be ever interested in using it?
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by gritzko on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:09AM
(#50348993)
The blog post paints a vivid picture of a slop volcano. We speak of code its authors never read, never share, and never accept patches. So the entire point of git is moot.
On the other hand, some lower-level tools have to be simple, reliable and efficient. Here, sharing is critical. Even the authors of the post shared some incremental improvements to git. Here, the slop-cannon-scalability story is moot.
I think git is becoming a protocol. One product can no longer cover these cases.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by fullstackwife on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:29AM
(#50349109)
What got us here won't get us there perhaps? Can you tell why open source started to exist in first place? Wasn't that a way to crowdsource manual labour, and this reason is not valid anymore, as cost of this spiecif labour is near zero?
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by matwood on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:33AM
(#50349863)
Depends on the problem those million pages solved. If it meant the government sent me a prepopulated tax form that I could just sign if I agreed with the numbers and be done - yes, I would be extremely excited.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by matwood on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:05AM
(#50350463)
Then you can do the whole file process. For most people the government gets all the data. The filing process is purposely keeping tax companies in business today.
The point of my response is that the analogy was broken without saying what adding those pages could provide.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by tempfile on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:14AM
(#50351041)
Right, but now there are a million extra pages in the filing process. Many more companies would be kept in business to deal with the extra garbage!
The analogy isn't broken. Your objection didn't really make sense, because adding pages to the tax code makes the tax code strictly more complicated. Your response just ignored the case where that complexity actually matters.
agents benefit from the same abstractions as humans do and they also benefit from a version system where the history can be tracked back where merch conflicts become obvious and so on
I am watching OpenAI's output, and while a lot of it is absurdly impressive, I can not even begin to imagine what kind of activity of theirs justifies a through-output of 5 petabytes of -GIT COMMITS-. That's not their data sets, that's not their models, that's not their math library. That's their code.
They're rengineering Git for scale, but like, why is there a demand for scale at all? If i saw an employee flipping the same number on an excel file over and over, I'd fire them, and yet they're perfectly happy running agents that do that and setting up meetings and writing blogposts about how much they improved their spreadsheet number randomization factory.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by tvbusy on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:00AM
(#50348931)
Scaling software development at Huge AI Company /s
We at Huge AI Company has surpassed human capabilities of software development. Git can no longer keep up with our development cycle and we're proud to announce that we're moving to Wish Driven Development.
Unlike Anthropic or OpenAI where no single engineer has any idea what they're doing and still uses pathetic source tracking, we have implemented an evolution and moved on to the next stage with our AGI: Wish Driven Development.
Our engineers, now called Wish Whisperers, open pull requests to add wishes to a controlled environment where all our wishes are stored in a Wish Registry. Swarms of agents are then dispatched to validate these wishes and when the pull requests are merged, implement these wishes directly in production.
Our productivity has significantly gone up, so much so that our Wish Whisperers are now running their own Wish Registries to automate their wishing speed.
To be frank, we still have no idea what we are doing but this is AGI level productivity and it's all that matters at the end of the day.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by springtimesun on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:03AM
(#50348952)
Is the increase in commits graph in percentages because it’s fewer than Anthropic’s rate? A case of commit envy?
In all seriousness though I have enjoyed reading these posts. I will never work at this scale, but I like to read how different teams approach problems like this and I do wonder if some of these approaches will trickle down (or up?) into regular practice as everyone is committing more and faster.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by bob1029 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:13AM
(#50349009)
Why not use a completely different VCS topology if you are a gigantic trillion dollar behemoth? Why are we still using the "distributed" git concept as the basis for everything?
Centralization is exactly what you want at this kind of scale. The most marginal participation from the server would make a huge difference.
There is a reason game studios don't use git. It's not just about the large objects.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by japgolly on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:33AM
(#50349137)
Interesting that they used both Lean and TLA+. I wish they'd speak more about that. I woulda thought they'd use one or the other. Generally speaking they both do the same thing (prove specs), but in very different ways.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by cadamsdotcom on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:16AM
(#50349399)
> under-appreciated feature of the Git protocol, `packfile-uri`, allows a server to return links to download additional packs separately ... To support this feature, OpenAI contributed a number of improvements to `packfile-uri`
Yes! Great adaptation of an existing system, showing exactly why open source is special.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by armcat on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:06AM
(#50349706)
> Pando now powers all development in OpenAI’s monorepo.
Monorepo. I keep hearing from various folks across the more frontier tech companies, that they have switched to a monorepo to improve agent-scale dev performance. Anyone have similar findings?
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by perks_12 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:47AM
(#50349962)
The non-agentic coding take is that a monorepo makes code sharing a lot easier. Especially in my case with OCaml front to back, I can just share protocol.mli files between parts of the code without duplication or vendoring my own repos.
The same is really true for agents. All code in one place makes it faster and more reliable to load the proper context for coding tasks.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by nihzm on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:00AM
(#50350051)
While technically impressive, the number of git commits without looking at the content is either a loose proxy for the speed of change of the codebase or a finer time resolution in the changes. But this says little or nothing about whether this is useful for anything related to their products. So what is this for? They are not employing the same number of engineers as Google, so what is the point of scaling the number of commits? Flooding the git commit messages "documentation" into something unmanageable? Or changing the code until every single engineer loses the overview? I wonder.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by m0rde on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:48AM
(#50350356)
Not to start a flame war, but this sounds like a problem of monorepos and not git.
If they switched to private packages in separate repos, would that scale better? Would they be hitting the same problems? Would they be hitting different problems?
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by cube00 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:14AM
(#50350544)
This is what always scared me about monorepos. While I'll never reach the scale of big tech it was always a nagging feeling that I'd hit some limit. I know that is less likely to be a problem with smaller component based repos and if something goes wrong only that component is impacted.
Re:Scaling Git at OpenAI
by solyin on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:52AM
(#50350851)
They would be hitting different problems. Taken to a ridiculous opposite extreme, think about your most recent project. Think about having it organized into a separate git repo for every file. One file per git repo. Absolutely ridiculous. You'd need a bunch of glue programs to deal with the pile of git repos you now have. How do you handle the problem of different branches for every file? You need some sort of orchestrator. It's a thought experiment, you wouldn't actually do that, but at scale, eg Google, Facebook, and now OpenAI; that's where they operate. Orchestrating between a bunch of different repos is a different problem entirely but a monorepo solves a lot of problems while creating others. Some are more solvable than others.
That coding volume is a liability only for human engineers, with their limited memory, short attention span, tiredness, and quirky coding preferences. LLMs don't have any of those problems.
The manager always has a very good stick: “Do a good job or you will be fired”. And me wanting food is well aligned to not produce buggy code. Or make my job harder in the future by writing unmaintainable code.
> Frankly, these discussions are tiring because there's a false notion that humans have to be in the loop 100% of the time
The code is written to process data. Someone needs to be aware of how it’s processed, so that when malformed data appears, we can collectively find where it happens. You can always play around with your own data (if regulation allows) but you need to respect your customers’ data. Not looking at the code jis just negligence.
You are welcome to not use the model if it makes mistakes. Its weird that you are cooking up some edge case scenario to make your argument strong - everyone is incentivised to make things work well. Anthropic wants their models to perform well because that's why you will buy it.
> Someone needs to be aware of how it’s processed, so that when malformed data appears
Eh no. You need to know about only a compressed part of it, not 100%. Do you really claim that you need to know 100% of the code? This is not true today and certainly won't be true in the future. Hardly any code will be looked at by humans in the same way my manager doesn't look at my code.
What Anthropic wants and what happens in reality are two different things. But with code I write, I do control the process.
> Eh no. You need to know about only a compressed part of it, not 100%. Do you really claim that you need to know 100% of the code?
I know the code I write, and I know how it interfaces with external modules. When those interfaces don’t function as described, I look at the code if I have access to it. When I don’t, the party in control has always good incentives to produce good documentation. That knowledge is usually good for some time (years even)
> my manager doesn't look at my code
Because that’s not his responsibility, just like he’s not responsible for bugs and crashes. He’s responsible for the project and the team and you can be pretty sure that he’s looking at all at the information about those. Imagine if his own manager ask him about some details and he answers: “I don’t know, Claude is doing it”.
Perhaps I'm being overly generous to the parent's point, but it stands to reason that we make a lot of choices of where and how much trust we give away. This is just another one of those points.
Trusting that a calculator works is like trusting that there will be another day tomorrow, while trusting the code of an LLM is like trusting that the current weather will hold for the next hour.
Also, LLM finding bugs in human written code doesn't mean it wouldn't find much more in LLM generated code, and spend much more money doing so. That is, of course, after ruling out the false positives (of which there are a few, judging by the PRs I've received on my open source projects)
LLM compute is getting cheaper, so one can re-run the coding agent until it produces the desired result.
> without adding value compared to a more thoughtful, efficient implementation
Thoughtful implementations require thoughtful developers, and thoughtful developers cost more money that dumb GPUs.
Thoughtful developers do take money, but so too does shitty code that reaches a point LLMs struggle to maintain. Having both- with the thoughtful developers in charge- is better than just throwing more LLMs at it and hoping for the best.
If you seriously believe we have "solved coding" or achieved AGI in coding, what is not possible? Any argument you can come up with will be easily dismissed with "we'll just ask the AGI to solve that problem".
This kind of fallacy keeps repeating time and time again. Another version of this fallacy goes like this: "agents can create a lot of code but humans have to review each PR anyway so reviewing is a massive bottleneck". This doesn't make sense because reviewing is also done by agents and humans don't have to read every line.
Who is this code helping?
This thing aside... IDK, I used to think that there's no way to manage such a mess but apparently there is. Or rather, it starts to seem plausible that models will evolve faster than this mess, and once it becomes unmanageable, you can simply ask AI "make it better, no bugs please" and it'll mostly work.
It's becoming harder and harder to justify my own existence as a software engineer. It's surreal that that I dedicated years of study to prepare myself for a job that's being automated away.
Of course the demand for human developers won't drop to 0 but it'll be limited to a handful of industries where even small mistakes are costly, like aerospace. But then let's be real - what percentage of currently employed devs are competent enough to write such code?
Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially? And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model quality) their products don't seem to be changing very much?
I've seen it on other workplaces, but from what I see from open ai and anthropic, the code shouldn't be as extended.
But maybe I'm crazy lol
I think it’s simply a matter of dogfooding and new feature development, they do have much higher velocity than companies of equivalent size and an unlimited token budget helps as well.
I do believe this will force the AI labs to eventually solve the bloat problem with AI, but we’re definitely not there yet.
Give a verifiable benchmark for the AI agent to hit such as reduce token processing time by 5% without affecting output.
Kernels, performance-required stacks etc. is different, so you optimise them for that.
It feels like OpenAI and Anthropic have a ton of room to optimizing that regard, but they choose to rather focus on moving the frontier forward than doing things that are already possible in a more efficient way.
It's better than the ductape and glue pipelines that we had previous to this.
The software is the definition of plumbing no one cares about and testing it is trivial.
If you are wondering what these changes are, you can take a peek at https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commits/main/
This isn't to say that such pace of iteration is good or bad. That's a separate discussion.
[0] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ArchitectureDecisionRecord.ht...
many yaks to shave. many bikesheds to paint.
if you're paid by the line, why not go to town...
As a user of Astra, it writes code that appears to work. It does not necessarily write sensible code that is architected in a way that makes sense based on what it does. I just watched it do a major rework of a couple thousand lines of code by keeping the original organization and kludging up an adapter to make old code have new semantics.
I would expect that this approach, coupled with lots of fun asking for changes and none of the grunt work of actually thinking about the result, could result in exponentially increasing amounts of mess.
I haven’t used a recent Anthropic model - maybe it’s better at this.
just exercise. it will be ok, really. somehow we managed for millions of years, kiddos, and both gravity and the human body are unchanged in any relevant way since which suddenly requires "an app". I can get out of bed without an app, or an AI. I can prepare a meal and eat without any kind of app, or any kind of AI or LLM. its a true and real thing, in the real world, promise!
There are tons of different conditions people are in, with different histories of injuries, etc. and even people without any issues benefit massively from having a sensible, well structured workout plan that ensures their weaknesses are addressed and they work towards their personal goals. You don't need AI, an app or a personal trainer for that but while many people do enjoy learning a lot about exercising in their (often limited) free time, many don't and it's great if they have an affordable/free option. Why do you think physiotherapy exists?
Additionally, studies have proven that progressive overload is a really important aspect for progressing, so you should be tracking your workouts in some way, in an app or on paper, to ensure you really are challenging yourself.
I would have loved to have all that in an app over the last 25-30 years so I could see my progress.
It writes like it works at big tech and is angling for a promotion to L{n}+1 with this "project".
Surely it's obvious?
Slop cannons firing at a rate so high no human can hope to restrain them.
Such a colossal volume of slop that even the most well engineered, efficient technology on the planet, written by one of the greatest coders of all time, is no longer sufficient to contain it.
And git is enough to version control some of the most complex software like the Linux Kernel, the FreeBSD operating system, QEMU, browsers like Firefox,... Git was insufficient for Facebook and Google because they wanted to put the whole org inside a single repo, which broke the assumption where decentralization in git would happen (repo level, not subtree level). Now it seems that another assumption is broken, that you wanted a version control system, not a snapshot or a rolling log.
Because the limiting factor for software has always been the supply, not the demand. When the average human engineer would ship 100 lines of production code / week, you could only afford to do the most critical things. But if code gets cheaper to produce, the projects that were marginal become worth doing, and the projects that were obviously insane become marginal. And that's exactly what is happening as models get cheaper and better, leading to the frontier of worthwhile projects expanding rapidly.
> And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model quality) their products don't seem to be changing very much?
That's got some nice But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? energy to it!
In doing so, they obviously need to keep track of the myriad of changes, hence the requirement to ensure Git can scale up.
(I'd like to think /s, but you know what, maybe not)
Of course, then the question is if it's even worth committing them - you might as well just commit the design spec and let the model generate ephemeral code to run this whenever you need it. For now, I almost consider committing generated code a caching step in some sense, so you don't have to spend the tokens and time to generate it again.
Once super fast and super cheap tokens become more ubiquitous, however, I expect this to change.
What about user testing though?
Can’t roll out fusion powered data centers in 2030 without a simulation engine.
Disclaimer: I am building a code forge at https://juju.bi
https://git-dedup.ben3d.ca
Also, maybe FUD, but is there anything useful to learn from (p)npm other than cautionary tales?
This is incorrect.
It actually will work if you mount a drive. Github mirrors can be on separate drives. Now I haven't fully tested it safety in that situation yet, like I have with local dev on Windows and MacOS.
> Also, maybe FUD, but is there anything useful to learn from (p)npm other than cautionary tales?
This is also incorrect. Denigrating pnpm's well regarded optimizations because NPM packages have vulnerabilities unrelated to NPM is missing the point.
Impressive!?
Over the last few months at Xavi Group, our team of one engineer has gone from ~1k commits a day to ~100k commits per day as a result of debilitating financial decisions and exponentially increasing agentic workflow capability. Our internal Gitea services began to get bogged down by our proprietary frontier coding agent (internal codename `xavi-polaris`) refactoring the monorepos comprising our three flagship projects, one of which of course is our widely unknown RSI harness project.
(At this time we are not accepting any additional requests for our closed private beta, unless you ask reaaaalllyyy nicely $$$)
These demands were increasingly straining our S3 bucket capacity (petabyte scale), our CI/CD pipelines (3 DO droplets, a macbook mini, and a legacy windows server possibly compromised). Most critically it was straining the agentic wellfare of Xavi sessions themselves, which began to flag push/pull latencies that were taking so long their caches would go cold between tool calls, resulting in even greater financial hardship.
`xavi-polaris` sess-3LQGgyUxLGXiV7OTTIMo4TWm0a6 is credited with identifying that this unprecedented pace was unsustainable, with projections that by mid 2027, commits per day could be north of 1 billion as monorepo sizes increased and refactoring became increasingly challenging despite the profound software engineering capabilities unlocked by the RSI harness project.
To identify solutions, we first looked to ensure we wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. We noted projects at Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI that recently aimed to address the very same challenges, but after ~20k USD in session research that incidentally solved an open conjecture in statistical analysis, we decided that adopting any of these existing protocols would limit Xavi sessions in our internal promotion benchmarks that enable “contributor” sessions to progress to “lead” sessions, irrevocably inhibiting our expansion of upper agentic management.
We’re proud to introduce our new, closed source Git model: AGIt.
AGIt is a drop in replacement for Git, which we identified as being critically important because xavi sessions are deeply familiar with git commands as a result of a massive distillation and theft of proprietary data. AGIt utilizes novel CRDT and distributed systems technology built from our extensive experience with scaling distributed systems off the back of YJS. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, it didn’t make any sense to the individual human engineer at Xavi Group either.
Importantly, we don’t believe it needs to. The future is agentic workflows, and we’re excited to continue giving back to the nursery that birthed our projects and has delivered at scale for almost every other software company on the planet. We’ll be donating five `xavi-polaris` teams to pumping PRs as fast as possible to these open source projects. As we enter this new era we’d like to thank contributing sessions sess-3LQKRQrJUyAvYHlUDJcjos2CInf and sess-3LQKRnqna2emLvyUyPUqSEIaUh0, their teams were instrumental in this endeavor, and both will be promoted from “lead” to “steward” to reflect their tenacity in building this system over the last few hours.
- Cursor: https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale
- GitHub: https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...
- Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/research/redesigning-source-contro...
- GitHub: https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/th...
Maybe also tangentially East River Source Control's too: https://ersc.io/blog/what-comes-after-git.
I'm wondering how much cross-pollination of ideas and subsequent implementation details there are between people working at these companies. It does seem like all of this could potentially converge.
Which would support your argument, but I don’t think this is particularly new.
I think their article reads a bit differently, they haven't optimised git, they've ditched it in favour of a new CVS.
Do you mean VCS?
I don't think so, their article says they were seeing 30,000 commits a day in September, when I was at Meta six years ago they were easily doing that.
Supposedly they started gzipping the conversations.
I think Git is becoming a protocol and that is good. Let a thousand flowers bloom. On the other hand, would any of the parties mentioned share their code with anyone? If so, would anyone be ever interested in using it?
On the other hand, some lower-level tools have to be simple, reliable and efficient. Here, sharing is critical. Even the authors of the post shared some incremental improvements to git. Here, the slop-cannon-scalability story is moot.
I think git is becoming a protocol. One product can no longer cover these cases.
The point of my response is that the analogy was broken without saying what adding those pages could provide.
The analogy isn't broken. Your objection didn't really make sense, because adding pages to the tax code makes the tax code strictly more complicated. Your response just ignored the case where that complexity actually matters.
I am watching OpenAI's output, and while a lot of it is absurdly impressive, I can not even begin to imagine what kind of activity of theirs justifies a through-output of 5 petabytes of -GIT COMMITS-. That's not their data sets, that's not their models, that's not their math library. That's their code.
They're rengineering Git for scale, but like, why is there a demand for scale at all? If i saw an employee flipping the same number on an excel file over and over, I'd fire them, and yet they're perfectly happy running agents that do that and setting up meetings and writing blogposts about how much they improved their spreadsheet number randomization factory.
Seventh, at least, all the major code forges are on it: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/scaling-git-for-the-agentic-so...
Entire also seems focused on this: https://entire.com/news/entire-launches-distributed-git-netw...
Unlike Anthropic or OpenAI where no single engineer has any idea what they're doing and still uses pathetic source tracking, we have implemented an evolution and moved on to the next stage with our AGI: Wish Driven Development.
Our engineers, now called Wish Whisperers, open pull requests to add wishes to a controlled environment where all our wishes are stored in a Wish Registry. Swarms of agents are then dispatched to validate these wishes and when the pull requests are merged, implement these wishes directly in production.
Our productivity has significantly gone up, so much so that our Wish Whisperers are now running their own Wish Registries to automate their wishing speed.
To be frank, we still have no idea what we are doing but this is AGI level productivity and it's all that matters at the end of the day.
In all seriousness though I have enjoyed reading these posts. I will never work at this scale, but I like to read how different teams approach problems like this and I do wonder if some of these approaches will trickle down (or up?) into regular practice as everyone is committing more and faster.
Centralization is exactly what you want at this kind of scale. The most marginal participation from the server would make a huge difference.
There is a reason game studios don't use git. It's not just about the large objects.
Wasn't this flagged as a big risk, as it seems to place complete trust in the client?
Especially with all the rogue agents and containment/monitoring failures we have seen in 2026?
Would love to hear how the validation is deemed sufficient.
Yes! Great adaptation of an existing system, showing exactly why open source is special.
Neat hack, OpenAI engineers!
Monorepo. I keep hearing from various folks across the more frontier tech companies, that they have switched to a monorepo to improve agent-scale dev performance. Anyone have similar findings?
The same is really true for agents. All code in one place makes it faster and more reliable to load the proper context for coding tasks.
If they switched to private packages in separate repos, would that scale better? Would they be hitting the same problems? Would they be hitting different problems?