I really don't like this. The code I write between commits is my thinking. I think by writing some code out, deleting it, writing again. The code I write that's shipped in commits is written for others to understand, and is a product of that writing for thinking process.

I don't want my thoughts to be serialized, version controlled and publicly accessible.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4

There are so many early-stage startups also competing in this space right now. I’ve been on the interview circuit the past few weeks and talked to at least two. It’s going to be stiff competition for any of these tools to get well-established enough to be successful at a large scale.

I can’t help but feel like it is all enabling a level of developer surveillance with which I am deeply uncomfortable, though.

I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good.

I don’t see the value proposition here. I’ve seen roughly this feature proposed by multiple companies, and absolutely none of the have given a convincing reason for the technology to exist.

This seems like a great way to facilitate data gathering for improving LLMs coding performance.

If previously you needed to take action 1, 2, 3 to go from state A to B, all you saw was the change from A, B. Now you see intermediates 1, 2, 3 and can train the models to skip straight to B with the added context of the intermediate states.

A commit is useful because you cleaned it up first. The messing around in between is where you try things and delete the dead ends and most of it is meant to be thrown away. Saving every change and every agent message keeps all that junk around instead.

Just a stream of thoughts: if git commits were a list of sequential primitive changes instead of diff snapshots, conflict resolution would be trivial in most cases.

Not without cons of course: commit byte size, public WIP work and leaked secrets/unwanted edits.

With LLMs now being responsible for the physical typing of code and mundane plumbing tasks, this is a wise direction to go into

Our human ability is not defined by our _absolute_ output, but, by the quality of the _delta_ applied to an engineering artefact

Great engineers obsess over every keystroke

With LLMs, a much smaller number of keystrokes can create a much larger and more positively impactful delta

Every delta to the codebase can tell us some informational property about the behaviour of the system and storing that information WILL prove to be useful in the future

so i think the thing that everyone building these git alternatives is missing is a multi-repo story - unless the expectation is that everyone is going to start operating out of monorepos

i've settled on all of this context attached to issues in a project management system and referenced from commits

it works just fine - its not like your agent cannot read your issue tracker

Well shoot, they beat me to the punch. I’d been circling around something like this, just not collaborative and obviously more thought out than my random experiments. Minus the collab portions I’m interested to see how it compares to jujutsu