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Comment by farouqjalabi | Hacker News Reader

Gitbutler is backed by git. Gitbutler is essentially just ui for git which also allows you to have multiple branches. It isn't meant to replace git.

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"Backed by" as in "running git under the hood", not as in "supported by the git organization". I'd probably use "powered by" in this case to avoid confusion

Not quite - it totally takes over your branching strategy and locks you into GitButler.

So.. worktrees?

What does that even mean? Multiple branches is a git feature.

and worktrees too.

Which Claude literally uses.

I think it means parallel branches. Normally in git you can use one branch at a time. With agentic coding you want agents to build multiple features at the same time, each in a separate branch

Can agents not checkout different branches and then work on them? It's what people also do. I have a hard time to understand what problem is even solved here.

Yes, this is the obvious solution. Multiple agents working on multiple features should use feature branches.

Can’t believe how this whole AI movement seems to want to reinvent software engineering, poorly.

Their goal is not to give us a better tool, it's to get us to think our old tools are rubbish so we give them money instead.

to be entirely fair while git is getting better, the tooling UI/UX is still designed with expectation someone read the git book and understood exactly how it works.

Which should be basic skill on anyone dealing with code, but Git is not just programmer's tool any more for a long time so better UI is welcome

Has that ever been achieved in software/dev industry?

claude can use worktrees.. so if you have a system with say 10 agents, each one can use a worktree per session.. no need to clone the the repo 10 times or work on branches. Worktreeees.

That has been implemented 10 years ago:

  git worktree add -b feature-2 ../feature-2

Even before git has the worktree feature, you could just clone the repo again (shallowly if it’s big).

Sooooo git worktree. It's exactly that. One repository dir checked out in different places with different branches.

Not quite, Gitbutler allows you to apply multiple branches to the code base at once. With codebases you will have multiple code bases not one.

for example: It allows me to test coworkers branches with mine without merging or creating new branch.

It has many features that makes it super easy to add patch to any commit in any branch

> for example: It allows me to test coworkers branches with mine without merging or creating new branch.

How is that not supported by worktrees? You are aware, that you can checkout commits?

Seconding others here, what you're bringing up as distinct features of Gitbutler seems to just be stuff git can do.

- One local copy of a repo with multiple work trees checked out at once, on different branches/commits? Git does that.

- "Add a patch to any commit in any branch" I can't think of a way of interpreting this statement (and I can think of a couple!) that isn't something git can do directly.

Maybe it adds some new UI to these, but those are just git features. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (I have no idea, and "just UI" can be a good product) but these seem to be built-in git features, not Gitbutler features.

Yeah ur right, Gitbutler is just UI that makes it easier to do the mentioned stuff.

...I don't think you actually know how git works if you think that's the thing you can't do with git.

Does it checkout different branches at the same time, provides an in memory representation to be modified by another API, or does it to multitasking checkouts. The first thing is already natively in Git. I guess the others are innovation, although the second sounds unnecessary and the third like comedy.

‘Embrace, extend, extinguish.’

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