Comment by rockmeamedee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rockmeamedee | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand. Gitoxide exists and is great.

It might have missing pieces, but it’s easier to vibecode any needed networking additions to Gitoxide (which is maintained) than to just go and burn tokens trying to clone all of git again.

Git wants to add Rust. Gitoxide is a multi year project that’s going to be more maintained than an ad-hoc “it says it passes the test” vibeclone.

I’m not even against vibecloning things when it’s useful, but this shows no benefits. Git is a beloved tool that few people dislike, it’s not like vinext (people disliking the vendor lock-in they have with nextjs).

Also execs should keep in mind that “we burned thousands of dollars on tokens to re-create this beloved software so we can have our own copy”, even without the copyright/licensing argument, just isn’t something positive that the community will react positively to.

It doesn’t feel nice to see your favourite works cloned for no benefit. We’re past the “it was an experiment to see how far AI can go” stage now.

As mentioned, we also work on the Gitoxide project and Byron is a member of our team. We are well aware of all large community efforts and we're also cohosting the Git Merge conference this year.

There is a recent effort to vibe-loop more Git into Gitoxide, which is interesting:

https://github.com/GitoxideLabs/gitoxide/pull/2538

I still think that this is a project that can have value with a little more work. This announcement is merely a milestone, not the end product. I wasn't sure it was really possible to do, even halfway through the project. There has been a lot learned and there is a lot to learn, but I think there are useful applications for both a high quality, hand crafted, opinionated partial Git library (Gix) as well as a vibed, fully implemented, partially sloppy LLM Git library (Grit). We think it's worth exploring and investing in both options for now.

Also, I am the exec involved and I've done quite a lot for the Git community over the years. I would never try to have my "own copy" of it, that's ridiculous. I wrote and open sourced the Pro Git book (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2) and Git community book before it (https://schacon.github.io/gitbook/index.html), I created the official Git website (https://git-scm.com), I cofounded GitHub which hosts nearly all open source in the world, I have evangelized and supported the Git ecosystem for almost 20 years now. I restarted and funded development of libgit2 15 years ago, which you could similarly argue was an exec trying to have our "own copy" of Git under a more permissive license and would have been a similarly ridiculous argument.

> Also, I am the exec involved and I've done quite a lot for the Git community over the years. I would never try to have my "own copy" of it, that's ridiculous. I wrote and open sourced the Pro Git book (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2) and Git community book before it (https://schacon.github.io/gitbook/index.html), I created the official Git website (https://git-scm.com), I cofounded GitHub which hosts nearly all open source in the world, I have evangelized and supported the Git ecosystem for almost 20 years now. I restarted and funded development of libgit2 15 years ago, which you could similarly argue was an exec trying to have our "own copy" of Git under a more permissive license and would have been a similarly ridiculous argument.

This "I am Scott Chacon" part doesn't matter. 95% of people here already know.

People are critiquing your current actions.

GitButler now employs/has hired the gitoxide maintainer, I think? So no doubt they’re aware.

I guess they found that gitoxide isn’t good enough and/or to expensive to extend/improve for their use cases?

I think Byron (Gix author/maintainer) is one of the most excited people about the Grit project.

Gitoxide is great and we will continue to push it forward. Grit is an orthogonal project. Perhaps we can use one in the other or maybe Grit goes nowhere. But we thought that a small investment in a different approach is worth the effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com