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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

I have absolutely no idea what this offers that makes it better than git (or any over VCS for that matter) for agents.

There’s some mention about performance, which is great, but the performance of git isn’t a bottleneck for agents.

There’s some mention about token use being reduced, which is great, but how have they achieved that vs gits porcelain modes. And why does token count require a whole new VCS, and thus incompatibilities with all the established git ecosystems?

I really want to find reasons to like this but it’s probably some of the worst product marketing I’ve seen. And something this significant really does need to sell itself hard if you’re going to get enough people in a project team to agree to switch away from git

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The main site mentions being able to "mount" a branch, vs. cloning a new repo or using git worktrees. And messageless commits for intermediate work. Besides that tho I don't see a compelling reason to ditch git, but looks interesting enough that I want to keep an eye on it

I've heard of this before but never tried it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gitfs

> messageless commits for intermediate work

Would this be like `git commit --allow-empty-message`?

What’s wrong with worktrees? To me that is exactly what mounting a branch would be. I use them a fair amount.

Edit: I see people bringing up lazy file checkouts in conjunction with mounting a branch. For some of the enormous repos people work in this makes sense to me.

worktrees are cool, i find i need some bash aliases to like them as a human.

> I really want to find reasons to like this

But why? Why would I want to like a project which seems to invent problems rather than solve any? I don’t want to like this.

We don’t know if it’s inventing problems or solving them. That’s the point.

>the performance of git isn’t a bottleneck for agents.

Eh, it depends on the workflow. Especially if you have certain stack based workflows. Worktrees are kinda half solution here but depending on the repo type and if you are dealing with LFS or sparse checkouts, I've had agents struggle really hard to work through a stack or rebase things without a lot of thrashing or being IO bound by just stumbling into operations in a boneheaded way. Now I have AGENTS.md/skills/hooks gaurdrails littered about to try and work around things.

checkout repo into tmpfs

> Eh, it depends on the workflow. Especially if you have certain stack based workflows.

I would normally assume there's 0 percent chance that `git` (the binary) is a significant impact on LLM based devel. The same applies to git, the protocol/format/tree.

I'd love to hear about what makes the workflow you have, where any part of git becomes a noticable proportion of the process? Unless you mean your LLM just can't figure out how to use git?

How much of that is due to the git CLI and how much of that is inherent flaws with the git VCS?

I know git (the VCS) can become a bottleneck with massive monorepos at the scale of Linux or Microsoft. But is anyone likely to port them to something new just to be a little more agent friendly? And if the goal of this new VCS was to make life easier for large monorepos (for humans as well as agents) then why doesn’t the author mention that on the project’s website? Because that’s exactly the kind of thing that might make this an easier sell to project teams.

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