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Comment by AlexErrant | Hacker News Reader

...did they just squash the repo to 1 commit for v2.0.4? Why? Yall should know that in this age of AI trust is the real currency... and nuking your history is one hell of a way to raise eyebrows.

> Enjoy bug-free, fast vibe-coded apps! Hints: ask it to write laws for whatever should never break, and to parallelize everything you want running fast. Bend is young: if anything goes wrong, ask it to open an issue.

Emphasis mine. I don't want to be snarky but like... come on.

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Multiple times, even. Still no real reason why. https://github.com/bendlang/bend/activity?ref=main

One time they force pushed and erased everything except a 2-line README... on purpose.

Pre-obliteration version: https://github.com/bendlang/bend/tree/814453670d0e0d6777c131...

There is just a lot of private data and even proprietary code (like SupGen) in the commit story, so I just squashed it. I didn't think that'd be an issue? Why?

Commit history is back!

Taelin's X is a war story of how the codexes and fables tried to bend it. If you're afraid then LLMs were used in there - fear no more - they were.

> curl -fsSL https://bend-lang.com/install.sh | sh

Hmmm... needs `sudo`.

GitHub shows 44 contributors. 41 distinct users have merged pull requests.

...so now their work has been reduced to nothing?

Old repo can be accessed here https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/Bend1 . I guess we could have it as a branch on the bend2 repo

yes, there's a lot of personal info and AI slop in the commit history.

is this a problem to you? why

Erm, because it looks weird? Do you know any other language projects that squash their repos down to 1 commit? That's a destruction of trust, which is kinda important if you want people to build on your language.

Virtually everyone has AI slop in the commit history. No one's judging you for the commit history. Everyone's code smells, but the fact that you're ashamed/hiding it is... odd.

> there's a lot of personal info

You should know that force pushing doesn't hide actual commits; it's trivially viewable if someone just iterates https://github.com/bendlang/bend/activity?ref=main e.g. https://github.com/bendlang/bend/commit/d184863 so like... why bother.

alright, we could try to restore history removing sensitive bits if that's so important. thanks for the feedback

Props. G'luck with your project, I know what it's like to work nights & weekends. Unfortunately, first impressions matter.

Ty! Commit history is back now

I for one don't find it strange at all that he squashed the commit history. I suspect many feel similarly. You've demonstrated that you're quite taken aback by it, but without explaining anything wrong with it. It is not a "destruction of trust".

I mean... If you wanna build your project on a language that has no auditable history, reproducible builds, artifacts/releases, force pushes and breaks literally EVERY fork/PR, has no way to build or even see v2.0.3, and doesn't have changelogs... then I guess that's cool. You must be a trusting person; I unfortunately am not like that.

To give you a concrete reason why you should care to preserve the exact history and why it’s a matter of trust: in your paper, you reported the pinned SHA head of the benchmarks you ran. When you destroy the history you make it hard for people to duplicate your benchmark results. Why report the SHA if you are going to destroy the history?

https://github.com/bendlang/bend/blob/80b6539bc57621633ca68e...

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