Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

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.

> but the speed is a consequence of the design, not the pitch.You kinda lost me there. I‘m supposed to use a central technology whose author can’t be arsed to write a few paragraphs?

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.

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 some 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!

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

Zach is underselling his achievements here, having previously built the Jamhub VCS which was acquired by a well known founder.

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

Did you have your agent talk you into making this something separate over building on top of git?

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.https://github.com/kjuulh/gitnow

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.