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225 pointsgeoffbp208 comments

Sometimes I think back to Google Wave, that beautiful glimmer of real-time collaborative canvases, announced in 2009 when Angular and Backbone hadn't even been invented, and think it launched almost two decades too early.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berli...

We're now in a world where we expect real-time interfaces to be developed and immediately deployed for our feedback by agents, in business-critical settings where classic SDLC timelines are far too slow, but code quality is becoming more difficult to manage at scale.

Git, at its core, is a fundamental notion that behavior is an auditable tree of immutable changes, where any participant can rearrange or rewind or remix this sequence on a local machine to show, and interact with, a provisional combination of those changes.

Google Wave, with its operational transformation (OT) and federation systems, was similar in many regards. We have CRDTs now, and far better techniques for auto-merging workstreams - including agentic systems that can resolve conflicts intelligently!

Wave fundamentally had a concept that people would come together and evolve a simple chat interface, into a customized real-time application for their use cases, and that that iteration could happen in real-time, with data and behavior both evolving in collaboration with bots. Wherever Git and the broader notion of SDLC goes, I hope it brings the best of this thinking.

When I tried out Delta by zed in Private alpha my first feedback was "wow this reminds me of Google Wave"

The Wave release was the event that really kicked off my starting to rethink my own framing of what Google's engineering culture actually produces. I was so excited for its release, possibly moreso than any major innovation before then, & what was delivered was pure crap implementation wise. The idea was brilliant, & open, so theoretically someone could have done it well, but Google poisoned the well by releasing such a turd.

Throughout it's existence Google has been revered as a company for its engineering output, but if you interrogate that even a little bit, you end up with a very small minority of gems among a massive ocean of over engineered crap. Even the huge objective open successes like k8s are to this day sold with the massive caveat of "it's heavy & over engineered, but": nobody's calling k8s elegant. Pretty much all of their good products are acquisitions, many of which they've subsequently degraded.

One can certainly make this argument about almost any large corporation, but I do think there's very few with such a stark divide between how the quality of their engineering work is revered & the reality.

Wave's failure and that of Google+ might have been the turning point for Google, never really to return to its former glory.

Consider if they had focused on it instead of Android. Maybe we would still have Windows phones. Such are the tides of time. I think their present, malignant glory eclipses it financially but never will romantically.

Loss of Windows Phone is sadly Microsoft's own doing.

They were around 10% in Europe when they ramped down everything.

It was the option for those unable to buy iPhones, and not willing to use Android as alternative.

However we had the whole mess with Windows 7 to 8.0 being a full reboot for devs, 8.0 to 8.1 being a reboot, 8.1 to 10 yet again, which naturally meant no one cared with quality apps as well.

Wave was a cool tech demo, and I was excited to see it. The teaser video was solid marketing. Me and my lab mates couldn’t figure out what use case it solved though.

Google+ was pure garbage being shoved down our throats. That was a huuuge signal that Google had changed.

They boldly claimed they'd beat Facebook in 100 days and began acquiring any startup that pretended to solve a social problem. Every team got a G+ OKR. In classic Google fashion, they chewed up the one social platform they had, Orkut, and gChat, which was filling the AIM void, also squandered its lead as it was subsumed. They never invested enough in their successful/functional video chat, and instead just had team after team launching new versions of the same damn thing. Looking through GCP and their AI/Vertex/Whatever naming soup, not much has changed.

Wave was very simply modern email. Conceptually, there's nothing more to it. It was a new protocol that effectively filled the same basic needs as email, but left room for first class support for the types of features we've either hacked badly on top of email or still lack today - proper threading, traceable message amendment, rich messaging & multimedia support that's not a MIME hack & an improved security posture.

I think that was maybe a secondary problem with Wave: it was marketed as some new voodoo that ended up smelling like a hammer seeking a nail, when it was really just Email 2.0

I think this might actually be the first time I've understood that intention. Fully in agreement with your earlier comment that it was a total turd of a product - I remember a group of friends all getting access, playing with it for about 30 minutes, and then just coming away thinking what an awful experience it was, never to return. None of us were thinking of it as even vaguely email related, it basically felt like forums but worse. Or messaging but worse.

Products are often timing the market and the need, maybe something like it today could land different.

Most of the tech unicorns are like this. Zuckerberg caught lightning in a bottle one single time and everything they’ve tried since has sucked. Instagram was an acquisition. So were oculus and WhatsApp. By contrast their next in-house flagship was temu Wii avatars.

Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle.

Surely it’s a consequence of being publicly traded that these companies cease to be able to develop good novel products rather than acquire competitors or iterate on past successes.

When you have nothing, risk is cheap. Once you make it, the strategy tends to shift from growth to protection.

You can’t be serious? AWS blows kindle out of the water in complexity and impact. Basic AWS started in 2006, Kindle in 2007.

The number of products under the AWS that are more impactful to society and more profitable to Amazon is vast.

The word used was "innovative", though.

Who offered IaaS and PaaS before AWS?? That is revolutionary.

"Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle."

That was in 2007; S3 and EC2 were in 2006. The pace of innovation at AWS has declined, which is partially to be expected as it matures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Temple probably counts, too. They had auto-provisioned VPSes long before EC2. I'd also count VMware ESX.

Why would it be a consequence of being publicly traded? Apple has less concentrated ownership than Facebook or Google and has been far better at developing novel products.

I think releasing Wave as its own product, via private beta, was a mistake. If they wanted to reinvent email, they should have done it with Gmail, similar to what Apple did with iMessage.

Gmail could operate as it always has, being an email client that integrates with every other email client. But when a Gmail user emails another Gmail user (or a group of them), have the thread automatically turn into a Wave, with everything that entails. This gets the new features where people already are, creates an incentive for people to move their email to Gmail, and doesn’t create yet another inbox for a person to manage.

I always saw Wave as a business failure, not an engineering one, for this reason.

Great comment. Why Meta could ship Muse but Google could not.

What Meta got right with Muse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946526 - October 2026

Except the part where it trains on your private of information by default.

This would've been great but given what they came out with on a greenfield project, I strongly suspect an in-Gmail approach would have ended up qualitatively worse from UX & design perspective, likely driving users away from Gmail as a whole, & not just Wave. It would've resulted in a backlash from the mainstream, rather than Wave which was simply a damp squib the mainstream mainly ignored.

In an ideal world you're right, but I still think it was an engineering failure as, theoretically, it should be easier to make something usable on a greenfield project, & it was a horrific mess.

It was the type of product that was an engineering impossibility to launch at the time. Mobile browsers of the time (and many users' desktop browsers!) couldn't run JS quickly enough to allow for the real-time experience - and reportedly Wave would consume 300-500 MB of RAM at the time, which was a ton for 2009!

https://theappslab.com/2009/10/05/google-wave-the-aftermath/

So they would have needed to invest in native mobile apps, and in significant levels of optimization. And none of this, not web or mobile, had the developer experience necessary to iterate quickly enough as the UI would inevitably evolve upon contact with customers, and you'd end up having many widgets reflecting a centralized global state.

Not to mention that you needed sticky server-side sessions to run the operational transformations efficiently, which harkens to the KV caching challenges that still challenge us today.

But it was an incredible dream, and it was a key source of inspiration to me to choose CS as a path.

There were plenty of apps at the time doing real-time experience, they just weren't running 300-500mb of RAM while doing so because they weren't overengineered by idiots.

There was nothing about the wave protocol or concept that necessitated the bloated mess of JS they churned out. A big part of the problem with optimisation, on top of it doing way too much in poorly thought through ways, was simply that nobody in Google even knew JS, because they were just transpiling Java to JS.

They tried that with buzz. It flopped even harder

I didn’t remember Buzz, so I looked up a video about it. It looks more like a social network than an evolution of email. I think that was the issue there. They tried to shove social networking into email. I don’t know about anyone else, but I always wanted social networks to be an island, especially in that era. The social contract and expectations with email are different from social networking.

Huge mistake! I loved Wave, and used it very successfully on one creative project. When I tried again, with some of the same people, we'd collectively burned all of our invite tokens and couldn't get any more, so we had to revert to emailing things back and forth so the new folks weren't kept out of the loop. That killed it, as far as any of us were concerned. I think I used it one more time, to plan a party or something with my sister, and never again. Integrating it into Gmail, as you suggest, would have been a better path, but hardly necessary. It was great as a stand-alone product, but destroyed itself because the damn invite system stopped the network effect cold.

In other words, you wish Google had EEE'd email. And also stopped supporting normal emails between two Gmail users, and completely redesigned the product.

You think this wouldn't get people who just wanted email to quit Gmail and use something else instead?

If you could attach or insert a wave into an email, that would make more sense.

Having gone through AOSP source code multiple times in the past, I really ask myself where those top engineers that make it through Google's famous hiring practices land.

The way they code Java, the C style C++ in some parts, the Android Studio stable releases that are always as buggy as preview releases (to the point of becoming a meme among Android devs), and so on.

> I really ask myself where those top engineers that make it through Google's famous hiring practices land.

Can I question the quality of said hiring practices?

I have been rejected for a project that was starting from scratch on something exactly like I had been building for 6 years at a competitor, based on such famous hiring practices (not at Google though). I was literally more experienced than the whole team on what they were building.

Because you hire people who are really good at leetcode doesn't necessarily mean that you always get the best candidates for the job?

Personally, I think we as a community should all question that theater.

My sense is that it likely made sense before Campbell's law took effect. IIRC they developed a reputation in the early 2000s for only hiring very bright people who could solve those kinds of problems on the fly. Then 1. the company needed more employees and 2. people started grinding away practicing those problems so they could pass tests that were intended to filter them, and you got what you have now. Lots of other companies cargo-culted them in the meantime and thought the studying was the point, or maybe for them it was (measuring compliance instead of brilliance).

Also concurrently I think a lot of HR departments were increasingly trying to create an air of objectivity to reduce legal risk, which is also where you get the N years of experience crap (e.g. my company's HR just made us change wording from something like "strong ability" to "5 years experience" with Go. I don't even have 5 years of Go experience specifically and I'm the technical lead on the team. Actually the way Go's culture is, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of experience with it were a negative as far as I'm concerned).

Do you think someone, given enough work, could vibe code another Wave product but better? Where is the desire to do that?

Whats crazy ia that Wave i. its alpha/beta form whatever it wqs back then to me was marvel if engineering and atm I would be able to release it in a day or so thanks to AI.

No you couldn't

If Google released Wave today, no one would care, because we all know it would probably be abandoned in two years, and definitely dead in five.

Google Wave was too much good for us at that time.

It lives on as Google docs. Go to http://docs.new and then share the link to collaborators. It's so smooth. It's sticky. I have hope that Google will figure out how to evolve that into a bigger platform, but maybe someone else will come along and do it.

So, one of the leader companies wants to replace the major tool used by developers all around the world, but doesn't want to pay developers to do so.

They want us, external developers, to build it for $25k... But not cash. $25k of cloudflare hosting.

Why do I feel like it's the most insulting offer I have seen in a while?

It feels pretty out of touch and average, maybe it came from llm brainstorming?

It seems success if getting through their heads.

I kind of hope someone does build it, just not exclusively dependant on Cloudflare.

Perhaps cloudflare thinks this is reasonably possible with LLM driven development, however, the devil on this is in the details to hit the production level footprint of something like github. especially if running from scratch.

I was asking myself the same question. Multibillion dollar business, but paid by pennies.

Wow. $25k in credits... if you win first place. And you must release under a permissive (commercially-exploitable) license. And you need to be a paying customer to even make an attempt.

Insulting seems to be putting it lightly.

The permissive license as a requirement is pretty crazy. They're just hiring a contractor at that point. And they're paying with company scrip

[Tennessee Ernie Ford - Sixteen Tons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTCen9-RELM)

This is the new economy.

The public take the risk, most never get paid, while big Tech is a guardian taking their cut of advertising.

Everything is becoming social media.

Your welcome.

And they want you to buildmit using their infrastructure/abstraction layer as a base, potentially vendor-locking people to Cloudflare.

Did they all not get that developers need full control of their tools?

Or they are hoping to turn this into a brave new (old) world where you are at the (bigger) mercy of proprietary vendors?

We want to have less, not more, dependence on Cloudflare.

Single point of failure, for both technical and political failures.

Cloudflare wants all dependence on Cloudflare they can get.

I agree with both you and the person you’re responding to.

Same, but the real question is how. At this point, the things they are proposing are genuinely useful for the environment that we are finding ourselves in? How does one even begin to allow for less dependency here without appropriate substitute/mitigation for what cloudflare renders relatively painless.

> How does one even begin to allow for less dependency...

One remembers that during the vast stretch of time that Cloudflare wasn't offering the new whiz-bang service, one was doing just fine in one's endeavors.

If one is fine with CloudFlare being the MITM for most of the Internet, then this doesn't matter at all to you. But if that or any other aspect of how CloudFlare does business and what their capabilities allow them to do concerns you, then that's how one begins.

It's true that setting up a service without Cloudfare is painful. But there will be a day in which anyone that has set up something using Cloudfare will go through some pain either by something breaking or because Cloudfare will show their true colors.

Do you want the pain now or later?

Consider Nostr ngit. There will eventually be decentralized alternatives for GitHub that are better than GitHub, but not for a while. ngit is about the best we can do for now. And to truly get rid of civilization-scale cancers such as Cloudflare, we have to shrink the fab (i.e. put the equivalent of ASML, TSMC, and Shenzhen into a single box and sell it as a home appliance), because the root problem is hardware manufacturing, as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354

Which is one reason to not want more dependencies on it.

Isn’t that the definition of success for any company, even the most altruistic ones?

less Cloudflare means more consolidation. they've been great for keeping cloud services competitive.

We want more Cloudflare.

We want more Cloudflares. The problem is the concentration of power into any single entity that a person controls.

I build things.

I build them on machines I own placed in racks I have they key to.

There aren't any resource limits to hit and legal service is brought directly to me - not to a provider nor middleman.

There also isn't a global MITM inserting itself between me and my users.

I can't imagine doing it any other way and I implore you not to build things on complex, fragile, highly abstracted foundations.

Agree, and also have a handprint that opens a data center door. But I've bought CF stock as a hedge...

Completely agree, I use the cloud for one thing, to run Wireguard VPN to have a public point of presence but all hardware and services run right here where I'm looking at them right now and can put my hands on them.

$25k to build the next GitHub for $125B company? How generous.

And not even cold hard cash but “Cloudflare credits.”

What an offensive slap in the face.

It's SCRIP!!!

I”m so sick of all these weird credits and points. Can’t pay food or bills with it.

Technically, you can pay your Cloudflare bill with it...

Woohoo

And only if you are a US or Canadian citizen/team and doubly so only if you use a permissive license like MIT, Apache-2.0 or BSD-2/3. Having even a moderate degree of control over your project is too much to ask for. But you do get a dinner, which might make it all worth it.

Tone deaf to the nth degree.

You get a dinner, but not even an all-inclusive travel package while you're there.

This is basically aimed at AI startups who are in SF anyways and need a platform for marketing. So no shortage of contestants.

A hero hacking for free food and a chance to swap Cloudflare credits for stolen goods on the black market. That is W.Gibson's original cyberpunk spirit.

The whole thing seems a bit uncouth. I get a real gross feeling from it.

I agree that the compensation was a miss.

I really hope that was a purposeful understatement.

Yes it was. I like Cloudflare as a company - and I don't want to say mean things about them.

That was my reaction. I was expecting, "The winner receives $500,000 in cash, $1M in Cloudflare credits, and an introduction to our venture team."

Or at least an employment offer!

They don't want to own the next GitHub. They want people to build the next GitHub on Artifacts (and pay Cloudflare for storage and compute).

I don't have a strong opinion here, but giving away compute as a prize for hackathons isn't anything new.

Well, kinda, but usually the compute is given away as part of the hackaton. Even AWS hackaton did expect you to buy AWS credits..

- how to make feature in cheap and fast way? - get weekend, buy pizza for $500 and call it "hackathon".

On brand for Cloudflare which is typically a cheap company.

Isn't the primary compensation for building the next GitHub the ownership of the next GitHub?

okay but they require you to use a permissive license so they can just take all your work

Author of GitSocial here. It is now possible to break most hosting dependencies by using such tools as Walgit or GitSocial to store all collaboration data in git itself and pushing it all to an S3-compatible bucket. https://gitsocial.org/ is hosted on an R2 bucket. Cross-forge, cross-bucket collaboration is built in to it, further decentralizing hosting. Happy to answer any questions!

What do you think about CloudFlare Artefacts?

Artifacts is a vendor lock-in, as you can't easily migrate. Much better alternative would be git being able to pull and push to object storage natively.

It doesn’t run on celld?

GitSocial needs just git and object store, nothing else.

How does gitsocial compares to git-bug?

If it’s for agents why don’t you make this a challenge towards them? What sort of human element is desired here?

The element of irony.

> What sort of human element is desired here?

The human wallet

Yep. This is basically an ad for their "Artifacts" product. They are probably hoping to make more off of the spend of contestents than they pay in the prize to the winner.

Who said it’s for humans?

I’m tempted to ask an agent to submit an entry for me.

Why do they need others to ask their agents to do it? Why can't they ask their own agents?

You don't get infinite monkeys writing Hamlet with just a few monkeys

Once in a while you do. I see what you did though by specifying a particular play. Normally we settle for any Shakespeare :)

Free marketing

Tokens be too expensive. Outsource to subs of all the devs over the world. OpenAI inverstors gonna take the inference L on subsidized tokens.

Yeah, but at the same time compensation is meager enough that they won't get as much of a response. I am only kinda considering it and that is mostly, but the more I am reading through the details the more of a turn off the whole thing is.

We've gone fully offline with our code and artifact storage. No need for a social network with vestigial low-quality dev tooling. Our devs don't even need a web UI. Bare git repos on SSH are plenty for agent workflows.

Now that we don't have to worry about people and weak git skill getting in the way, agents can use git without needing all the emergent centralization.

So you basically want to remove yourself from the equation? I agree that centralization is bad. But leaving "using your agent" as the only way to collaborate is just another way of centralizing. Now you need to basically pay to run git commands

your agent can be running on your machine, at the same cost as running the PC you're already on. Agents != subscription services

Right, because I want a stupid Cloudflare captcha before every git operation.

Cloudflare gets so much action on here, and the product they've put out the last 6-12 months has been pretty underwhelming in my opinion. Sometimes, as in this case, obnoxious even. A lot of it (most of it?) feels vibe-coded and derivative, just take whatever is big now or last month and throw "edge" on top. Anyone care for a moltworker?

> Cloudfare gets so much action here

Cloudfare buys a lot of posts here*

Wait, we're getting paid to do this? Who do I talk to in order to get my cheque?

We need remediation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHtHKJts6rg

Hard disagree. They’re on a generational run atm. While the hyperscalers focused on big enterprise customers over the last 10 years, Cloudflare has built a product that lets a single developer run crazy projects for insanely cheap and with almost no maintenance. Now that basically everyone is writing and deploying software this is fast becoming the de facto deployment platform of vibe coders everywhere. Even ChatGPT sites runs on Workers.

Yeah, they seem well placed with their cheap-but-grear offerings.

I'm a cheapskate so am sometimes motivated by this cheapness, but each time I realise it's easier to just stick with what I know (Linux daemons) than cloud offerings.

Do you have any suggestions for something in the homelab/self-hosted space where CloudFlare has great offerings? (Other than the boring stuff like cache/DNS).

It depends what you’re doing for sure. If you’re into homelab type stuff Cloudflare is probably not going to offer much. But if you want to run things on the public web, workers and D1 are insanely good offerings, with R2 (their object store) close behind. You can run a public site or app with a proper SQL database, logging, TLS, authentication, with great performance - and never have to touch a thing. No certs, no setting up containers or services, no logging, no patching, and uptime is basically 100% and it’ll either be free or $5 a month. It’s absurd.

D1 does look great. I usually don't bother setting up services with state, but maybe CF D1 is hands-free enough.

cloudflare has their weird proprietary stack like workers etc and they build a ton of low effort products on it.

a few years ago it was exciting to read their product launches - and to use them.

Now it feels like a wave of slop. They do whatever next thing is trending on twitter. fs for agents? sure! new git? sure! agent os? Sure!

like there is absolutely no filter. whatever pops in their mind they push it. and the results are mediocre at best.

What makes them mediocre?

I agree some of the latest stuff feels slop-py, but the core offering is extremely good.

The next platform for Agentic SCM is just… Fossil. Fossil is an SQLite database that can store anything an agent would ever need.

I use beads + git; you just need to put the bead id at the beginning of the commit msg. The agents do the rest.

What is beads?

I am curious what people think about the use case that is different for AI agents compared to humans. Aside from the things people use SCM for already that is.

Fossil fits the bill if you ask me because it has built in forum and stuff too, so Agentic discourse can happen there, commits happen in the SCM history. And it has auto sync so they can automatically sync their state.

I looked into beads but I didn't see a way to make it work any better than fossil, and fossil does more stuff. My typical setup is to use the repo as a working directory, the tickets for todo, wiki/forum for conversation. There is also a chat interface, but I haven't tried that with agents yet.

But I love fossil for this. You can create users for all of the agents (or agent roles). The CLI for fossil is just a binary and it compiles nearly everywhere.

+1 over here for agentic fossil. With fossil the "work" is integrated in with the code. Beads separates this out, the beads are instances of work that agents can consume, and they aren't part of the work repo. I could see why you might want this, but I still think that fossil gives you more utility.

More info on beads if you are curious: https://github.com/gastownhall/beads

i feel like dropping the review and test phase -- especially in the agentic context - is incredibly spicy though.

So if I wanted to use fossil scm, i'd have to find a way to glue that on, and now ... we'Re basically in the same situation as with any other solution: it supports only a subset of the feature we want.

and especially CI pre "merge" is a hard requirement, and fossil doesnt have any concept for that i think?

But the last time i evaluated it was in the mid 2010s, so things may have progressed since? but couldn't find anything on cursory glance and AI confirmed that position, but we all know how often its wrong... so how did yall solve that issue?

yes, I agree: architecthre design, linting, commit msg structure, unit testing and other ci gates helps to direct the agents into building better software.

Fossil doesn’t have GitHub PR capabilities per-se. But its design philosophy is different with a focus on smaller groups of devs and not so much drive-by patches. I think in the case being discussed for AI agents, it can be simplified.

If you want human review on the code I’m thinking keep it simple and just review in branches/tags before merging OR even just have loose patch files.

As we’re seeing with resurgence of command-line utility by agents, that extends equally well to the O.G. diff/patch. A PR is literally just a diff with commentary and an approval process prior to merging. Diffs can be attached to forum topics and so-forth.

Lots of possibilities, but I think the main thing discussed here is how is version control better suited to AI agents moving forward.

in my case, i use opencode with oh-my-openagents. Omo has an orchestrator in charge and manage all the intetactions between agents. ADRs store decisions and beads store decisions as well (including design ones), then multiple agents work on a single bead.

Centralization is antithetical to the whole idea of the internet

HTTP provided a means for multiple clients to fetch resources from a central server. If centralization was antithetical, the clients would have been P2P.

There are a bazillion decentralized and some p2p git platforms out there, no need to bend over to Cloudflare.

Lot of negativity here. I've been using cloud flare for years on many small projects. (For free and paid). Im a big fan of their tech stack and operating model. I also quite like their scraping api. Their AI needs more regional support though.

You can think two thoughts at once. I am also a happy cloudflare customer who likes some of their DNS and worker products. But this is in poor taste and deserves the negative reaction.

There'll be plenty of developers who won't touch "the next Git" with a 10-foot pole if it's coming from a MitM attacker that is a front for the NSA.

Why do you think they’re a front for the NSA? It would be way cheaper for the NSA to just force them to install wiretaps than it would be to fund and build the whole platform.

Extremely rubbish that entry is only for US/CA citizens, especially given they themselves have many of their staff in Europe.

> We want you to build

Strangest tech announcement ever.

"The first-place team will also receive $25,000 in Cloudflare credits, along with invitations to the VIP speaker dinner on Monday night at Connect."

Whoever in Cloudflare thought that this is an appropriate compensation for the work is delusional. This is insulting.

:D Please rewrite the current foundation for how programmers across the world cooperate. Should be easy.

Well, that part is easy.

Us? Ask the agents.

I really like the idea of someone building a GitHub alternative, but these are some horrid terms hahaha

If you're asking people to build something as ambitious as a GitHub replacement, $25k of your own infrastructure credits isn't really the same thing as paying someone $25k

I consider myself an AI power user. There's nothing wrong with Git or GitHub. Both work perfectly both personally and at my org.

Reinventing source control to accommodate bot sprawl for $25k in scrip, lol.

Cloudflare can't think highly enough of themselves recently. It seems the company culture there is that they seriously believe they are the saviours of the internet, the Google when Google became ok with doing evil

I have just one question: if they have millions of agents working on the same codebase at the same time, why the heck they can't just build the next Git platform on Cloudflare?

Of course cloudflare wants you to bring more data and money to cloudflare. Is any of this actually useful though? Do agents need git? Are agents even useful?

After reading the rules and thinking about what I can use it finally hit me: https://entire.io/ this is basically design a better entire.io system using CF and NOT git but they want multi agents and they want that history of what and why the agents did that really isn't source code. And doesn't belong in git.

It could live in git commit comments, though.

it COULD but should it. I guess that's the contest. Fun.

I doubt an agent-forward git should position the agent collaboration locus of data and control structures within git itself. Even when distributed, git commit messages are a one-way street if you want hash stability (critical property for agent collaboration).

Even when we cram the collaboration ledger into git notes, git's optimistic locking still breaks down in a thundering herd scenario, which is now easy to spin up in a git-centric agent collaboration scenario. I think the decision ledger in git needs to stay separate from the collaboration ledger, and both need massive elastic scaling capabilities when we as an industry are still used to thinking of scaling in a pre-agentic world. Think what happens when in the near future non-technical users are the dominant users of fleets of agents, they are virally connected in a social media frenzy, and descend upon a repo. Billions of concurrent agents all trying to do something with a repo and affiliated forks, are not hard to imagine in such a scenario.

Have to point this out because it annoys me every time:

Cloudflare is perhaps most famously and most significantly an international, global platform. That's kind of the whole point.

Only in the smallprint does it mention you must be a United States or Canada resident to enter.

Thank you for pointing this out! I always love a good competition and since I already have a workers paid plan it seemed fun. But I'm not eligible, so I guess I'll rebuild github without giving any IP to Cloudflare

I'll be honest: I saw the prize was a trip to SF and — while I was vanishingly unlikely to enter anyway — that was enough to kill any idea of entering. It's been over 20 years since I was last in the USA, and I have no intention of visiting again any time soon.

Indeed from a company targeting global market, scoping the contestants to US & Canada residents is already not very welcoming.

I think if Cloudflare wants to have a fighting chance it should at least give its projects a different domain and a different brand. Nobody wants to pile in more failure modes into dash.cloudflare.com. This is probably the reason all their developer products are failing to take off.

Funny how these things work. I built slivingdoc.dev which is practically exactly the same thing.

Glad to see that my idea was on point, even though I ofc failed to make it into a competitive product.

Cloudflare, lately, has been trying to have a finger in every pie around with such suspect enthusiasm.

I guess I am old and outdated. Too stupid to learn new things again. Bring me back an improved version of SVN and give me sync FTP.

Why all these additional complexity.

SVN was better than CVS but no way I'd go back to SVN after git, former are centralized and latter is distributed. Having the repo local is amazing, being able to make a new branch in git even on a massive repo is lightening fast compared to svn.

lol, spec work anyone? For maybe-maybe-not $25k, you build something that could create millions in enterprise value.

Advice for everyone considering this: if you're passionate about ideas in this space and have access to an LLM — build it yourself and start your own company. In fact, message me easting.exe [at] gmail. I'll throw in $25k to get us started. I'm a prior founder with an exit. Because this offer from Cloudflare is ridiculous.

Badass offer and even badder gmail address

The problem is git is three things, a command line interface, a wire protocol, and a database format, and you can't replace all three at once if you want to gain any acceptance. So you have to chip away at the individual pieces. The real problem though is that AI makes version control invisible because the agents are capable of producing the artifacts. AI makes git's data model all wrong. What you want is then a way for AI to be able to make, say, 1,000 views into the codebase, cheap. That involves spinning up VMs/containers and is a much different problem than hey, let's make github2.com.

> How do you review everything they produce? How do you keep track of not just what changed, but why a change was made?

Cloudflare you silly goose, you ask an agent to review it duh.

People keep forgetting to ask if they”should” build something before building it. Yeah the tokens are cheap but even though it only takes 3 months instead of a year is still expensive.

3 months? if they gave 3 months then this would be at least plausible given the gigantic scope they set, but... youve got 10 days

> Deadline > October 14, 2026.

: .｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:

but as others have said: $25k in credits as a reward for winning first place: this is not a real competition, this is just a minor marketing post so they get a few cheap clicks nwith no expectation of anything valuable from it

Lot of people in these threads talk about Cloudflare like they're forcing the centralization of the Internet. There was a DDoS problem and they got there early and don't charge much, if anything, to protect your endpoints. End of that story.

Anybody else remember when a less evil version of Google gave their engineers time to go make whatever they wanted to make? And everyone was like that's really cool — to trust your smart people to make useful things.

Every half-baked product coming out of Cloudflare feels like some version of that. Letting your engineering teams cook to see if the end result tastes good. Some stuff doesn't. Some stuff is amazing.

Now I have DNS, Workers, D1, R2, email, secret vault, MCP, CLI, tunnels, access, analytics, and on and on. I have like 8 Svelte apps running with decent traffic for free. And they're stable. And it feels like Cloudflare is loss-leading instead of conducting bait-and-switch enshittification. I've been using their shit for over a decade.

Looking around the rest of the industry landscape, I'm not sure how anyone lands on Cloudflare being bad for developers/engineers. My shit is centralized because nobody else does what they do and delivers the DX that they do. I truly feel gaslit sometimes on this site.

> Anybody else remember when a less evil version of Google gave their engineers time to go make whatever they wanted to make?

Yes, it was great. Until Google turned evil, and the goodwill that we had given to them on the basis of all of these cool products was turned back against us. The lesson I learned from this time was that you don't give a company leverage over you just because you like what they are doing today. You should also consider where they are headed in the future.

Why did Google turn evil? Do you think Cloudflare is immune from these same incentives? Is giving a bunch of free services away to everyone sustainable, or will they be forced to tighten the screws in the future, and if so, what will it look like when they do?

No, Cloudflare is definitely not immune. No corporation is immune and as the world leans harder into fascism, pay-to-play becomes a concrete requirement to operate a large business. I don't think Cloudflare is completely innocent or anything. They just don't make me feel 'the ick' yet. There are some signs, like the Omarchy donation, but I also can see the business angle of supporting a project from the guy created Rails. He's going through some midlife thing, and definitely has opinions that suck, but there's a talented engineer in there somewhere.

Businesses only care about money. That's why the Cloudflare hate feels strange to me I guess. They've been giving stuff away to devs for free that would normally be expensive, and supporting open source projects at the same time. They're not perfect but this is capitalism. Everyone sucks in some way or another. They're conducting business but at the same time, they're driving their business with loss-leading services that they're definitely losing money on. That's not a business practice I would typically attribute to an evil and soulless money machine. I'm not naive either, I've been waiting for them to begin enshittifying for at least 5 years. They just never seem to.

"They've been giving stuff away to devs for free"

It's not free, it moves the cost onto the users of those services. I have to pay with my time and my data.

Or, increasingly, I hit backspace as soon as I see the Cloudflare logo. Who's going to pay when the users don't?

> There was a DDoS problem and they got there early and don't charge much, if anything, to protect your endpoints. End of that story.

But part of the story is that they also protect the DDoS providers causing the problem! To some extent, they're the firefighter arsonist who suspiciously always is first to arrive on scene to be the hero. Recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025001

They had a very hard line on refusing to take anyone off their platform without a court order. There was a huge fuss here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031922) when they told the Daily Stormer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer to go elsewhere.

I don't understand what is wrong with existing Git platforms to be needing replacement.

$25,000 in Cloudflare credits for a revolutionary new Git platform by checks calendar a week and a half from now? I'm sure someone will go for this.

The funny things is, I'm actively working on a replacement for Github but it's not gonna be built on Cloudflare LMAO!

It's not gonna be ready by CLoudflare's deadline but I'm aiming to get the beta deployed by end of November. Plenty to do! It'll be available on eol.sh...

"We want you to dig for gold using our picks and shovels" is a fascinating angle for what I assume was intended as more of a showcase of the underlying versioned storage offering.

Git, as a protocol, is probably part of the problem for the scale that they are talking about here (1000s of agents). You probably want something between multiplayer editing and commits. That being said, I am terrified about the degree of slop that would be generated with 1000s of agents actually working on a codebase.

This thread doesn’t seem to know about https://celld.dev. There is a far less lock-in to CF than there once was.

I wonder if they still use Bitbucket internally.

> So in this new world where you have hundreds, or even thousands, of agents working on the same codebase at the same time, what does the foundation look like?

So, would it maybe make sense to question this whole bit, before we starting creating platforms for something like that?

Why do you need hundreds of thousands of agents working on the same codebase? In my experience, and what I see around me, quality code that actually works in production isn't produced by "software factory autonomously run by 1337 agents", but instead one human sitting and interacting with maybe 1-3 agents max, back and forth, pair programming rather than letting hundreds of them output million of tokens over hours.

Are others seeing the same thing, or am I in my own little bubble here? All the "software factory with agents" approaches I've spent time looking into, literally produces trash on top of trash, while I see senior developers 10x their productivity while producing better code than before and they have one terminal open with three panes, a text editor, a agent TUI and a general shell, that's it. Is what I'm seeing (and doing myself) not the typical situation out there in the wider world?

That's my experience as well

It would make sense for a monorepo at big tech company, where a single source control system contains many thousands of common libraries and the apps that use them. And now with AI, maybe a small company could build a large, sprawling monorepo?

But I don't think it's actually a good idea. Keeping everything on the same version is difficult. We have package managers that do a better job.

There is that, there are a handful of companies with mono repo they have solved the checkout build deploy test cycle. The other approach is the separate the monorepo for build deploy and test loop.

Similar experiences here

> hundreds of thousands

Not to take anything away from your point, but TFA said hundreds or thousands - not hundred of thousands. Couple orders of magnitude of difference there…

You’re still spot on - even thousands of agents working on a single codebase would mean hundreds of humans directing them…

This is a threat to all developers who believes in fair play

I want you to stop donating to Omarchy.

It's the only thing they do that's not disagreeable.

No thanks. No more US based infrastructure for me.

There remain fundamental patterns for the future of software development that are missing.

Orchestrating an agent free for all tends to invite more chaos management.

At the same time there’s folks who quietly have this working.

25k seems like a small bounty for such a large prize.

https://www.cloudflare.com/git-competition/?cf_page=next-git...

> Earlier this year, we launched Artifacts, a versioned filesystem that speaks Git and can scale to millions of repositories.

> We want you to build your vision for the Git platform of the agentic era using Cloudflare Workers and Artifacts.

> A link to the source code, which must be provided under a permissive open source license (MIT, Apache, BSD)

> We’ll select the top three projects and fly up to two members from each team to San Francisco to attend Cloudflare Connect and show what they built. The first-place team will also receive $25,000 in Cloudflare credits, along with invitations to the VIP speaker dinner on Monday night at Connect.

LOL. So basically they built some new product and it's not getting enough adoption. And they're looking to get (*almost) free labor to do the work for them.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

No, thank you.

I dont want cloudflare

Me too, dont have enough tokens.

I'm going to push back on this idea. Of course git is a pretty terrible revision control system for humans, hence it will be such for agents too. But why do we need a totally new kind of revision control system for agents? I don't think we do. Or, conversely if you think you do you're either confused or doing something wrong.

Hunger Games whistle

So they want to take someone’s idea for peanuts and then vibecode it later.. also, any word on training AI on the code there?

Not even for 25 millions

"I don't have a great idea right now, but I will make an app store and surely people will have great ideas and build great apps and it will make me rich".

Fuck everything about this.

Lololol. This is probably the dumbest sounding competition I've ever heard. Git for bots? Uhhhh ok, whatever.

SVN2

Putting hundreds and thousands of agent’s slop commits into a readable format for review sounds like a torture device

“We want you to use our product” said every SaaS company ever. “Our product is designed for AI” says every SaaS for the last two years.

None of this is very clever or very compelling.

multiblliuon company larping

I'm sure Cloudflare wants me to do a whole boatload of shit that increases their profits.

> We want you to build the next Git platform on

the computer under your desk!

Roll your Own, don't depend on billionaire platforms to get your work done...

There is no computer under my desk

Ok the computer on your desk then? I guess it’s probably a laptop and not on all the time, but that shouldn’t prevent it from working for you when you need it. Probably want a good backup strategy though

It is called a "desktop" computer and not a "deskunder" for a reason...

Put a computer under your desk then use it to host your git repos.

> But the next generation of software is going to be built differently because it is going to be built by a different kind of developer: agents.

Yeah. No!

I like software built by humans who understand what the software does and can maintain it.

Maintenance is the ultimate boss!

Don’t want to use sloppy unmaintained over-complicated software.

Can we please have it decentralised and without any single entity having control over the lifecycle of a product ? Lessons learnt.

Git is already decentralised, just stop using platforms and self host

well

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