alt Hacker NewsWe've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
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No CLI installer for Windows.
App itself for Windows won't proceed past my selected repo. Said something about bad permissions, but I use that repo every day.
Doesn't jj basically do all this and more?
It’s weird because I could see raising money on the premise that GitHub is garbage, not git. But then you can’t say I co-founded GitHub as your bona fides.
I wonder what the development of git itself has cost in engineer time? Presumably more than $17 million? Assuming a fully loaded engineer is 250k, that only amounts to 68 engineer-years over 20 calendar years, which seems low.
Remind me, how much venture capital did Linus need to raise for building git?
Makes sense. Git solved versioning, not collaboration at scale. Most real pain today is juggling context across PRs, tools, and now agents not writing code.
That money could've gone to something useful instead of building "git but better"
LLMs have solved the Git problem without any need for other tooling. There is no learning curve anymore. You don't need to know any commands or even look at the CLI. You can explain in plain text what you're trying to do.
Is this actually replacing git, or just a new frontend for the same git stuff? In any case, I'll be interested to see if this still exists in a year, and if that $17M actually made it replace git
Git is pretty close to ideal for the distributed model.
I think the real money is in figuring out a centralized model that doesn't suck. Explicitly locking things has certain advantages. Two people working on the same file at the same time is often cursed in some way even if a merge is technically possible. Especially if it's a binary asset. Someone is going to lose all of their work if we have a merge conflict on a png file. It would be much better to know up front that the file is locked by some other artist on the team.
Apparently what comes after git is git
“raise 17m to try to kill off and extract value from popular open source tool”
Pound foolish and folly
I feel like we’re over-capitalizing a problem that could be solved with better protocols. If the "Git successor" is just a wrapper to help agents not hallucinate their own worktrees, it feels like a very expensive solution to a context-window management problem.
Looks like almost as good as JJ but with VC money.
The only thing I want is an as far as Claude Code can tell 100% Github clone running on my $5 Hetzner VPS.
Anything that leads off with how much money you've raised is automatically disqualifying.
Humm at a quick glance git was functional enough for the linux kernel after 2 people worked on it for 4 months. That doesn't really add up to 17M.
I was thinking- why on earth raise 17M for that, it sounds like something you make in a basement with a few friends, if that.
But then it's the github cofounder- well, github did add a lot of stuff onto git I didn't know I needed, so I'm curious.
Some others mentioned pijul, but I will put in my two cents about it. I have been looking to make use of it because it seems really nice for working with an agent. Essentially you get patches that are independently and can be applied anywhere instead of commits. If there is ambiguity applying a patch then you have to resolve it, but that resolution is sort of a first class object.
The title is misleading and click bait perhaps.
But you also get an idea of the average reading skill of people based on the top 3 comments: "I don't want a replacement for Git!"
I'm not blaming anyone, or maybe both the readers and the authors.
People now write something that could've been published as a short story 30 years ago, for something that could be a paragraph in length, detailing their emotional state, minute background information, their hopes and dreams.
The adaptive response to this by humans and society is to read the headline and ignore the prose, as the prose is so god damn long.
"Gitbutler is a UI for Git" would've been more suitable than hype about replacing git.
They need to have a dedicated page explaining me why should I change my current workflow. Else I don't get the point.
The title mentions 'after git' but the video demo shows that it's very much tied to git and Github. The post also mentions the overhead of dealing with git, but the examples shown come with their own overhead and commands. I'm admittedly unable to see the appeal or just misunderstanding it, but the number of stars on the repo shows I'm in the minority.
I watched the video but I don't quite get it. I feel like I'm missing something? A nicer git workflow is not what I need because I can ask an LLM to fix my git state and branches. This feels a bit backwards. LLMs are already great at working with raw git as their primitive.
I'm curious what their long term vision they pitched investors is.
Why this and not jujutsu, pijul or sapling? These are all version control systems that are better than git in various ways.
I can't see any significant difference between their "Operations Log":
https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/operation...
and git's reflog:
I looked at the demonstration video and closed it after a couple of minutes. I don't see how this tool will replace git.
Well, I think it won't
This will just force them to build in some sort of revenue extraction model. Pass! Git and copyleft are fine as is.
I don't know about a new Git, but GitHub feels like the cruftiest part of agentic coding.
The Github PR flow is second nature to me, almost soothing.
But it's also entirely unnecessary and sometimes even limiting to the agent.
I love how whole article described none of the ideas they have for product, just buzzwords
Most of the comments here are clearly from people who haven't used GitButler. Try it out and it's a very sticky product, clearly superior workflow to vanilla Git.
Real problem is how to cope with few billion of bots hammering APIs 24/7 saturating net cables, physical infrastructure and taking down platform with constant DDOS.
Im curious when it will be “SO BAD” we start blocking every AI agent on firewall level.
Is anyone from GitButler reading this?
As others alluded, JJ already exists and is a credible successor to Git for the client side.
Technical desides aside though: how is this supposed to make money for the investors?
I'd like to see some kind of "whitespace aware" smart diff in whatever comes after git
Dunno what they’re trying to build, but I encourage everyone to try what they already have built. It helps me work on multiple changesets in parallel. This often just happens, for example you work on something and discover a bug in something else that needs to be fixed. In GitButler, I can just create another branch, drag the changes in there, push and done.
Also, if you ever worked with Perforce, you might be familiar with changelists. It’s kind of like that.
Now, GitButler is by no means perfect. There are many rough edges. It tends to get stuck in unexpected states and sometimes it isn’t easy to rectify this.
It also cannot split changes in a single file, which is a bummer, because that’s something I encounter routinely. But I understand this complicates the existing model tremendously.
Is $17M private equity enough to poison the initiative? Or is software-by-committee still the real project killer? Let’s find out…
How many millions were raised to build Git?
GitHub CEO also raised 60M for 'entire' to bring agent context to git. The dust is yet to settle here as it's difficult to bring a paridgm shift from today's git workflows
Linus Torvalds was able to build this in a cave!
With a box of scraps!
I was skeptical at first, but then I watched the video and it really looks interesting. I wonder if this works with Azure DevOps?
First time I heard of gitbutler, is this like gitk? If anyone remembers gitk
"Gitbutler", really rolls off the tongue, doesn´t it :) Oh and the irony of raising $17M to "replace" a tool which kinda...does not need replacing at all? How about replacing some of the entshittified services, like Google Workspace? Now that would be worth the $17M raised.
The initial version of Git was written in two weeks, what do you need $17m for?
Great! Instead of solving actual problems we are seeing funding for stuff we don't need.
How much money did they need to raise to make git?
How do you intend to make money ?
Easier Git doesn't translate into something I can get my boss to pay for.
Improving something that basically everyone uses is obviously worth money
please also build it for easy multimedia management
I watched the demo video on the git butler home page and agree with the premises that:
1. git is not going away 2. git UX is not great
So i appreciate their effort to manage development better as agents make it possible to churn out multiple features and refactors at once.
BUT, I reject this premise:
3. Humans will review the code
As agents make it possible to do so much more code (even tens of files sucks to review, even if it’s broken into tiny PRs), I don’t want to be the gatekeeper at the code review level.
I’d rather some sort of policy or governance tooling that bullies code to follow patterns I’ve approved, and force QA to a higher abstraction or downstream moment (tests?)