Version control second coming

2/3 down the article I gave up. What are you trying to tell me? What is this revolution about? How are agent things fundamentally different and how are they being solved? What is this "second coming"?

Also, why "second"? Was git the first? But then what about all the other things before it? CVS was huge before, for better or worse.

Dreaming of "virtual filesystems everywhere". Hmm, sorta sounds like Plan 9.

Great to have an inside view of wrangling technologies for these behemoth data sets.

What second coming? If I had the option I would still be using either Mercurial or SVN.

In fact, the way I use Git is hardly any different, I have no interest in getting a black belt in git magic.

The author mentions it briefly, but I'd like to see more exploration of what we can do differently now that we're all online all the time. I think that could potentially enable a Git-level revolution in the way we do things, similar to the way unlimited disk space did for Git.

People complained about having to use ClearCase back then, it wasn't just the price that was wrong with it.

> If only 2 years ago somebody said GitHub would be no longer relevant soon, nobody would believe them. GitHub was the undisputed leader in repository hosting [..]

> GitHub has done too many great things over the years, so I hope it remains, but there is obviously an earthquake going on.

Is the 'earthquake' referring to the frequent outages over the last couple of years, and if so are those outages because Microsoft can't keep up with the demand?

It's closer to 'too relevant' than it is to 'no longer relevant'.

It sounds like the author went through a lot of pain to avoid using git+lfs or perforce.

I use git+lfs for unity projects and it works out great. If I had a real studio I'd buy some perforce seats.

Reinventing the wheel like this is quite exhausting. There are options that are proven to work. AI authorship does not fundamentally violate the idea of some thing owning a specific commit. We don't need new schemas in our source control system. "Provenance" is a bullshit word used to make the AI sound like it's some kind of oracular source with superhuman capabilities.

It's great to see some moves to break up this great calcification around git. Gut greatest contribution to version control was stagnation. The space was evolving with great fresh ideas before git became a quasi-religion among the early adopters because Linus made it in a day and therefore it must be great or something. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but the zeal of some people back then was next level annoying.

Beyond that, git has a great deal of shortcomings, some obvious, some subtle. It was a regression against SVN in some ways and inferior to Mercurial in others. But the strengths of SCN and Mercurial are again vastly different. There is a reason SVN isn't dead.

My biggest gripe with the open source VCSes is that in the last 20 years, no meaningful evolution happened in the established tools, especially around any weaknesses. Commercial systems like Plastic and Perforce as well as proprietary solutions like piper/jujutsu and sapling show that the tools can still improve drastically. I'm excited for a future where we get better open tools for the masses.

Not worth reading.

I half agree here. Now that the primary usage of Git is increasingly centered on providing auditable and revertible history for organizations that use a mix of AI (mostly) and people to do stuff with it, the requirements are going to shift away from being user friendly towards just being fit for purpose and efficient.

Git is so far good enough for this. It's not particularly user friendly. But that's not a problem for AI agents. What is a problem is that GitHub is a shared resource that is bottle necked on massively increased usage. That's nice if you are sharing code with other people but it becomes a bottleneck otherwise with a clear solution in the form of maybe using faster and compatible (or completely different) alternatives that do things faster/better.

If you sit back and watch what agents do with Git, it involves a lot of agents going through the moves of creating lots of pull requests, waiting for whatever CI systems to kick in, dealing with failures, etc. All that takes a lot of time and tokens and it's designed to compensate for human failures to properly follow processes. So, at least some of that is kind of becoming redundant. With AI we can compensate with more complicated processes instead.

There's definitely some optimization potential lurking there. If you have tens of thousands of agents working on a thing, it might be more efficient to share the burden of integration testing instead of each agent trying to do this independently and testing each micro change in isolation. Also you could question the logic of needing some centralized hub to dump and integrate code. Git is decentralized by design. GitHub is nice as a backup strategy but there are probably cheaper or different ways to do QA and integration with agents. As the development process changes and adapts to all this, the role of Git and Github also needs to be rethought.

As for the rest of the article, it seems a bit too people centric. Virtual file systems are cool. But do AI agents really need them?

Funny this is hosted on GitHub pages

I can accept the authors bias, but all credibility was gone when I read “AccuRev was a fantastic system”. AccuRevs UX was akin to putting your face next to a farting anus and breathing deeply.

Honestly felt like I was missing some sort of satirical masterpiece as the author gleefully declared all the up and coming projects that are going to scatter open source projects to the four corners of the Earth.

Maybe they’ve been so locked into version control tooling as a career they’ve missed the bigger picture, but version control before git ubiquity sucked. Not saying Git is perfect but come on, are our memories so short?

Now that the revolution has apparently started, does anyone know of a version control system which uses encrypted storage? (I'm not concerned about performance, for I will use it for small projects only.)

> While we all stopped coding manually around December 2025

Come on at least say "many people". There are plenty of people still coding by hand.

> GitHub is still gigantic in both repos and minds, and its impact in the world of software development and collaboration in general has been enormous, and most likely it will continue to be.

Well - Microsoft worsened GitHub in the last few months with regards to reliability. The next corporate slayer move is to worsen it feature wise. GitHub will indeed most likely remain strong, but the outer shell has some cracks and that means people will be more eager to look for alternatives. It is also a problem that Microsoft has a say in open source projects via GitHub - I never liked that, and many others did not like that either, even more so with Trump acting in a political and ideological manner with his TechBros (who all have nothing to do with Epstein ... right? because what if some of them do ...).

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