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Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

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Re: Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

#91

Post by forty_one »

Looks very interesting, but it's difficult to see the benefit from git right now apart from performance? Don't get me wrong, that's good, but I don't think it's a big enough proposition to get people to ditch git and move to oak.

Since it's early, here a couple of things I'd loooove git to be and it's not, maybe you can consider to go in this direction and, if there are many more like me, get a large user base: - The private/public quantum shouldn't be a repo but something more fluid within a repo. A public repo should be able to have private sub-directories, files, etc. If should be fluid in this regard, so big projects could open-source some features, not all. Right now it's all or nothing, and that closes the doors to many big closed projects. - env variables. If you could make its usage easier and more seamless within oak, that could convince many (me included). It's really a headache to deal with env vars and git, and shouldn't be the case. - Collaboration for agents beyond PRs. I don't know exactly what's the flavor for this, but I know that fundamentally the create PR/merge circle of git is not how it should be.

Great initiative and good luck!

Re: Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

#92

Post by zdgeier »

forty_one wrote: post #91

Looks very interesting, but it's difficult to see the benefit from git right now apart from performance? Don't get me wrong, that's good, but I don't think it's a big enough proposition to get people to ditch git and move to oak. Since it's early, here a couple of things I'd loooove git to be and it's not, maybe you can consider to go in this direction and, if there are many more like me, get a large user base: - The…

Totally agree with everything. Definitely will be hard to get people to switch. Also love the monorepo idea you mentioned. It should totally be possible to keep the benefits of a monorepo without the downsides of git submodules. So you should be able to open-source parts of a repo without open sourcing the whole thing. One of the benefits of building from scratch is that this is pretty straightforward. Also the other ideas you mentioned are really awesome. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

#93

Post by desmondl »

hnlmorg wrote: post #68

I have absolutely no idea what this offers that makes it better than git (or any over VCS for that matter) for agents. There’s some mention about performance, which is great, but the performance of git isn’t a bottleneck for agents. There’s some mention about token use being reduced, which is great, but how have they achieved that vs gits porcelain modes. And why does token count require a whole new VCS, and thus inc…

The main site mentions being able to "mount" a branch, vs. cloning a new repo or using git worktrees. And messageless commits for intermediate work. Besides that tho I don't see a compelling reason to ditch git, but looks interesting enough that I want to keep an eye on it

Re: Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

#94

Post by jayknight »

GroksBarnacles wrote: post #66

I wish we as a society would stop using random words for products. "Slacked about Oak, but they need in Fizzle. The deck's in Slate, the assets are in Vault, the timeline's in Pulse, the copy's in Quill, the build's in Forge, and the launch party's already in Ember."

Aren't all product names "random" words before they become well known? Some are more descriptive than others, but they're all arbitrary to begin with.

Re: Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

#95

Post by ianburrell »

gitpusher wrote: post #84
GroksBarnacles wrote: post #66

I wish we as a society would stop using random words for products. "Slacked about Oak, but they need in Fizzle. The deck's in Slate, the assets are in Vault, the timeline's in Pulse, the copy's in Quill, the build's in Forge, and the launch party's already in Ember."

What alternative would you suggest? "Sent a message in our enterprise chat application about the version control system that our engineering team sometimes uses (no, not that one, the other one) but they need it in the project management app that our Design team uses (good luck requesting access from IT, we have more than a dozen project management tools in our catalog)"

The solution is to always add a second name. Like people, projects could have short name and full names. Could be organization (Apache Spark), could use type (Oak Versioncontrol), could be longer name (Violet Spring). Then can use short name internally, and full name globally. I like the type name cause tells what it is.

Re: Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

#97

Post by grayhatter »

zbowling wrote: post #72
hnlmorg wrote: post #68

I have absolutely no idea what this offers that makes it better than git (or any over VCS for that matter) for agents. There’s some mention about performance, which is great, but the performance of git isn’t a bottleneck for agents. There’s some mention about token use being reduced, which is great, but how have they achieved that vs gits porcelain modes. And why does token count require a whole new VCS, and thus inc…

>the performance of git isn’t a bottleneck for agents. Eh, it depends on the workflow. Especially if you have certain stack based workflows. Worktrees are kinda half solution here but depending on the repo type and if you are dealing with LFS or sparse checkouts, I've had agents struggle really hard to work through a stack or rebase things without a lot of thrashing or being IO bound by just stumbling into operations…

> Eh, it depends on the workflow. Especially if you have certain stack based workflows.

I would normally assume there's 0 percent chance that `git` (the binary) is a significant impact on LLM based devel. The same applies to git, the protocol/format/tree.

I'd love to hear about what makes the workflow you have, where any part of git becomes a noticable proportion of the process? Unless you mean your LLM just can't figure out how to use git?

Re: Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

#98

Post by laserbeam »

hnlmorg wrote: post #68

I have absolutely no idea what this offers that makes it better than git (or any over VCS for that matter) for agents. There’s some mention about performance, which is great, but the performance of git isn’t a bottleneck for agents. There’s some mention about token use being reduced, which is great, but how have they achieved that vs gits porcelain modes. And why does token count require a whole new VCS, and thus inc…

> I really want to find reasons to like this

But why? Why would I want to like a project which seems to invent problems rather than solve any? I don’t want to like this.

Re: Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

#99

Post by zdgeier »

desmondl wrote: post #96

I would have loved to try locally, but the installer asks me to create an account and I don't want to do that yet.

Agree we should definitely support offline flow. You can download the binary manually if you would like [1]. Although the offline/self-hosted flow isn't fully tested right now, would love some feedback on it if you're able to check it out!

[1] https://github.com/oakdotspace/oak/releases

Re: Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

#100

Post by SwellJoe »

Anything "for agents" needs to provide some kind of evidence it's better than what the agents already have baked into the model training data. It can't just be "easier" on some dimension, because the model has already learned the hard parts of the old thing and models can't make new memories to learn new things, so there is always a context cost for the new thing.

Models know git because there's a monstrous amount of git in their training data. Models never heard of a new thing "for agents", so you have to teach them to use it via skills and docs. Models can, of course, follow documentation, so there's nothing stopping them from using the new thing...but, the new thing "for agents" starts the race well behind the known thing that was built for humans a decade or two ago and has huge amounts of training data baked into every model.

I'm not saying nobody should make new things (an accusation I've gotten when saying something similar about a previous "for agents" thing), of course people should make new things. I'm saying that when I see "for agents", I think, "prove it". Agents don't have trouble with git, so there's gotta be some kind of pain point about using git with agents that I'm unaware of that this solves somehow (but isn't expressed on the page) or this isn't actually for agents, it's just a project someone wanted to do (and that's also fine!). But, if the latter, "for agents" is merely marketing and I'm not interested.

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