Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.gitbutler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 785 posts

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

#531

Post by someguynamedq »

conartist6 wrote: post #424
tiffanyh wrote: post #42

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…

The question is not "will the product be better." The question is will you make the investors money.

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

#532

Post by dwoldrich »

schacon wrote: post #475
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, e…

There does seem to be a lot of jaded pessimism this morning (buck up, fellas!)

I watched a bit of the gitbutler video and I liked the ideas, multiple/stacked branches. It felt like a genuine/natural extension of git concepts.

Sortof like Typescript vs JavaScript, I worry that the payoff of adopting something like Gitbutler would require navigating a lot of janky integrations with the rest of my tooling and training of the team.

I myself have always resisted mastering the git command line because JetBrains' git tooling is so nice, and abstracts just the right bits that I haven't had the need. I'm not opposed to switching to command line, but that 3-way git merge tool that JetBrains has is so good and I'd hate to lose it.

Honestly, I predict the world and its networks and developers are going to start cloistering and close themselves off as the AI training panopticon is getting nasty.

It would be great for Gitbutler to abstract true decentralized version control by offering decentralized/self-hosted feature parity with GitHub and remove vendors like them from the picture. I'd pay recurring seat licenses for something turnkey that I could run privately and securely.

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

#533

Post by trashb »

> The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow. Not only has the problem not been solved well for that old model, it’s now only been compounded with our new AI tools.

A bit of a strange thing to say in my book. Git isn't SVN and I think these problems are already solved with git. I agree that the interface is not always very intuitive but Git has the infrastructure which is very much focused on supporting alternatives to "one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow".

> the problem that Git has solved for the last 20 years is overdue for a redesign.

To me it's not clear what the problem is that would require a redesign.

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

#534

Post by conartist6 »

myroon5 wrote: post #523
conartist6 wrote: post #424

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…

Step 1: don't pitch from a conartist6 username

It's been my username for 20 years and I'm not changing it to be more corpo-propriate now. I think it makes more sense if you know that my name is Conrad.

It's pretty easy to find out who I am in the real world too. For one thing I'm a private pilot and for 10 years I had an airplane personally registered to me, making my name and address a matter of (open) public record.

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

#535

Post by steveklabnik »

aseipp wrote: post #327
justincormack wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its VC funded https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2076429/000207642925...

Jujutsu is not "VC funded". But some of the developers, including me, work at East River Source Control (I worked on Jujutsu before that, too). The majority of the code in the project doesn't come from us -- or Google, for that matter. We don't allow people to approve patches when the author is from the same company, anyway.

(also at ERSC here, hi Austin!) Heck, I have not had enough bandwidth to do as much upstream work as I initially thought I would when I started there!

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

#536

Post by jayd16 »

Seems fine I guess. I'm not a fan of Perforce but it does have some features that git still struggles with and needs to address to break into new customers. This Gitbutler seems to address some of them but I can't say it really feels next gen.

I like the idea of parallel branches. I feel like you could probably get away with just creating multiple, named stages but having a full history is nice. P4 has multiple pending CLs and it works nicely enough. This sounds a bit better so that's cool.

As far as "social coding" git's design is really at odds with any sort of real time communication. I would love to see a first class support for file locking, and file status work flows. It's not big at all in code dev because code can be merged but for non-coders, source controlled assets are often not mergeable. To solve this, P4 is often used with heavily integrated tools that provide live file status (Locked, out of date, edited by others). This way merge conflicts are prevented at author time. Git is really lacking here. Is fetching constantly really the best we can do?

Then of course... can we get some large file and partial checkout workflows that don't feel good?

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

#537

Post by factorialboy »

schacon wrote: post #462
factorialboy wrote: post #192

Installed GitButler to try it out — and realized it installs malicious Git hooks to take over the git commit workflow: * pre-commit — The malicious one. It intercepted every `git commit` attempt and aborted it with that error message, forcing you to use `but commit` instead. Effectively a commit hijack — no way to commit to your own repo without their tool. * post-checkout — Fired whenever you switched branches. GitB…

Just to clarify (and we do say this when you run `but setup`), the `pre-commit` hook is needed because of the way that we manage commits - we allow for multiple parallel applied branches, which Git cannot do. The way we accomplish this is to maintain a hidden 'megamerge' commit (as JJ would say). All Git commands work fine the way we're doing it except 'git commit', which is not aware of our operating model and will…

All I did was install GitButler via my OS's package manager, and open a local repo via the GUI.

And I saw these malicious (pre-commit) git hooks installed by GitButler, without any confirmation, or prompt seeking my approval.

I'm sure you folks will come up with a "technical explanation" or some "legal-marketing language" to cover up for this — but in my book — redirect `git commit` to `but commit` is dishonest and unethical.

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

#538

Post by conartist6 »

someguynamedq wrote: post #531
conartist6 wrote: post #424

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…

The question is not "will the product be better." The question is will you make the investors money.

I understand that money is at the root of the question. I don't see any problem with my strategy for making money, which is to win over all their users with a wildly better product.

Github itself basically followed this route. They didn't built Git on top of SVN. They built a much better product (than Sourceforge) and they used network effects (particularly their free-for-OSS offer) to grow their userbase until they could start to land corporate contracts.

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

#539

Post by steveklabnik »

eproxus wrote: post #388
dwb wrote: 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?

The others use `jj status`, but if I were to do this, I'd use `jj log -n0`, which has no output. All you really need is any read-only jj command.

You could also turn on watchman and have this property on every save of a file and not even need to worry about hooks.

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

#540

Post by jlokier »

Meleagris wrote: post #17

I recently switched to Jujutsu (jj) and it made me realize that “what comes after Git” might already exist. It turns out the snapshot model is a perfect fit for AI-assisted development. I can iterate freely without thinking about commits or worrying about saving known-good versions. You can just mess around and make it presentable later, which Git never really let you do nicely. Plus there’s essentially zero learning…

> You can just mess around and make it presentable later, which Git never really let you do nicely.

I'm surprised to read that, because that's how I've always used Git (and GitHub).

That's what I've understood to be good practice with Git, and it was liberating compared with what came before. One of the nicest things about Git is you can throw things in locally without worrying about how it looks, and make it presentable later.

Post reply on HN