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

blog.gitbutler.com

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

#471

Post by Geniuzz »

znnajdla wrote: post #191

I continue to be amazed at American capital allocation. $17M for an idea to improve Git? For a fraction of that money Ukrainian housewives build anti-drone air defence systems in their garage that protect their country. For that kind of money you could build an apartment block to ease the housing shortage. You could invest in electricity resilience and build mini nuclear power plants or a small wind farm. Soviet capi…

I don’t understand the negative sentiment here.

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.

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

#472

Post by kva »

fxtentacle wrote: post #15

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…

Totally agree - most of these co's that get funded are pointless. FWIW, the general math here is that you'd spend We've strayed really far from where technical innovation began

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

#473

Post by bluGill »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #72
uwagar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am actually fine with how svn works.

Guessing you aren’t working with hundreds of collaborators in a distributed offline system. Which is what git was for and why svn wasn’t enough for that type of use case.

The vast majority of git users are using github as a central repository. There a a few other not github but serves the same purpose central repositories. Distributed sounds cool, but almost everybody wouldn't notice a thing if git was centralized.

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

#474

Post by otterley »

materielle wrote: post #89
ergocoder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus built git in 8 days or something.

No he didn’t. He built a proof of concept demo in 7 days then handed it off to other maintainers to code for real. I’m not sure why this myth keeps getting repeated. Linus himself clarifies this in every interview about git. 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…

Those were not his ideas. Before Git, the Linux kernel team was using BitKeeper for DVCS (and other DVCS implementations like Perforce existed as well). Git was created as a BitKeeper replacement after a fight erupted between Andrew Tridgell (who was accused of trying to reverse engineer BitKeeper in violation of its license) and Larry McVoy (the author of BitKeeper).

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

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

#475

Post by schacon »

troyvit wrote: post #461

Huh. I look at what it took to build Git to begin with[1] and have to wonder if the thing that comes after it is really going to be _that much_ better. Git came about because there was a need for it. I feel like GitButler came about because there was a need for funding. Maybe I just need to have my coffee before commenting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History

I'm trying not to comment on too many of these, but this one is interestingly wrong to me, so why not indeed?

GitButler came about many years ago because I have been using Git for almost the full 20 years of it being around and I thought there could be a better way to do the things it's trying to solve for us. I want version control to do more for us, easier, faster and smarter. Git is still pretty dumb. Plus, now, everything in the dev workflow is changing - it's an interesting problem to think about what a _great_ toolset for how we'll all soon be developing software will be.

As a _single_ example - agents can't use interactive editors, yet _so many_ of the powerful parts of Git absolutely _require_ it. Agents can't interactively rebase, meaning they can't very effectively squash, amend, reword, reorder, absorb. They can't very easily interactively add. They are middling at best when it comes to stacking branches. Git is designed to send patches over email and agents are not concerned with that.

I would love to debate all of the lessons learned about the history of Git, but I was around for all of that. I know why Git was started, I know what it was meant to do, I understand how it's evolved. I still think there are a lot of interesting things that we could have in our change control tooling and Git is not the perfect solution.

Nearly everyone in this thread suffers from the same basic local maxima blindness that you do. Git is great, GitHub made it more valuable. But maybe the answer to the papercuts we've constantly been dealing with for decades isn't faster horses. (To, you know, mix metaphors)

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

#476

Post by thcipriani »

> 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.

Today, with English, we're all teaching swarms of agents to use a language built from scraps of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon Old English. That's far from what is needed today.

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

#477

Post by Aurornis »

drunner wrote: post #459
fxtentacle wrote: post #15

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…

Not to mention the irony that they need $17M to try and recreate/improve what Linus built in a week.

That’s not really fair. That first week prototype was proof of concept, not the Git we use today. It would easily have taken $17 million for a private team to put in equivalent work to all of the open source effort that has made Git into the tool we have today.

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

#478

Post by IshKebab »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #417
IshKebab wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that will go well for my formal model in a language that about 100 people use...

If only 100 people in the world are using this language, who are you even merging code with, lol.

Some of the other people?

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

#480

Post by schacon »

pu_pe wrote: post #93

I actually believe we need to rethink Git for modern needs. Saving prompts and sessions alongside commits could become the norm for example, or I could imagine having different flags for whether a contribution was created by a human or not. This doesn't seem to be the direction these guys are going though, it looks like they think Git should be more social or something.

Actually, it is. We're currently leading a conversation among several players in this space to agree on a metadata standard that helps make attaching, collaborating on and transmitting information like this simple, extensible and scalable.

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.

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