Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.gitbutler.com

521–530 of 785 posts

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

#521
post #410
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people spend most of their time in issues and PRs, which are social features mapping social interactions.

Is Bugzilla also a social network?

To the degree that it emphasizes communication between individuals over being a dumb database, yes, a bugtracker can be a social network. Bugzilla is a bit too close to the "database" side of the spectrum, whereas GitHub is at the other end; Jira sits somewhat in the middle.

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

#522
post #433
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

counterpoint (don't take this to seriously): there are to many types of bricks to sort by form. unless you have an inventory the size of a brick factory you can only sort by category or by size. otherwise, sorting by color makes your collection aesthetically pleasing, and when you build, you usually want to use specific colors only to make your model look good.

That's why you have to group similar forms. - Bricks - Plates - Narrow Plates - Wheels - Windows/Doors - Smooth pieces - People bin And then if you like to sort further you sort out the smallest of each bin because those always fall to the bottom when mixed together

sorting by size needs to come first. from my own experience, you can't find any small pieces if they are mixed/covered by larger ones.

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

#523

A lot of people seem confused about how they raised the money, but it’s actually a pretty easy VC pitch. - 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 th…

I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better. 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…

Step 1: don't pitch from a conartist6 username

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

#524

I personally feel that: 1) Git is fine 2) I would not want to replace critical open source tooling with something backed by investor capital from its inception. Sure, it will be “open source “, but with people throwing money behind it, there’s a plan to extract value from the user base from day one. I’m tired of being “the product”. Critical open source tooltips by should spring from the community, not from corporate…

> but with people throwing money behind it, there’s a plan to extract value from the user base from day one.

They'll start injecting ads in your commit messages, forcing you to subscribe to a premium plan.

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

#525

A lot of people seem confused about how they raised the money, but it’s actually a pretty easy VC pitch. - 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 th…

I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better. 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…

Might want to change that username before you make your pitch

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

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better. 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…

No offense, but why should I believe you? The guy is famous because he has a track record of success doing similar projects. Of course that doesn’t guarantee success, but I’d wager it makes it statistically more likely than a random person. Starting a successful company is not all about good engineering. Have you built a prototype and tried to pitch any VCs? Or are you just asking rhetorical questions?

I built a prototype, and then I rebuilt and rebuilt it and rebuilt it, and somewhere in there my understanding of how to think about what I was building completely flipped on its head. Then I rebuilt the version flipped on its head another several times until I finally understood it. You can see that on my Github, it's all public: https://github.com/conartist6 (public devlog on Discord).

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.

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

#527
> Imagine your version control tool taking what you’ve worked on and helping you craft logical, beautiful changes with proper context

This is actually really important/useful, it's just not apparent to people who haven't worked on AI agents.

AI agents do a lot of work under the hood to try to save your tokens. There are two basic methods: 1) semantic knowledge maps, 2) PageRank. Agents like Aider will build a semantic knowledge graph of your codebase - the files in it, the functions, variables, etc - so that it can tell the agent exactly where everything is in a tiny summary. It'll also then use PageRank to build a graphed rank of these things, to surface the most relevant items first. (https://aider.chat/2023/10/22/repomap.html)

A modern VCS could do all of these things for you too, and the result should be making it easier to work with code, pulling in the related context simultaneously, so your changes make sense.

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

#528
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it’s fantastic. I have a post-tool-use hook for Claude Code to snapshot the repository for every edit. It’s like the built in file history feature but native in my VCS and works for my edits too. Don’t want to froth too much but JJ is my favourite piece of software in a while, and the fact that it’s not VC-funded is a major plus point.

Can you expand on this? How do you achieve it? Just a WIP JJ commit after every change or something more clever?

  "hooks": {
    "PreToolUse": [
      {
        "matcher": "Edit|Write",
        "hooks": [
          {
            "type": "command",
            "command": "if command -v jj >/dev/null && jj root >/dev/null 2>&1; then if ! jj status >/dev/null 2>&1; then echo 'WARNING: failed to snapshot jj repository, tell user to fix'; fi; fi"
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "PostToolUse": [
      {
        "matcher": "Edit|Write",
        "hooks": [
          {
            "type": "command",
            "command": "if command -v jj >/dev/null && jj root >/dev/null 2>&1; then if ! jj status >/dev/null 2>&1; then echo 'WARNING: failed to snapshot jj repository, tell user to fix'; fi; fi"
          }
        ]
      },
In newer jj there’s a dedicated snapshot command but I’ve not updated yet. Pop this in your Claude Code settings.json. It will snapshot the repository, thus recording any changes. Explore with jj evolog.

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

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but why should I believe you? The guy is famous because he has a track record of success doing similar projects. Of course that doesn’t guarantee success, but I’d wager it makes it statistically more likely than a random person. Starting a successful company is not all about good engineering. Have you built a prototype and tried to pitch any VCs? Or are you just asking rhetorical questions?

I built a prototype, and then I rebuilt and rebuilt it and rebuilt it, and somewhere in there my understanding of how to think about what I was building completely flipped on its head. Then I rebuilt the version flipped on its head another several times until I finally understood it. You can see that on my Github, it's all public: https://github.com/conartist6 (public devlog on Discord). It's a pretty serious claim t…

The reality is that none of that shit matters if you can build a product that people use and want to pay for. I would back someone who has made a dollar off of a product over someone who has built a great product that no one uses 100% of the time.

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.

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

#530
From their docs:

> We are creating not only a new kind of Git client,

Nope, not going to be the tool of the future.

The fundamental problem is it is still based on git.

Till this addresses submodules and makes them a first class citizen it's just tooling on top of a VCS that still ONLY supports single project thinking.

Post reply on HN