Anything "for agents" needs to provide some kind of evidence it's better than what the agents already have baked into the model training data. It can't just be "easier" on some dimension, because the model has already learned the hard parts of the old thing and models can't make new memories to learn new things, so there is always a context cost for the new thing.
Models know git because there's a monstrous amount of git in their training data. Models never heard of a new thing "for agents", so you have to teach them to use it via skills and docs. Models can, of course, follow documentation, so there's nothing stopping them from using the new thing...but, the new thing "for agents" starts the race well behind the known thing that was built for humans a decade or two ago and has huge amounts of training data baked into every model.
I'm not saying nobody should make new things (an accusation I've gotten when saying something similar about a previous "for agents" thing), of course people should make new things. I'm saying that when I see "for agents", I think, "prove it". Agents don't have trouble with git, so there's gotta be some kind of pain point about using git with agents that I'm unaware of that this solves somehow (but isn't expressed on the page) or this isn't actually for agents, it's just a project someone wanted to do (and that's also fine!). But, if the latter, "for agents" is merely marketing and I'm not interested.
I've built my own workflow for using agents on git, as i now often have to do changes across repositories, or in the same repository for different tasks. I could use worktrees, but I'd rather invert it, give agents the ability to have a workspace, that they pull repositories into, create branches as they want, commit on main it doesn't matter. the agents don't bother each other, and when i finally have to merge, conflicts are either resolved, or it is just smooth sailing.
The tool is called gitnow. it is honestly quite simple, just create a project, add the repositories you want and get to building. I've found having another claude chat or whatever use the tool to great success coupled with zellij, but could also be zed, tmux or whatever.
Secondly it also pretty much solves the problem of the agent dumping memory files everywhere, they now basically have a scratch space that is theirs, where they can keep their tasks, and just update the repositories as needed.
Use gn the shell after eval if you use it, it will actually invoke cd, instead of creating a subshell.
I have absolutely no idea what this offers that makes it better than git (or any over VCS for that matter) for agents.
There’s some mention about performance, which is great, but the performance of git isn’t a bottleneck for agents.
There’s some mention about token use being reduced, which is great, but how have they achieved that vs gits porcelain modes. And why does token count require a whole new VCS, and thus incompatibilities with all the established git ecosystems?
I really want to find reasons to like this but it’s probably some of the worst product marketing I’ve seen. And something this significant really does need to sell itself hard if you’re going to get enough people in a project team to agree to switch away from git
The lazy mount is very interesting. This is similar to how google3 works at Google that I have not seen any similar implementation in open source so far.
Git sparse checkout is helpful but checking files out as they are needed is much more flexible and intuitive.
Microsoft VFS for Git / GVFS is the closest that I can think of.
There is room for this lazy mount idea to be built on top of Git
Looks very interesting, but it's difficult to see the benefit from git right now apart from performance? Don't get me wrong, that's good, but I don't think it's a big enough proposition to get people to ditch git and move to oak.
Since it's early, here a couple of things I'd loooove git to be and it's not, maybe you can consider to go in this direction and, if there are many more like me, get a large user base:
- The private/public quantum shouldn't be a repo but something more fluid within a repo. A public repo should be able to have private sub-directories, files, etc. If should be fluid in this regard, so big projects could open-source <i>some</i> features, not all. Right now it's all or nothing, and that closes the doors to many big closed projects.
- env variables. If you could make its usage easier and more seamless within oak, that could convince many (me included). It's really a headache to deal with env vars and git, and shouldn't be the case.
- Collaboration for agents beyond PRs. I don't know exactly what's the flavor for this, but I know that fundamentally the create PR/merge circle of git is not how it should be.
This project falls into the classic "More" trap. Agents are fast at creating code so let's make them even faster (more). However any rational observer can see that the bottlenecks for throughput are no longer at this segment of the process.
Human decision-making, communications and awareness are the key bottlenecks, not code generation and commit speed, by several orders of magnitude.
And I think that's a good thing if we want to avoid mass-psychosis.
I would recommend just linking to a few sentences that say how Oak is different than Git, rather than a personal backstory. (https://oak.space/docs)
My initial reaction is if this is not something than could be built on top of Git, rather than replacing it. Describe the data model - what is a "commit", what is a "branch" ..., if the same as git, then why not reuse.
I have always wanted a version control system that was basically Emacs/Vim/Neovim's undo-tree[0] but persistent and social. Why do I have to manually talk to git? You are a computer, track every modification I make while editing and let me decide (or help me decide) on what a checkpoint is.
My impression with this space is that you'd need to fundraise startup-style, which I'm assuming you'll do, to catch up with everyone that is doing a similar thing.
The problem space and solution has been around for a while in big tech, and now there is a handful known products publicly known, and probably a couple dozen still secret ones. It is just now with AI/agents volume, there probably needs to be an easier solution for quick narrowly focused VCS views.
For filesystem mount, usually FUSE-FS, of a version control system to enable multiple viewers without transferring a lot of data see some current/previous implementations:
- Google: Piper via CitC (Clients in the Cloud) often used with Cider (web IDE)
- Meta: Sapling on EdenFS (from what I read, never worked there)
The main issue I see is with the site -- it just seems like a big blob of AI-generated text I need to understand what is going on. The cool part wasn't even shown off: your GitHub UI clone that you can get to from seeing the benchmark code.
FYI, I also think the 4-way arrows logo has been used before, and still might be in use. I tried searching, but I think I saw a multi-colored one, maybe in a UK-based IT corporate training company's class I attended.
The focus on speed is interesting here, it's something I think less and less about with agents. I'm not waiting for git operations, and at the rate agents run it's just not a major factor. Agentic development is all about throughput, not latency.
This looks interesting regardless, but I do wonder if the latency focus is the wrong way to sell this.
Interesting to see more dev tools designed specifically for agent
workflows. I've been building a local tool that monitors AI agent
API calls and costs in real time — the "I have no idea what my
agent just did" problem feels like it's only going to get bigger
as agentic coding tools spread.
I am curious, how do you handle latency issues for on demand access? I saw you use FUSE (and FSKit), and from my experience it is pain to make filesystems in userspace work on-demand over WAN because a) latency, and variable RTT; and b) you can't saturate the wire and aggressively read ahead things, otherwise native apps will freeze, lag, or just make the UX unpleasant, especially if there are too many placeholder files, or large files with random jumps in them.
What I want from a version system is to capture event in history not like changes as a files but as events that capture a process.
If I split a file in two I still want to be able to see blame correctly for the author of the function, not one file as freshly created and the other with a bunch of deletes. I wish commits could be folded into larger commits so that you can still capture the individual changes but also not see them by default when looking at the history of a file.
Just a more human centric perspective on change history where it captures the way we talk and think about changes.
Many things were forever until they suddenly died, but I think this is especially true for git.
I'm not saying this as a git hater, quite to the contrary. I think git is great. I also think git is an ill-fit for the majority of modern commercial software projects and there will be a breaking point where companies realize that and move on.
> This repo was written almost entirely using AI with human oversight. If you see anything that needs fixed or would like to contribute, please email ... or reach out on Discord
Why not just provide an email address that's delivered directly to the agents you have developing Oak?
I didn't delve into the benchmark repo to understand what your loop is measuring. Why would an agent (without fine tuning or oak-specific context) be faster with oak than it is with git or jj?
I thought I wouldn’t because it’s just another git - but git worktrees are a PITA.
Can I suggest though to focus the readme on the lighting fast checkout for multi agent loads? That seems to be the big selling point and is the real win over git.
I think other commenters here are missing the point - it’s not “for agents” in that the API is somehow agent friendly. Of course git being omnipresent in the training data gives it a one-up. It’s “for agents” in that it aligns with a multi-checkout workflow better than git does.
Certainly an interesting project although I am wondering what makes the benefits mentioned agent specific? You have mentioned performance improvements which is great but in that case would it not just be a better vc than git in general? what perks only work with agents that wouldn't work with individuals?
Back in the day, 2020, the effort to create a program/website/service was the prohibiting factor, which meant the sediment remained at the bottom of the barrel where it belonged.
Now, every brain fart is published as a finished product no one wanted.
With AI, I can finally build what I've been dreaming about.
What was your dream before AI, exactly? Not to build a VCS for agents, presumably. But the entire value prop here is centered around agents.
This is not the first "agentic VCS" project which claims both N% VCS token savings, and "faster VCS operations". But how are either of these two things a bottleneck? No case is made for this.
It dramatically improves the speed and context your agents need when working on serious projects: 50% fewer VCS-related tokens and 90% faster per operation.
So less context is an improvement? How much is 50% in practice? And how do my agents "need" a 90% speed increase (source, btw?) in VCS operations? What % of wall-clock time is spent in VCS commands vs actual inference?
"Agents locally and in the cloud no longer need a full copy of a repo to get working" - but was that ever a problem? And git supports shallow clones anyway.
work on many tasks in parallel without needing to download everything or fight worktrees
Who is "fighting worktrees"? If you're concerned about all these downloads, why not use worktrees over a network share, as mentioned in the git manual?
seems like an interesting idea. the only friction would be to get people to use it instead of git, however i believe it will happen slowly, more people trying it and recommending it to others.
I wish we as a society would stop using random words for products. "Slacked about Oak, but they need in Fizzle. The deck's in Slate, the assets are in Vault, the timeline's in Pulse, the copy's in Quill, the build's in Forge, and the launch party's already in Ember."
I think git it the perfect system to bring order AI coding. Generate code however you like, but ultimately, it goes through a sensible, proven, and auditable pipeline. As someone also building AI tools, git it something I find myself "building with" - not against.
Could this not have been a git wrapper? I struggle to see why git had to be abandoned entirely. Now you need to rebuild the world just to add some ergonomics on top of git.
You're jerking yourself off with the web UI here. What I see on first load is essentially completely homogeneous, just a sea of black boxes with white text. As a purely aesthetic composition it's interesting to look at from afar. But in the context of presenting it to strangers it's hard to approach. Too much going on and hard to parse.
It's kind of like replacing Wordpress. Sure, you can make a better alternative. But replacing an entrenched player that has been there for at least a decade will be almost impossible.
* The core idea sounds interesting. Make it the first paragraph, not paragraph seven.
* Spend more words describing what makes Oak different.
* "I built a version control system in my free-time called Jam". You probably didn't name your free time. "I built a version control system, called Jam, in my free time."
Lots of self-promotion, but no concrete comparisons where this tool does a better job than git.
The only thing to go on is this single sentence: "With virtual mounts, agents locally and in the cloud no longer need a full copy of a repo to get working."
> For the first 100 users that subscribe to a paid plan I will send you a personalized e-ink display
I don't understand anyone who feels incentivized by this. Brogrammer 2.0 is weird.
Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents
(oak.space)209 points by zdgeier 22 June 2026 | 181 comments
Comments
Models know git because there's a monstrous amount of git in their training data. Models never heard of a new thing "for agents", so you have to teach them to use it via skills and docs. Models can, of course, follow documentation, so there's nothing stopping them from using the new thing...but, the new thing "for agents" starts the race well behind the known thing that was built for humans a decade or two ago and has huge amounts of training data baked into every model.
I'm not saying nobody should make new things (an accusation I've gotten when saying something similar about a previous "for agents" thing), of course people should make new things. I'm saying that when I see "for agents", I think, "prove it". Agents don't have trouble with git, so there's gotta be some kind of pain point about using git with agents that I'm unaware of that this solves somehow (but isn't expressed on the page) or this isn't actually for agents, it's just a project someone wanted to do (and that's also fine!). But, if the latter, "for agents" is merely marketing and I'm not interested.
The tool is called gitnow. it is honestly quite simple, just create a project, add the repositories you want and get to building. I've found having another claude chat or whatever use the tool to great success coupled with zellij, but could also be zed, tmux or whatever.
Secondly it also pretty much solves the problem of the agent dumping memory files everywhere, they now basically have a scratch space that is theirs, where they can keep their tasks, and just update the repositories as needed.
Use gn the shell after eval if you use it, it will actually invoke cd, instead of creating a subshell.
https://github.com/kjuulh/gitnow
There’s some mention about performance, which is great, but the performance of git isn’t a bottleneck for agents.
There’s some mention about token use being reduced, which is great, but how have they achieved that vs gits porcelain modes. And why does token count require a whole new VCS, and thus incompatibilities with all the established git ecosystems?
I really want to find reasons to like this but it’s probably some of the worst product marketing I’ve seen. And something this significant really does need to sell itself hard if you’re going to get enough people in a project team to agree to switch away from git
Git sparse checkout is helpful but checking files out as they are needed is much more flexible and intuitive.
Microsoft VFS for Git / GVFS is the closest that I can think of.
There is room for this lazy mount idea to be built on top of Git
Since it's early, here a couple of things I'd loooove git to be and it's not, maybe you can consider to go in this direction and, if there are many more like me, get a large user base: - The private/public quantum shouldn't be a repo but something more fluid within a repo. A public repo should be able to have private sub-directories, files, etc. If should be fluid in this regard, so big projects could open-source <i>some</i> features, not all. Right now it's all or nothing, and that closes the doors to many big closed projects. - env variables. If you could make its usage easier and more seamless within oak, that could convince many (me included). It's really a headache to deal with env vars and git, and shouldn't be the case. - Collaboration for agents beyond PRs. I don't know exactly what's the flavor for this, but I know that fundamentally the create PR/merge circle of git is not how it should be.
Great initiative and good luck!
Human decision-making, communications and awareness are the key bottlenecks, not code generation and commit speed, by several orders of magnitude.
And I think that's a good thing if we want to avoid mass-psychosis.
You kinda lost me there. I‘m supposed to use a central technology whose author can’t be arsed to write a few paragraphs?
My initial reaction is if this is not something than could be built on top of Git, rather than replacing it. Describe the data model - what is a "commit", what is a "branch" ..., if the same as git, then why not reuse.
[0]: https://i.sstatic.net/4vbd9.png
The problem space and solution has been around for a while in big tech, and now there is a handful known products publicly known, and probably a couple dozen still secret ones. It is just now with AI/agents volume, there probably needs to be an easier solution for quick narrowly focused VCS views.
For filesystem mount, usually FUSE-FS, of a version control system to enable multiple viewers without transferring a lot of data see some current/previous implementations:
- Google: Piper via CitC (Clients in the Cloud) often used with Cider (web IDE)
- Meta: Sapling on EdenFS (from what I read, never worked there)
- Rational Clearcase, anyone else remember mounting VOBs?
The main issue I see is with the site -- it just seems like a big blob of AI-generated text I need to understand what is going on. The cool part wasn't even shown off: your GitHub UI clone that you can get to from seeing the benchmark code.
FYI, I also think the 4-way arrows logo has been used before, and still might be in use. I tried searching, but I think I saw a multi-colored one, maybe in a UK-based IT corporate training company's class I attended.
This looks interesting regardless, but I do wonder if the latency focus is the wrong way to sell this.
If I split a file in two I still want to be able to see blame correctly for the author of the function, not one file as freshly created and the other with a bunch of deletes. I wish commits could be folded into larger commits so that you can still capture the individual changes but also not see them by default when looking at the history of a file.
Just a more human centric perspective on change history where it captures the way we talk and think about changes.
how does your agent run tests or click around the UI to verify changes if it doesn't have the full code?
Many things were forever until they suddenly died, but I think this is especially true for git.
I'm not saying this as a git hater, quite to the contrary. I think git is great. I also think git is an ill-fit for the majority of modern commercial software projects and there will be a breaking point where companies realize that and move on.
> This repo was written almost entirely using AI with human oversight. If you see anything that needs fixed or would like to contribute, please email ... or reach out on Discord
Why not just provide an email address that's delivered directly to the agents you have developing Oak?
I didn't delve into the benchmark repo to understand what your loop is measuring. Why would an agent (without fine tuning or oak-specific context) be faster with oak than it is with git or jj?
> You can work on many tasks in parallel without needing to download everything or fight worktrees.
What does "download everything" even mean? Why would you "fight worktrees"?
I thought I wouldn’t because it’s just another git - but git worktrees are a PITA.
Can I suggest though to focus the readme on the lighting fast checkout for multi agent loads? That seems to be the big selling point and is the real win over git.
I think other commenters here are missing the point - it’s not “for agents” in that the API is somehow agent friendly. Of course git being omnipresent in the training data gives it a one-up. It’s “for agents” in that it aligns with a multi-checkout workflow better than git does.
Now, every brain fart is published as a finished product no one wanted.
This is not the first "agentic VCS" project which claims both N% VCS token savings, and "faster VCS operations". But how are either of these two things a bottleneck? No case is made for this.
So less context is an improvement? How much is 50% in practice? And how do my agents "need" a 90% speed increase (source, btw?) in VCS operations? What % of wall-clock time is spent in VCS commands vs actual inference?"Agents locally and in the cloud no longer need a full copy of a repo to get working" - but was that ever a problem? And git supports shallow clones anyway.
Who is "fighting worktrees"? If you're concerned about all these downloads, why not use worktrees over a network share, as mentioned in the git manual?Like replacing streets with rails while we claim FSD works out of the box
YAAS (yet another agentic substrate)
* The core idea sounds interesting. Make it the first paragraph, not paragraph seven.
* Spend more words describing what makes Oak different.
* "I built a version control system in my free-time called Jam". You probably didn't name your free time. "I built a version control system, called Jam, in my free time."
The only thing to go on is this single sentence: "With virtual mounts, agents locally and in the cloud no longer need a full copy of a repo to get working."
> For the first 100 users that subscribe to a paid plan I will send you a personalized e-ink display
I don't understand anyone who feels incentivized by this. Brogrammer 2.0 is weird.