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We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

blog.gitbutler.com

291–300 of 785 posts

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#291

I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it. But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has…

One reason I don't read HN as much as I used to is because I can't help translating numbers like that into the amount of research that could be accomplished with the same amount, and then I get angry.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#292
post #221
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should ai need this? A linear backlog is enough, a cache, for everything else they can create it new in a short time.

Another commenter explained it: It's about working on multiple branches in parallel. You can only check out one branch at a time currently in git - but with "but" you have all the changes just in memory so different agents can work on different branches at the same time.

git-worktree has been a thing for a decade+ and AI agents seem to be using them just fine in my experience. This is a solved problem.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#293
post #258

I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it. But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has…

When the sock bot dries the socks, matches and folds them together we're at peak robot. Come to think of it, its got to not lose either of them also. Current tech falls short of this.

> When the sock bot dries the socks, matches and folds them together we're at peak robot. Come to think of it, its got to not lose either of them also.

Missing socks (and containers or their lids) are still great unsolved problems in 2026. Solving this issue is like fusion, always 10 years away.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#294

I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it. But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has…

17M isn't a lot of money. It is for a person sure. Retire. Cessna. etc. But not to build a butler!

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#295

The only security incident I've had in my career was due to Git Butler - it committed temporary files into GitHub without me explicitly approving it! Of course, it was a private repository, but still, it became impossible to delete those secrets because there were plenty of commits afterward. Given the large file tree and many updated files in the commit, it wasn't apparent that those folders got sneaked into the com…

Just a reminder that even if you managed to amend those commits and force-push, the commits would still exist and will be addressable given the hash is known.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#296
post #154

I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it. But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has…

Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends . If you look at how VC (or really any network) funding circulates, it’s just people who are allowed to enter that circle and money just flows between them constantly. On one hand, you have trusted people who you are willing to give money, on the other hand, this inherently creates a clique. It reminds me how the Bohemian Club’s slo…

"Money is given to friends."

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.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#298
First off, I'm of course interested to see what the future infrastructure of software building next looks like.

> The hard problem is not generating change, it’s organizing, reviewing, and integrating change without creating chaos.

Sure, writing some code isn't the bottleneck. Glossed over is the part where the developer determines what changes to make, which in my experience is the most significant cost during development and it dwarfs anything to do with version control. You can spend a lot of energy on the organising, reviewing, patching, etc. stuff -- and you should be doing some amount of this, in most situations -- but if you're spending more of your development budget on metaprojects than you think you should be, I don't think optimising the metatooling is going to magically resolve that. Address the organisational issues first.

> This is what we’re doing at GitButler, this is why we’ve raised the funding to help build all of this, faster.

The time constraint ("faster") is, of course, entirely self-imposed for business reasons. There's no reason to expect that 'high cost + high speed' is the best or even a good way to build this sort of tooling, or anything else, for that matter.

Git's UI has become increasingly friendly over a very long time of gradual improvements. Yes, Mercurial was pretty much ideal out of the gate, but the development process in that case was (AFAIK) a world away from burning money and rushing to the finish.

Maybe going slow is better?

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#299

I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it. But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works. On the list of pain points in my life, “what comes after Git” has…

> ... and sort LEGO bricks by colour You never sort by color, ever! You sort by form, and then throw every color of that specific form in one bin. If you throw every red brick in the same bin, you'll never find a specific formed red brick because to many red bricks. But if you first search by form and then by color, you are much faster.

As someone who tried to sort many lego sets lately, I do like this. The problem lies that modern lego has so many unique forms that it feels like you'll have many bins with one or two pieces in.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But instead, we get a replacement for Git. [...] Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore? While I personally doubt that for $17M one could build such a vacuum robot prototype (for a vacuum cleaner company, investing this amount of money - if it worked - would be a rounding error), I will rather analyze the point that you raised: It is a very common situation that the workflows of companies is deeply ingrained…

As someone who makes things it always confuses me when millions just disappear whenever a company or government contractor makes things. Give me $17M and I'll build a vacuum robot prototype in under 2 years, I can't imagine 10 engineers getting paid $100+k/year can't do it in less time? Tooling is expensive, but not THAT expensive...

You sure? You ever ran a business? Prototyping costs, machines, licenses, overhead etc. etc.
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