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The problem is how to make money from something that is more or less solved.

More power to them for re-visiting this, but agree with you:

> The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow.

That sounds exactly like the pre-git model that git solved..

I've always wanted a kind of broader and more integrated approach that isn't just about text diffs. the ability to link in substantial comments that would be displayed optionally and not piss off linear readers. links to design and reference documents. bugs and prs that were persistent and linked to the versioned code instead of being ephemeral.

think about all of the discussion we have around the code that gets lost. we certainly have the ability to keep and link all that stuff now. we don't really need to have arguments about squashing or not, we can just keep the fine grained commits if you really want to dig into them and maybe ask that people write a comprehensive summary of the changes in a patch set -in addition-.

but I guess none of that has anythig to do with AI

They dont want to build the next git they want to build the next Github. It will have one of those licenses where you can use it but not offer a managed service like the Elastic License

if the cli is open sources and ends up finished i don't see what the problem is to let a vc fund them building it

Seeing all of these investments in developer tooling projects makes me wonder/skeptical of what the next chapter of development looks like when the money spigot runs dry.

I've not used this app, but I wonder how tooling like this truly competes against an open source community armed with AI. Like where is the moat here, really? I built a personal tool that does some of this with a basic Claude subscription over the course of a few weeks.

Feels like vibe-coders are the real target market for something like this, but if it takes off, would not be that hard to clone as a FOSS app.

I would argue it being proprietary would be completely unacceptable, for such a position of importance.

In any case, Git has become tremendously entrenched over the past couple decades. Anything that hopes to replace it would have to be significantly better to break from the inertia Git has. I’m honestly skeptical as to whether this is even possible in the near future. We’re not at all in the same historical moment as when SVN was beaten out.

I mean it worked out for Astral who made open python tooling and got acquired by openai¹ maybe it's a new legit strategy now

1 - https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/

I use Git as a deduplication compressing backup tool. Git is fine and useful for a multitude of uses both manual and automated. Maybe the UI aka. porcelain is a bit clunky, but Git was explicitly intended to be separated into porcelain and plumbing, so that you can use the plumbing to make your own porcelain.

From git(1):

    LOW-LEVEL COMMANDS (PLUMBING)
       Although Git includes its own porcelain layer, its low-level commands 
       are sufficient to support development of alternative porcelains. 
       Developers of such porcelains might start by reading about git-update-index(1) and git-read-tree(1).

       The interface (input, output, set of options and the semantics) to these 
       low-level commands are meant to be a lot more stable than Porcelain level 
       commands, because these commands are primarily for scripted use.
       The interface to Porcelain commands on the other hand are subject to change 
       in order to improve the end user experience.

       The following description divides the low-level commands into commands that 
       manipulate objects (in the repository, index, and working tree), commands 
       that interrogate and compare objects, and commands that move objects and 
       references between repositories.

You can stop at bullet #1 and that's plenty to raise $17m on right there. No questions asked.

I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better.

I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient, inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years of my life on nothing but this.

My question is: say the investor believes that some new platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that it will be mine over a famous person's?

I watched video to see where my prompts etc are stored in a way that makes sense. But no, this is just a nicer git. We need a solution to all these 10k loc PRs.

put differently: there's already a lot of money moving from A to B as people use AI & agentic coding. Find a way to get yourself in the middle of that cash flow and suck out a few percentage points of it .. profit!

Makes sense to me. The new coding agents are drastically changing software development, and I think there's a lot of space for innovation in how version control tooling works in this new world.

They actually started before the LLM craze. The original pitch was just better Git.

Put another way: the idea didn't raise $17M, the team did. That's usually the case but you can fully expect a pivot in their future.

Once open source spreads into an area, it tends to kill (commodify) commercial software in that space.

For example, with databases, MySQL and Postgres "won". Yes, there are commercial databases like SQL Server and Oracle but they largely exist through regulatory capture and inertia. It's highly unlike anyone will ever make a commercial general purpose database again. There are always niche cases.

Same with operating systems. Yes we have MacOS and Windows but what are the odds we get another commercial mass OS? I'd say almost zero.

It's the same for source control. Git "won". There are a handful of others (eg Mercurial). But gone are the days of, say, Visual Source Safe.

But when people talk about "what comes after Git" they really mean (IMHO) "what comes after Github", which is a completely different conversation. Because Github absolutely can be superseded by something better. Will it though? I don't know. It has an incredible amount of inertia.

As for AI and anything related to source control, I'd have a hard time betting against Anthropic. But remember the exit could be an HN post of "We're joining Anthropic!". Side note: I really hate this "we're joining X" framing. No, you took the bag. That's fine. But let's be honest.

For people with a proven track record, AI is a gold rush of acquisition more than creating a sustainable business, let alone an IPO. I think that's what this bet is.

> You can just mess around and make it presentable later, which Git never really let you do nicely.

I'm surprised to read that, because that's how I've always used Git (and GitHub).

That's what I've understood to be good practice with Git, and it was liberating compared with what came before. One of the nicest things about Git is you can throw things in locally without worrying about how it looks, and make it presentable later.

Every success story and happy conversion to jj is evidence that hg should have won the DVCS war, but more importantly, that VCSes and their inherent merits and tradeoffs were always secondary to the social networks underpinning them. GitHub as a defacto monopoly really killed innovation in the VCS space, but also shifted the focus and attention elsewhere. That's why I don't think there'll be so much of a "post-git" without as much as a "post-github".

Yes, it’s fantastic. I have a post-tool-use hook for Claude Code to snapshot the repository for every edit. It’s like the built in file history feature but native in my VCS and works for my edits too. Don’t want to froth too much but JJ is my favourite piece of software in a while, and the fact that it’s not VC-funded is a major plus point.

What's the difference between "snapshots" and git commits? In my mind a git commit is already a snapshot of the repo and the changes one staged. In what way can you move around more freely than what one can do with magit, deciding for files, hunks, or even single lines of code, whether or not they get staged and committed?

It seems to have been build on great idea. Git's "plumbing" is just a set of snapshots of the tree, and everything above is built on that so replacing the porcelain with something better fitting the problem is far more useful than trying to reinvent the wheel and making yet another distributed tree snapshot based VCS just to reinvent user facing tooling like the other VCS tried

Do you not use git branches? Your use case was why git was made.

Definitely not true about models knowing jj. I've had latest opus and gpt fail at revsets and fileset syntax, even hallucinating subcommands like jj move (maybe it existed before, interface is not stable). Luckily it's easy enough to not need them most of the time.

I gotta say, jj was not something that interested me before, but that's a compelling pitch.

is there a jj hosting service?

I was doing something with jj snapshots with AI now that you have mentioned.

I will admit, I didn't know jj but I wanted snapshots so I used it, so then when AI made some changes and kept on going and I wanted to go back to a particular change and I used ai to do that. It was actually really frustrating. To the point that I think I accidentally lost one of the good files within the project and I had to settle on good-enough which I had to try to get for hours to that particular point.

My point feels like I should either learn jj properly to use it or to at this point, just ask AI agents to git commit. Another point but I was using ghostty and I had accidentally clicked on the title bar and somehow moved the folder to desktop, I wasn't thinking the most accurately and I just decided to delete it thinking that it must have copied it rather than moved it. (Also dear ghostty why do you make it so easy to move folders, it isn't the best of features and can lead to some honest errors)

My face when I realized that I have deleted the project:

Anyhow decided to restore it with ~/Trash but afterwards realized that the .git/.jj history is removed because it deletes hidden folders (from my understanding) so I definitely lost that good snapshot. I do have the binary of the app which worked good but not the source code of it which is a bit frustrating

These were all just an idea of prototyping/checking how far I can move things with AI. Yeah so my experience for that project has been that I could've even learnt a new language (Odin) and the raylib project to fix that one specific bug in lower time than AI which simply is unable to fix the bug without blowing the whole project in foot.

I think the takeaway is to have good backups man. I mean I was being reckless in this project because I had nothing to lose and was just experimenting but there have been cases where people have lost databases in prod. So even backups should be essential if you find any source code which is good to be honest.

I am sure you guys must have lost some source code accidentally which you have worked upon, would love to hear some horror stories to hopefully know that I haven't been the only one who has done some mistake and to also learn something new from these stories. (I am atleast happy in the sense that I learnt the lesson from just an tinkering thing and not something truly prod)

"I can iterate freely without thinking".

Vibecoding moto.

The biggest problem with Jujutsu is the name. I would love to hear a Swedish person try to pronounce it.

Just to clarify (and we do say this when you run `but setup`), the `pre-commit` hook is needed because of the way that we manage commits - we allow for multiple parallel applied branches, which Git cannot do. The way we accomplish this is to maintain a hidden 'megamerge' commit (as JJ would say). All Git commands work fine the way we're doing it except 'git commit', which is not aware of our operating model and will commit on top of our megamerge, which is problematic. So we install pre-commit to protect against getting yourself in a poor situation by using both Git and GitButler interchangeably.

It's not difficult to "escape" - using `git checkout` will tear everything down properly - that's the only task of the `post-checkout` - to determine that you want to go back to using vanilla git commit tooling and remove our shims.

We also don't have a prepare-commit-msg hook - our commit tooling will inject an extra Change-Id header (of the same format and interchangeable with Jujutsu) but that affects nothing that vanilla git cares about.

So they decided to start "embrace, extend, and extinguish" directly with with "extinguish".

Gitbutler is backed by git. Gitbutler is essentially just ui for git which also allows you to have multiple branches. It isn't meant to replace git.

> but with people throwing money behind it, there’s a plan to extract value from the user base from day one.

They'll start injecting ads in your commit messages, forcing you to subscribe to a premium plan.

Git is fine. I would like something better than fine though, especially for dealing with rebase/merge conflicts where I would say Git is mediocre.

Bingo

Apparently it takes $17M and a whole team full of people to do what one guy with a chip on his shoulder could do for free.

Thinking it for bit it comes to "what comes after Git" and what does "Git" mean there.

To build better tool than git, probably a few months by tiny team of good developers. Just thinking of problem and making what is needed... So either free time or few hundred thousand at max.

On other hand to replace GitHub. Endless millions will be spend... For some sort of probable gains? It might even make money in long run... But goal is probably to flip it.

Linus built git in 8 days or something.

Unless one wishes to control the entire ecosystem rather than simply participate in it.

Just a reminder that even if you managed to amend those commits and force-push, the commits would still exist and will be addressable given the hash is known.

I was going to be snarky, but Scott Chacon is a serious person, so we'll see!

Idk how git works under the hood but those both seem like they could both be easily accomplished with git itself .

but if not just your own work flow, have a dir dedicated to storing prompt history and then each file is titled with the commit id.

As for the flag just agree to some convention and toss it in the commit message

Actually, it is. We're currently leading a conversation among several players in this space to agree on a metadata standard that helps make attaching, collaborating on and transmitting information like this simple, extensible and scalable.

Keep an eye on our blog to see how we're doing this, and how we're doing it in a way that hopefully the entire community joins us in a way where we're not all reinventing the same wheels.

>Saving prompts and sessions alongside commits could become the norm for example, or I could imagine having different flags for whether a contribution was created by a human or not.

Yes, it could have syntax like

    git notes add -m "Claude prompt: foo fee faa foo" <commit-hash>

OH WAIT YOU CAN DO THAT ALREADY SINCE 2009

Seriously, the 90% complaints about git not being able to do something is just either RTFM or "well, it can, but could use some better porcelain to present to user"

> I could imagine having different flags for whether a contribution was created by a human or not.

Only useful if it can be reliably verified, which is challenging at best.

The point of git is that it has strong authentication built into the fabric of the thing.

What do people expect to do with these saved prompts/contexts? Nobody is going to read through them, right? I suppose the thinking is LLMs will, but any decently active codebase will soon contain far too much context for any current LLM. Is this the same thinking behind cryonics, ie. we may be able to use this stuff one day so let's start saving it now? Hoarding has ruined many people and it will ruin us all if we're not careful...

Getting it is not the hard part. Keeping it in light of an adversarial, litigious contender is.

Could you explain parallel branches vs what git offers today?

If it's to enable multi-agent scenarios, don't worktrees (at least in the local sense) allow for this?

Why do rich people raise money when they already have money?

1) because they can

2) it's their money, not company money, and again, why would you risk your own money when someone else wants to risk their money?

So that when the venture inevitably fails, VCs are the ones that lose money and the founders get a nice exit.

I'd like to pretend that inability to render large diffs is a feature. Nobody is going to actually read the multi-thousand line diff; you need to make smaller PRs, or just admit that the diff in that particular view isn't helpful. I doubt that's the actual reasoning, but I can live with it.

> I am tired of using and waiting for alternatives of, Github.

Are you interested in giving https://tangled.org a try? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

The lesson is quite simple... don't over promise in the title.

I created a cli called spotlight-testing to solve this pitfall with worktrees. I hope it helps! https://github.com/mblode/spotlight-testing

I've been using gitbutler since 09/24. It was the first git GUI I preferred over the command line. Being able to separate local changes into separate branches, drag missed changes into a past commit, etc. made tidy development so much easier. It is a great tool and the hate here is wild. However, I find it less useful when agents code for me. The surgical changes GitButler made so easy became less relevant as agents touch so many files at once. Have you found the same? Whats your vision for how GitButler will make agentic coding better in the way it did human coding? Does it move away from the UI you have now to something else? Does the UI get relegated and it becomes a tool the agent controls? (I liked the agent integration but it didn't feel like an improvement over using codex/CC so I went back to using them directly)

I'm trying not to comment on too many of these, but this one is interestingly wrong to me, so why not indeed?

GitButler came about many years ago because I have been using Git for almost the full 20 years of it being around and I thought there could be a better way to do the things it's trying to solve for us. I want version control to do more for us, easier, faster and smarter. Git is still pretty dumb. Plus, now, everything in the dev workflow is changing - it's an interesting problem to think about what a _great_ toolset for how we'll all soon be developing software will be.

As a _single_ example - agents can't use interactive editors, yet _so many_ of the powerful parts of Git absolutely _require_ it. Agents can't interactively rebase, meaning they can't very effectively squash, amend, reword, reorder, absorb. They can't very easily interactively add. They are middling at best when it comes to stacking branches. Git is designed to send patches over email and agents are not concerned with that.

I would love to debate all of the lessons learned about the history of Git, but I was around for all of that. I know why Git was started, I know what it was meant to do, I understand how it's evolved. I still think there are a lot of interesting things that we could have in our change control tooling and Git is not the perfect solution.

Nearly everyone in this thread suffers from the same basic local maxima blindness that you do. Git is great, GitHub made it more valuable. But maybe the answer to the papercuts we've constantly been dealing with for decades isn't faster horses. (To, you know, mix metaphors)

There is nothing inherently special about the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Why do they need $17m to build this? Vibe code it in a couple weeks, ship it.

It's obvious that GitButt wants to be bought by one of the AI providers so they can add it as a feature to their subscription.

Many investment decisions are taken by people who get cut of investment as fees.

Wealthy people don't have time to do all due diligence and vetting specially when random startups become unicorn.

git isn’t Saas.

git ≠ GitHub

If you think like that why invest in software at all; the AI will do everything?

Does AI make reading or writing stacked PRs any nicer? No, it does not.

I also concluded based on the video:

4. GitButler is a terrible name for this

5. No one will use the "but" command over "git"

6. The founder needs to learn to enunciate the name of his new product better

And also, your central premise is exactly right. The solution to agents and humans working faster will not be better manual oversight of what they're doing. It's like missing the most important principle of agentic development. Supervise, don't gatekeep.

Linus didn’t build git. He built a proof of concept and then handed it over to real maintainers that wrote real code.

It's certainly a choice to lead with the funding and a photo with a venture capitalist.

https://docs.gitbutler.com/why-gitbutler

It was the early 2000s though, $17 got you like a weeks worth of snacks back then.

Yes, I think that “after git” claim is just marketing. This is indeed just a nice frontend to git. It looks interesting and seems to solve real problems, in the same way that jj already does. But it is not a radical change.

Also if they really wanted to “replace git” I think that would be much more difficult due to network effects. Everybody is already using git.

you can literally plug in any diff program you like into git and even make it extension-aware

There's `git diff -w`, and most forges expose a setting for that in their diff views.

Use difftastic. You can do so with current git :)

This is is made for AI or ... something.

To me jj is an ok porcelain for git, but I find it worse than magit. Sure, it has some tricks under their sleves for merging, but I just don't run into weird merges and never needed more advanced commands like rerere.

What I'd would expect of the next vcs is to go beyond vcs of the files, but of the environment so works on my machine™ and configuring your git-hooks and CI becomes a thing of the past.

Do we need an LSP-like abstraction for environments and build systems instead of yet another definitive build system? IDK, my solution so far is sticking to nix, x86_64, and ignoring Windows and Mac, which is obviously not good enough for like 90%+ of devs.

Which version control system should we not tell?

Clearly butler comes after git.

I would like to take this opportunity to kindly inform you that I wrote that post, as I write all of the blog posts on our blog (and everywhere else I write). You will never see something with my name on it that was written by AI. Thanks.

Ah, I see. You missed the part where that was funny.

Could be I live in a bubble, but I don't use git because of GitHub or with GitHub that much. No doubt, GitHub is/was great for distributing software but I feel we'd still all be using git without GitHub

Standard is better than better. For all of its flaws, I’ll take Git any day over any (better) alternative, because the value is in the absence of fragmentation. If a repo doesn’t use Git, I’m out.

> I don't understand how anyone could think to replace git by raising money. The only way to truly do this is grassroots iteration.

Yeah, that is also my take. I'm biased of course since I'm someone working on replacing git through grassroots iteration, but I've been around this block a few times though and I never saw blasting money at a problem produce real innovation.

It’s not 17m for an idea to improve git.

It’s 17m for a tool which hopes to serve companies and charge money and make more than 17m in profit as a result.

If you look at the set of dev tooling, teams will frequently pay many hundreds per dev on things like CI, Git tools, code review, etc.

And to be fair, GitHub is really quite bad for a lot of workflows. I haven’t used gitbutler, but my team pays ~$30 a month per dev for tools which literally just provide a nicer interface for stacking PRs, because it saves us WAY more than that in time.

This isn’t even an egregious example of VC, it’s just an enterprise dev tooling bet.

It’s just gambling without the stigma of being called an addict.

After a decade of negative interest, there is still a lot of excess capital looking for high-risk-high-gain investments. Perceived future economic value is unfortunately not in the stuff we know and understand to be useful, essential.

Use value != sales value; hype sells.

Ps. not too sure how far $17M gets you toward mini nuclear power plants, but I catch your drift.

I don’t understand the negative sentiment here.

What’s the problem?

Do you think less money should be going into VC?

Just some numbers ~1.5M housing units are built in the US with an approx cost of $300k - $400k. That is $450B to $600B going into housing units construction every year.

On the other hand VC has maybe $1T AUM in the US. Maybe 10%-20% of that is deployed every year? So $100b to $200B.

What is wrong with that ratio? Could there be better solutions to make more housing cheaper? (lower regulations, efficient permitting, etc)

Money moving from VC to housing seems without a first principled approach on what problem your solving and how is silly.

You'd have thought the same about all the big tech companies when they were startups. Yet now they're making piles of money and contributing to America's overall economic success.

The worst part about what I see here is the inequity or imbalance of what we're seeing about where money gets allocated, and the material effects of what that inequity brings about. It's not "I have a good idea and a great team" it's "I am X, or know Y" and... ugh.

There's gobs of amazing technology being built by people who just love to build, have great ideas, and huge talent (now exponentially compounded by LLM assistance, even) -- and 99% of it is ignored by people with $$ and none of them will be paid to work on these things -- let alone get funded to build a business around them -- and the reason isn't the inadequacy of the technology or "lack of a workable business plan": it's lack of social connections or pedigree.

And what this tells me is two things

1. there's a fundamentally sickness to the VC culture coming out of Silicon Valley and it's gotten worse not better with the new restraints in the post-ZIRP era. It's an echo chamber and a social circle, not a means for creating new profitable companies or good infrastructure, and it serves mainly just to feed a pipeline of acquisitions into much bigger fish rather than building tomorrow's new businesses or ideas. This is very different from 80s, 90s tech culture that I grew up in.

2. there's clearly a desperate need for more actual incubators or labs for actual technology, paying people to build "good stuff" independent of the vagaries of what VCs and their ivy league friends are able to pitch.

Frankly: The $$ out there in heavy circulation has been mostly corrosive, not helpful.

But then again, for a fraction of the money US-Americans pay for health insurance, we actually have public health insurance here...

Yes, we have higher taxes, yes, we pay more in social security... but in the end we have far less "Working Poor" and I know very, very, very, very few people who have more than 1 job.

But I guess that's just socialist bullshit.

What I am trying to convey is: The US lives in its own bubble, just like the rest of us does.

The difference is that the US hears the US propaganda and the rest of us heard the US propaganda for decades as well, through Hollywood and media.

Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends. If you look at how VC (or really any network) funding circulates, it’s just people who are allowed to enter that circle and money just flows between them constantly. On one hand, you have trusted people who you are willing to give money, on the other hand, this inherently creates a clique.

It reminds me how the Bohemian Club’s slogan, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is a bit farcical given that it is impossible for the club members not to engage in commerce.

> ... and sort LEGO bricks by colour

You never sort by color, ever! You sort by form, and then throw every color of that specific form in one bin. If you throw every red brick in the same bin, you'll never find a specific formed red brick because to many red bricks. But if you first search by form and then by color, you are much faster.

> Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

Because solving problems isn’t the goal, the goal is money (and sometimes a little fame) with the least possible effort, and software can be changed on a whim and is very cheap to manufacture and distribute and “fix in flight”, it’s the perfect vehicle for those who are impatient and don’t really care about understanding and studying a need.

> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably ...

People complaining about investors throwing stupid sums of money at stupid or trivial things unrelated (or only marginally related) to AI? ...sounds to me like the first glimpse of hope I have come across in this industry for half a decade.

For what it's worth, that LEGO vacuum does exist[0], it was on Shark Tank[1]. I assume they stole the idea from The Office. It doesn't sort the bricks, but I assume that was more of a stretch goal based on the insane amount of money being discussed. After all, the LEGO vacuum only cost $495k to get to market.

[0] https://pickupbricks.com

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25MIpQqLIU

> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.

The world doesn’t need this. It would just be more plastic and electronic trash.

You and your kids have hands. Pick them up. It’s what we do in my house.

If you don’t have hands, use your feet.

> But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works.

Perhaps you should have. Based on the link it seems like it's more an extension to than replacement for Git.

The page is mostly sort of fluffy AI hype, but the concrete bits are things like integrating issue tracking and PR logic in one tool/repo, like e.g. fossil does.

Also git proper could use some love too. The UI is still a mess. And the large file support and the submodule/subtree/subrepo situations are quite dismal.

> $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size.

Doing this robustly is probably quite far from robotics SOTA.

Not to shoot down your comment with sarcasm, I'm being really honest: I changed my shower gel with an expensive one this week, and it really had an unexpected, exciting effect. Small stuff can really have consequences much bigger than themselves.

That said, if you ever decide solve the tidying the toys problem, start a kickstarter, I pledge to pledge support! :D

I like git, it works perfectly fine on my command line.

I do wonder, though, if it would have been designed differently if the whole “code forge” sort of application (or whatever GitHub and the like are called) was envisioned at the time. Pull requests aren’t even a concept in git proper, right?

It seems like a kind of important type of tool. Even though git is awesome, we don’t need a monoculture.

> one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.

And what's the next step? I can't even imagine how rich (and how large the their houses) the parents need to be for them to comfortably buy such dedicated tool. Perhaps 100x~1000x richer than me?

And, while this is just pulled out from my rear side, I feel even getting this passed safety regulation would cost your $17M. It's a fully automated machine working next to toddlers!

On the contrary Github is a proven product.

Not to mention the irony that they need $17M to try and recreate/improve what Linus built in a week.

Thing i learned about raising capital it, you need to build or have a network. Thats YC is great, accelerators, incubators help you do that. Network and story you tell. Also, every stage you raise, you have to make sure the folks you raise from help you craft the narrative for thr next round.

I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.

Irony of thr market is, just like tinder 20% of the companies attract all the attention rest of them try to gran the attention. Those who need capital get the capital, those who need the capital die trying.

Enough friday pessimisim.

granted how much did Linus spend on Git? probably well south of $17M and he's not beholden to the likes of a16z

Unsure if you want the real answer, but the financials on gitv2 will be much more appealing to a VC. Hardware is hard, slow, expensive, risky. Finally, China is the place to build physical things not the US.

One reason I don't read HN as much as I used to is because I can't help translating numbers like that into the amount of research that could be accomplished with the same amount, and then I get angry.

VCs have no clue. They have money and therefore they are in a dominant position. Everybody around them (professionally) is trying to flatter them and convince them that they should invest in their project.

I had a few interactions with VCs (both professional and personal), where I didn't care because I wasn't benefitting from them. One of them was "an expert in CRISPR and blockchain" (WTF?) and... well I didn't need much time to see that he did not understand what a "hash" was. He was mostly an expert at repeating stories he had been told about how he would make a ton of money with the latest bullshit he didn't understand.

The truth is, it's like trading. You diversify the investments and hope that the economy goes up (respectively that one of the startups you invested in gets profitable). The only thing a VC has to do is verify that they don't invest in a fraud, but even that is hard given that they never understand the technology enough to say it's worth it (they often invest in shiny bullshit).

> But instead, we get a replacement for Git. [...] Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

While I personally doubt that for $17M one could build such a vacuum robot prototype (for a vacuum cleaner company, investing this amount of money - if it worked - would be a rounding error), I will rather analyze the point that you raised:

It is a very common situation that the workflows of companies is deeply ingrained into some tool

- that they can't get rid of (be it Microsoft Excel (in insurance and finance), be it Git (in software development), ...)

- that is actually a bad fit for the workflow step (Git and Excel often are)

So, this is typical for the kind of problem that companies in sectors in which billions of $/€ are moved do have.

I am actually paid to develop some specialized software for some specialized industrial sector that solves a very specific problem.

So, in my experience the reason why nobody [is] solving actual problems (in the sense of your definition) anymore is simple:

- nobody is willing to pay big money for a solution,

- those entities who are willing to pay big money often fall for sycophantic scammers/consultants.

But we are not even get a replacement for git, we are getting a CLI on top of git. Since agents can use GH CLI and mcp very well, I'm very interested to see what is it that Git butler can do so much better (I also might be a bit sceptic, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt).

The author is a founder of GitHub, he could raise $17m for “git but it’s called pit and a repository is a hole and committing code is called burying it” if he wanted to, investors care about pedigree.

> Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

Because that’s too risky for investors.

> For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.

Just write down how you'll spend the money to make that, what it'll eventually cost to produce, what the market size will be, and what the price will be, and if it's enough return you can easily convince someone to give you $17m to do it all.

>Scott Chacon is a co-founder of GitHub

Thought so until saw this. Man, he is the co-founder of Github and already seed-funded. How can someone refuse him? 17M is a small amount considering the valuation VS Code Agent wrappers are getting

Totally agree - most of these co's that get funded are pointless. FWIW, the general math here is that you'd spend < 2-3mm developing new git and most of the money goes into distribution.

We've strayed really far from where technical innovation began

> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money

Well, cofounding Github helps

To be fair, discovering a new shower gel that smells better or feels better is a nice experience.

Hasn't someone already built that robot? At least my kids tell me this exists every time I tell them to clean up their Legos. Actually it just does Legos, not the general toys.

I ask myself this all the time, I have ideas now and then that I need to start writing down. Its just sad, we have so much potential as a society, but all the money goes to things like AI and bitcoin blindly. While I love some aspects of AI, and hope to someday be like the Jetsons and have a robot in my home that helps with things, and frees up me and my wife to doing other things with our family, I also don't trust something that is feeding my most intimate events from my home to a server somewhere.

It's primarily focused on "take from someone else" rather than create something new and useful.

Consider that many of the tech posts here are of the form, "i did X but with Z" as the poster hopes they will be recognized as some master of execution.

I think it’s always good to dig a bit deeper on these things.

This seems ridiculous to you, compared to a very obvious win with a Lego sorting vacuum.

Lego isn’t niche, and the explanation isn’t a weird technical thing that only experts would get and understand how important or valuable it is.

Yet it’s not being done.

Is there nobody who has realised this gap but you? Has nobody managed to convince people with money that it’s worthwhile? Have you tried but failed?

Or is it not many many thousands of people who are wrong but you?

Is the problem harder than you think? I’ve worked with robotics but not for a long time and I think the core manipulation is either not really solved or not until recently. I don’t know about yours but my kids also don’t fully dismantle their Lego creations either so would the robot need to take them apart too? That’s a lot of force. And some are special.

How people want Lego sorted is pretty broad. Kids don’t even need it sorted that much. And the volume can be huge for smaller buckets of things.

Is the market not as big as you think? Is it big enough for the cost, I’d buy one for £100 but £1000? £10,000?

How does it compare for most people against having the kids play on a blanket and then tipping it into a bucket? Or those ones that are a circle of cloth with a drawstring so it’s a play area and storage all in one? I 3d printed some sieves and that’s most of the issue right there done.

People are solving actual problems, but lots of problems are hard, and not all of them are profitable.

As a gut feeling, there is such a large overlap of engineers and large Lego collections and willingness to spend lots of money and time saving some time sorting Lego that the small number of implementations usually split over many years is very telling about the difficulty.

For what it’s worth I want this too.

You see, the actual problem is raising the money.

I feel exactly this way

Why are we trying to replace git? What is the problem with git?

When the sock bot dries the socks, matches and folds them together we're at peak robot. Come to think of it, its got to not lose either of them also. Current tech falls short of this.

Git is still pretty lacking in the area of big files. This is quite annoying if you're dealing with big deep learning data. So your LEGO vacuum robot could actually benefit from a better Git.

I feel like git started to feel outdated overnight as the company I work for went agentic development first.

I fought for years trying to convince my colleagues to write good commit messages. Now Claude is writing great commit messages but since I'm no longer looking at code - I never see them. I don't think Claude uses them either.

Branches are now irrelevant since all agents work in worktrees by default. But worktrees are awkward since you run out of disk space fast (since we're in a monorepo).

There is a constant discussion ongoing whether we commit our plans or not. Some argue that the whole conversation leading up to the PR should be included (stupid imo).

The game changed completely. It isn't weird that people are wondering if the tools should as well.

Definitely feels like there's opportunity to build something better

>Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFRzIOna2oQ

you just need pedigree. any kind. where you went to school, where you worked etc.

It’s probably because you’re not willing to lie enough. There was some founder back in the 2010s, I forgot his name, but he’d go around giving talks on fundraising and he basically said he just lied all the time.

For example, instead of building a robot to pick up Lego bricks, say you’re building a platform for personal robotics, and it’ll cook you food, do your laundry, repair your fridge. It doesn’t matter if you have any idea how to do this, just say you need $50M and you’ll hire some robotics and vision guys to figure it out. The bigger and bolder the lie, the better.

I've long had the same idea.. this one has legs.

You missed the boat, baskets that open out into a giant play mat have flooded amazon and temu. Something like this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toy-Storage-Organizer-Lego-Play/dp/...

4 McDonalds. That’s a better way of measuring it.

17M seems like a rounding error these days with all the AI investments. Probably some spare cash in a fund that needed to be closed or something.

Solving actual problems are hard, and even harder to get money for (see research). Most VC’s are in it for the returns only, not actually making a change, there are some exceptions but they are far and few apart.

I’m also contemplating a lego sorting machine.

@fxtentacle I’m at the airport and spat out my coffee reading your comment .. this is legendary and super funny ! Happy Friday to you kind sir

> sort LEGO bricks by colour and size

I just looked into this out of idle curiosity, after watching some guy build a LEGO sorting machine. (They work in a warehouse that sells used bricks for model builders.)

Interestingly, this is on the cusp of viability, but training the ML model would still be cost-prohibitive (for me). With $17M, it's within reach, but there's still the obvious mechanical hurdles: Kids don't disassemble their Lego, the conditions are "less than ideal", and even vibrating belts in a warehouse scenario have a lot of trouble keeping bricks separated for the camera to get a clear image.

Robot hands are nowhere near the point where they can reliably (or even unreliably!) take apart two arbitrary Lego bricks that are joined, let alone anything of even mild complexity. This is hard for most humans, and often requires the use of tools! See: https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/help-topics/article/lego-...

The machine vision part is... getting there! You could pull some clever tricks with modern hardware such as bright LED lights, multi-spectral or even hyper-spectral sensors, etc. The algorithms have improved a lot also. Early attempts could only recognise a few dozen distinct shapes, and the most recent models a few hundred, but they're about 2-3 years old, which means "stone ages".

A trick several Lego recognition model training runs used was to photo realistically render 3D models of bricks in random orientations and every possible color, which is far faster than manually labelling photos of real bricks.

These days you could use the NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to heavily accelerate and automate this.

Definitely sounded like a shower gel moment.

You mean the one they try to build in The Office?

You're fine with how git works, many others aren't.

I am actively looking for a replacement for GitHub and would prefer something that is not based on git.

Solutions to more actual problems are more expensive. It’s easier to ask millions of people for $0.01 than it is to ask thousands for $100. Things that are easy to sell to millions of people for $100 are rarely innovative (transportation, food, entertainment, etc), and if they are, they’re world-changing (cars, supermarkets, smartphones, etc).

Yes!

I mean who tf gives some small team millions to put some Nvidia GPU into space and thinking we will have market disrupting GPU clusters in space in 10 years?!

There are so many low hanging fruits in IT Industry to just being solved.

Even just having something like well build, open smart home products whould have been disruptive years ago (until someone like ikea decides to enter that space).

Don't do that. Don't buy into the bullshit.

On the other side, people who were using, say, Perforce, also thought there can't be anything better. Still, BitKeeper appeared as an innovation in the area, eaten later by Git, created by angry Linus (because of BitKeeper licencing changes).

So, even though Git seems to be ok (people who store large binary files or who run huge monorepos would probably disagree), maybe we can do better.

Altavista was kind of okeish for search, yet Google managed to figure out something that was (at that time) way better.

i am actually fine with how svn works.

I for one can't wait for open Ai to buy them and reroute every git commit to chatgpt.

17M isn't a lot of money. It is for a person sure. Retire. Cessna. etc. But not to build a butler!

Your kids need to learn how to clean up after themselves.

All you need is a camera pointing at the floor with image detection... when there's legos on the floor it triggers a video playing that explains how the kids need to pick up the legos. /s

Yes, you may be fine with git, but can you say the same thing about AI agents? /s

You didn't click the link. Who are you to say that they aren't solving actual problems? You might not be their target. The whole article is dedicated to explaining why they're building their product.

> Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

Let me just state the obvious. Of all the major problems of society, sorting legos isn't one. If you disagree, try emerging from the cellar.

Tbf, git is very much a problem that needs solving. It only works well for text data, the fact that it is decentralized adds a lot of complexity but doesn't matter for 99% of users since they use a centralized git forge like Github or Gitlab, and the UX is pretty much non-existent.