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Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

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Re: Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

#461
post #254

> Checkpoints are a new primitive that automatically captures agent context as first-class, versioned data in Git. When you commit code generated by an agent, Checkpoints capture the full session alongside the commit: the transcript, prompts, files touched, token usage, tool calls and more. This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you.

Sure... you `git add` the context text generated by AI and `git commit` it, could be useful. Is that worth 60 million?

Well a famous name is attached, could be the start of the product that replaces github, building github2 would give oppertunity to fix mistakes that are too entrenched to change at github, and who better to try? I'm uncharacteristically optimistic on this one, I'd give it a try!

Re: Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

#462
post #393

[flagged]

I don't think your Github example is accurate. The vast majority of developers started using git after Github became a thing. They may have used svn or another type of collaboration system before, but not git. And the main reason they started using git is because Github was such massive value on top of git, not because git was so amazing.

I don't think SVN and Mercurial were more widely used than git before Github became popular, but Github definitely killed off most of the use of those.

Re: Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

#463
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure... you `git add` the context text generated by AI and `git commit` it, could be useful. Is that worth 60 million?

It’s good to know that a few decades later the same generic Dropbox-weekend take can be made.

Cough https://ycgraveyard.iamwillwang.com/

Re: Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

#464
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure... you `git add` the context text generated by AI and `git commit` it, could be useful. Is that worth 60 million?

Discord is not prized because you can send a message to a chatroom, or any of the hooks and functions. It's because of everybody there. Currently no one is on Entire - the investor are betting they will be.

I think discord became popular in the first place because it was so much better than the alternatives, at least for the gaming/ hanging out with friends use case. Discord was initially competing with a bunch of self hosted stuff, vent/ mumble etc with higher barrier to entry and less features and Skype which was terrible.

Re: Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

#465
post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to build anything. Just tell the agent to write tickets into .md files in a folder and move them to a closed foler as you go along. I've been using Claude Code with the Max plan nonstop essentially every day since last July and since then I've come to realize that the newer people are the more things they think they need to add to CC to get it work well. Eventually you'll find a way that works for you…

I'm thinking a customized LLM would write notes in its own hyper compressed language which would allow it to be much much more efficient. For debugging you could translate it out to English, but if these agents can do stuff without humans in the loop, why do they need to take notes in English? I can't imagine creating this without hundreds of millions if not billions. I think the future is specialized models

They're literally trained on natural language to output natural language. You would need to create the hyper compressed language first, convert all of your training data to that, and then train the models with that. But token efficiency per word already does vary between different languages, with Chinese being like 30%-40% more efficient than English last I heard

Re: Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

#466
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bet that less people had their source code on git in 2008 than the number of developers using the various coding agents today. And the open-source project that we published today hooks into the existing workflow for those developers, in Claude Code and in Gemini CLI. Time will tell the rest. We will publish regular updates and you can judge us on those results.

At least for me, I have felt like the chat history in an agent is often times just as important and potentially even more important than the source code it generates. The code is merely the compiled result of my explanations of intent and goals. That is, the business logic and domain expertise is trapped in my brain, which isn't very scalable. Versioning and tracking the true source code, my thoughts, or even the tho…

Natural language is in fact a terrible way to express goals, it is imprecise, contradictory, subjective, full of redundancies and constantly changing. So possibly the worst format to record business rules and logic.

This lesson has been learned over and over (see AppleScript) but it seems people need to keep learning it.

We use simple programming languages composed of logic and maths not just to talk to the machine but to codify our thoughts within a strict internally consistent and deterministic system.

So in no sense are the vague imprecise instructions fed to LLMs the true source code.

Re: Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

#467
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

>what's the value of paying someone for a product like this vs just building it myself? Same thing it’s always been. Convenience. Including maintenance costs. AI tools have lowered the bar significantly on some things, so SaaS offerings will need to be better, but I don’t want to reinvent every wheel. I want to build the thing I want to build, not the things to build that. Just like I go to restaurants instead of mak…

Right, but paying for food at a restaurant doesn't get me any closer to owning a restaurant. If promises are delivered on for these agentic coding platforms (which I do believe in), it seems the most reasonable path forward is to use those platforms to build your own platform.

Re: Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how HN'ers frequently judge ideas based on complexity of implementation, not value. I still remember the reaction when Dropbox was created: " It's just file sharing; I can build my own with FTP. What value could it possibly create ".

Dropbox value was instantly recognizable, but I feel I have zero use for Entire.

I mean, I CAN see the value in pushing the context summary to git. We already have git blame to answer "who", but there is no git interrogate to answer the "why". This is clearly an attempt to make that a verb git can keep track of. It's a valuable idea.

I also seen examples of it before. I've got opencode running right now and it has a share session feature. That whole idea is just a spinoff on the concept of the same parent that led to this one.

Re: Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is not prized because you can send a message to a chatroom, or any of the hooks and functions. It's because of everybody there. Currently no one is on Entire - the investor are betting they will be.

I think discord became popular in the first place because it was so much better than the alternatives, at least for the gaming/ hanging out with friends use case. Discord was initially competing with a bunch of self hosted stuff, vent/ mumble etc with higher barrier to entry and less features and Skype which was terrible.

Discord really became big because it had 0 obstacle onboarding. In an age of Skype, Ventrillo, Teamspeak and Mumble, all "installation" software with "server addresses" and "setup your user config", Discord shows up, says "press this link", and done, you're ready to go. Install link? No, it's in the browser. Account? No, you literally got a temp account made for you. You just talked. Yes, with a button in the corner that says "Claim this account" which just wants an email and a name, but point is, you didn't even have to do that much. This is why the comparison to it is IRC despite the two being so far apart, IRC was the only other chat software with this small of a barrier to entry.

Everything else about the featureset was copy pasted from Slack. No one cares about that part.

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