Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#11

Post by adastra22 » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:08 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #2

A fun anecdote, and I assume it's tongue in cheek, although you never know these days, but is the LLM guaranteed to give you back an uncorrupted version of the file? A lossy version control system seems to me to be only marginally better than having no VCS at all.

From experience, no. I’ve customized my agent instructions to explicitly forbid operations that involve one-shot rewriting code for exactly this reason. It will typically make subtle changes, some of which have had introduced logic errors or regressions.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#12

Post by graemep » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #10

I cannot wrap my head around the anecdote that opens the article: > Lately I’ve heard a lot of stories of AI accidentally deleting entire codebases or wiping production databases. I simply... I cannot. Someone let a poorly understood AI connected to prod, and it ignored instructions, deleted the database, and tried to hide it. "I will never use this AI again", says this person, but I think he's not going far enough:…

Its a matter of priorities. Its cheap and fast and there is a chance that it will be OK. Even just OK until I move on. People often make risky choices for those reasons. Not just with IT systems - the crash of 2008 was largely the result of people betting (usually correctly) that the wheels would not fall off until after they had collected a few years of bonuses.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#13

Post by ants_everywhere » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:10 PM UTC

I'm not sure it's the context window. Gemini cli keeps a shadow git repo to be able to rollback changes in cases like this: https://gemini-cli.xyz/docs/en/checkpointing.

It's disabled by default, but even with the default setups, you can find large snippets of code in ~/.gemini/tmp.

tl;dr: Gemini cli saves a lot of data outside the context window that enables rollback.

I'm sure other agents do the same, I only happen to know about Gemini because I've looked at the source code and was thinking of designing my own version of the shadow repo before I realized it already existed.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#14

Post by Flavius » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:11 PM UTC

Who needs anything when you can keep everything in a 16 TBs txt file?

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#15

Post by eisbaw » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

Lol. The context window is actually just a buffer in your client. The guy could probably simply scroll up...

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#16

Post by adastra22 » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

mathieuh wrote: post #8

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #2

A fun anecdote, and I assume it's tongue in cheek, although you never know these days, but is the LLM guaranteed to give you back an uncorrupted version of the file? A lossy version control system seems to me to be only marginally better than having no VCS at all.

I frequently (basically every conversation) have issues with Claude getting confused about which version of the file it should be building on. Usually what causes it is asking it do something, then manually editing the file to remove or change something myself and giving it back, telling it it should build on top of what I just gave it. It usually takes three or four tries before it will actually use what I just gave…

Your changes aren’t being introduced to its context, that’s why.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#17

Post by f1shy » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #4

Don't take this as career advice! This is an amusing anecdote. But the only lesson to be learned is to commit early, commit often.

And in general maybe have a better working methodic, or however you name it. Sounds like messing around to me.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#18

Post by ed_elliott_asc » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

I’m completely paranoid about claude messing with my .git folder so I push regularly

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#19

Post by mobeigi » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

I'm waiting for the day someone builds a wrapper around LLM chats and uses it as a storage medium. It's already been done for GitHub, YouTube videos and Minecraft.

Re: Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

#20

Post by f1shy » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:15 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #12

the_af wrote: post #10

I cannot wrap my head around the anecdote that opens the article: > Lately I’ve heard a lot of stories of AI accidentally deleting entire codebases or wiping production databases. I simply... I cannot. Someone let a poorly understood AI connected to prod, and it ignored instructions, deleted the database, and tried to hide it. "I will never use this AI again", says this person, but I think he's not going far enough:…

Its a matter of priorities. Its cheap and fast and there is a chance that it will be OK. Even just OK until I move on. People often make risky choices for those reasons. Not just with IT systems - the crash of 2008 was largely the result of people betting (usually correctly) that the wheels would not fall off until after they had collected a few years of bonuses.

I do not know who is doing the math, but deleting production data does not sound very cheap to me...