Show HN: Git for AI Agents

Posted by doshay 23 hours ago

hi guys. been working on something i think is fundamentally missing in today's workflow with ai agents.

vcs.

i find myself struggling with questions that agents can't answer like "why did you do it?", "when did u delete this folder? why?", etc. or trying to /rewind (after a /compact...) or basically `bisect` to find when and why something was done by the agent in the current / previous session.

just like git did for code, i think we are the same core capabilities with ai agents

so...

i developed an open source solution for that (currently supporting claude code)

would love to get feedback, contribution or maybe other ideas or solutions you find for those problems.

108 points | 47 commentspage 2

embedding-shape 22 hours ago|

Agents can use git FWIW, and you can tell them to search old sessions by saying "Search through sessions in ~/.codex/sessions" and it'll find the most appropriate tools for doing so that is installed already. You can even add this to your system prompt or AGENTS.md and now you don't even have to prompt for it, it'll just look up the session history by itself.

Why this isn't built-in, I dunno, but been possible and easy for a very long time already, and works for any agent harness out there (as long as they persist sessions that is).

Personally I make the agent justify and explain things in the git commits, where is where that info went before agents anyways too, then have some sentences in my AGENTS.md about reading recent commits before doing changes, and using it whenever I prompt for history that isn't part of the current session. Seems to work perfectly fine.

cosimo-dw 20 hours ago||

I think codex has done something along the line: https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/6041

But it is trying to use git as a backend to save file states, and at the same time NOT showing it in the user's git history.

_ink_ 22 hours ago||

I haven't tried it, but conceptually I can imagine that it is good to have a separate VCS for the agent. This way I can keep git clean and easy to understand for humans and still keep all the verbosity the agent needs.

embedding-shape 21 hours ago|||

> This way I can keep git clean and easy to understand for humans

Personally I like it best when both humans and agents find it clean and easy to understand, but we all like different things :)

tfrancisl 22 hours ago||||

Branches and worktrees exist and can effectively act as a "separate" history. At the end of the day you would still merge the changes in, possibly with a squash if you don't care about the little commits.

esafak 21 hours ago||||

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes

giraffe_lady 22 hours ago|||

It's really not. Anything the LLM can benefit from people can too. Keeping minimal explicit information in git history is a cultural norm not proven best practice. The best codebases I've worked on have very large commit messages and searching them is very useful. We should have been doing it that way all along.

binyu 20 hours ago||

Hey, this is cool work. By any chance, did you see Cloudflare Artifacts?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/artifacts-git-for-agents-beta/

deferredgrant 21 hours ago||

Small recommendation: Speed up the demo on the Github page. That would reduce the number of folks that drop off the page waiting for the command-line typing.

doshay 16 minutes ago|

thanks! will do

Cilvic 19 hours ago||

quite interested in this but I'm working pi/omp only at the moment.

Inspired by entire.io I've vibed a super small extension that seems similar to this: https://github.com/janmechtel/pintire

I expect this feature to eventually end up in the harness

esafak 21 hours ago||

1. Tests look anemic: https://github.com/regent-vcs/re_gent/tree/main/test

2. How does it compare with http://usegitai.com/ and https://entire.io/ ? Another Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057104

3. Please add it to other registries, esp. those compatible with mise, e.g., https://github.com/aquaproj/aqua-registry

radial_symmetry 22 hours ago||

This is brilliant. Does it only work with Claude right now? Will it work with any agent built on the Claude Agent SDK?

doshay 15 minutes ago|

at the moment only Claude Code, i'm planning to add support for the other big 3, but at the moment it's just me ... hopefully in the near future :)

shcheklein 21 hours ago||

just curious since it reminds me a bit. Have you / someone tried https://entire.io/ (I'm not affiliated at all, so it is not a plug).

doshay 5 minutes ago|

sure, fair question i think the main difference is that entire are built on top of git == you would have to commit in order to track something...

transkey 22 hours ago||

That's a good idea. I think you should develop it to make it more versatile.

keybored 22 hours ago|

None of these X-for-agents seem to motivate why they don’t use X.

tfrancisl 22 hours ago|

Git is a particularly egregious one, imo. It has a simple cli and solves all of the problems presented here! Worktrees for "exploratory" work that you might throwaway, and otherwise atomic commits just make tracking changes and reasoning for changes easy.

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