Sometimes I think back to Google Wave, that beautiful glimmer of real-time collaborative canvases, announced in 2009 when Angular and Backbone hadn't even been invented, and think it launched almost two decades too early.
We're now in a world where we expect real-time interfaces to be developed and immediately deployed for our feedback by agents, in business-critical settings where classic SDLC timelines are far too slow, but code quality is becoming more difficult to manage at scale.
Git, at its core, is a fundamental notion that behavior is an auditable tree of immutable changes, where any participant can rearrange or rewind or remix this sequence on a local machine to show, and interact with, a provisional combination of those changes.
Google Wave, with its operational transformation (OT) and federation systems, was similar in many regards. We have CRDTs now, and far better techniques for auto-merging workstreams - including agentic systems that can resolve conflicts intelligently!
Wave fundamentally had a concept that people would come together and evolve a simple chat interface, into a customized real-time application for their use cases, and that that iteration could happen in real-time, with data and behavior both evolving in collaboration with bots. Wherever Git and the broader notion of SDLC goes, I hope it brings the best of this thinking.
The Wave release was the event that really kicked off my starting to rethink my own framing of what Google's engineering culture actually produces. I was so excited for its release, possibly moreso than any major innovation before then, & what was delivered was pure crap implementation wise. The idea was brilliant, & open, so theoretically someone could have done it well, but Google poisoned the well by releasing such a turd.
Throughout it's existence Google has been revered as a company for its engineering output, but if you interrogate that even a little bit, you end up with a very small minority of gems among a massive ocean of over engineered crap. Even the huge objective open successes like k8s are to this day sold with the massive caveat of "it's heavy & over engineered, but": nobody's calling k8s elegant. Pretty much all of their good products are acquisitions, many of which they've subsequently degraded.
One can certainly make this argument about almost any large corporation, but I do think there's very few with such a stark divide between how the quality of their engineering work is revered & the reality.
And only if you are a US or Canadian citizen/team and doubly so only if you use a permissive license like MIT, Apache-2.0 or BSD-2/3. Having even a moderate degree of control over your project is too much to ask for. But you do get a dinner, which might make it all worth it.
Of course cloudflare wants you to bring more data and money to cloudflare. Is any of this actually useful though? Do agents need git? Are agents even useful?
Git, as a protocol, is probably part of the problem for the scale that they are talking about here (1000s of agents). You probably want something between multiplayer editing and commits. That being said, I am terrified about the degree of slop that would be generated with 1000s of agents actually working on a codebase.
I'll be honest: I saw the prize was a trip to SF and — while I was vanishingly unlikely to enter anyway — that was enough to kill any idea of entering. It's been over 20 years since I was last in the USA, and I have no intention of visiting again any time soon.
Thank you for pointing this out! I always love a good competition and since I already have a workers paid plan it seemed fun. But I'm not eligible, so I guess I'll rebuild github without giving any IP to Cloudflare
> So in this new world where you have hundreds, or even thousands, of agents working on the same codebase at the same time, what does the foundation look like?
So, would it maybe make sense to question this whole bit, before we starting creating platforms for something like that?
Why do you need hundreds of thousands of agents working on the same codebase? In my experience, and what I see around me, quality code that actually works in production isn't produced by "software factory autonomously run by 1337 agents", but instead one human sitting and interacting with maybe 1-3 agents max, back and forth, pair programming rather than letting hundreds of them output million of tokens over hours.
Are others seeing the same thing, or am I in my own little bubble here? All the "software factory with agents" approaches I've spent time looking into, literally produces trash on top of trash, while I see senior developers 10x their productivity while producing better code than before and they have one terminal open with three panes, a text editor, a agent TUI and a general shell, that's it. Is what I'm seeing (and doing myself) not the typical situation out there in the wider world?
It would make sense for a monorepo at big tech company, where a single source control system contains many thousands of common libraries and the apps that use them. And now with AI, maybe a small company could build a large, sprawling monorepo?
But I don't think it's actually a good idea. Keeping everything on the same version is difficult. We have package managers that do a better job.
There is that, there are a handful of companies with mono repo they have solved the checkout build deploy test cycle.
The other approach is the separate the monorepo for build deploy and test loop.
lol, spec work anyone? For maybe-maybe-not $25k, you build something that could create millions in enterprise value.
Advice for everyone considering this: if you're passionate about ideas in this space and have access to an LLM — build it yourself and start your own company. In fact, message me easting.exe [at] gmail. I'll throw in $25k to get us started. I'm a prior founder with an exit. Because this offer from Cloudflare is ridiculous.
Ok the computer on your desk then? I guess it’s probably a laptop and not on all the time, but that shouldn’t prevent it from working for you when you need it. Probably want a good backup strategy though
Sometimes I think back to Google Wave, that beautiful glimmer of real-time collaborative canvases, announced in 2009 when Angular and Backbone hadn't even been invented, and think it launched almost two decades too early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berli...
We're now in a world where we expect real-time interfaces to be developed and immediately deployed for our feedback by agents, in business-critical settings where classic SDLC timelines are far too slow, but code quality is becoming more difficult to manage at scale.
Git, at its core, is a fundamental notion that behavior is an auditable tree of immutable changes, where any participant can rearrange or rewind or remix this sequence on a local machine to show, and interact with, a provisional combination of those changes.
Google Wave, with its operational transformation (OT) and federation systems, was similar in many regards. We have CRDTs now, and far better techniques for auto-merging workstreams - including agentic systems that can resolve conflicts intelligently!
Wave fundamentally had a concept that people would come together and evolve a simple chat interface, into a customized real-time application for their use cases, and that that iteration could happen in real-time, with data and behavior both evolving in collaboration with bots. Wherever Git and the broader notion of SDLC goes, I hope it brings the best of this thinking.
The Wave release was the event that really kicked off my starting to rethink my own framing of what Google's engineering culture actually produces. I was so excited for its release, possibly moreso than any major innovation before then, & what was delivered was pure crap implementation wise. The idea was brilliant, & open, so theoretically someone could have done it well, but Google poisoned the well by releasing such a turd.
Throughout it's existence Google has been revered as a company for its engineering output, but if you interrogate that even a little bit, you end up with a very small minority of gems among a massive ocean of over engineered crap. Even the huge objective open successes like k8s are to this day sold with the massive caveat of "it's heavy & over engineered, but": nobody's calling k8s elegant. Pretty much all of their good products are acquisitions, many of which they've subsequently degraded.
One can certainly make this argument about almost any large corporation, but I do think there's very few with such a stark divide between how the quality of their engineering work is revered & the reality.
Wave's failure and that of Google+ might have been the turning point for Google, never really to return to its former glory.
When I tried out Delta by zed in Private alpha my first feedback was "wow this reminds me of Google Wave"
We want to have less, not more, dependence on Cloudflare.
Single point of failure, for both technical and political failures.
Cloudflare wants all dependence on Cloudflare they can get.
I agree with both you and the person you’re responding to.
$25k to build the next GitHub for $125B company? How generous.
And not even cold hard cash but “Cloudflare credits.”
What an offensive slap in the face.
And only if you are a US or Canadian citizen/team and doubly so only if you use a permissive license like MIT, Apache-2.0 or BSD-2/3. Having even a moderate degree of control over your project is too much to ask for. But you do get a dinner, which might make it all worth it.
Tone deaf to the nth degree.
I”m so sick of all these weird credits and points. Can’t pay food or bills with it.
It's SCRIP!!!
They don't want to own the next GitHub. They want people to build the next GitHub on Artifacts (and pay Cloudflare for storage and compute).
I don't have a strong opinion here, but giving away compute as a prize for hackathons isn't anything new.
The whole thing seems a bit uncouth. I get a real gross feeling from it.
That was my reaction. I was expecting, "The winner receives $500,000 in cash, $1M in Cloudflare credits, and an introduction to our venture team."
On brand for Cloudflare which is typically a cheap company.
I agree that the compensation was a miss.
I really hope that was a purposeful understatement.
If it’s for agents why don’t you make this a challenge towards them? What sort of human element is desired here?
> What sort of human element is desired here?
The human wallet
The element of irony.
Who said it’s for humans?
I’m tempted to ask an agent to submit an entry for me.
Why do they need others to ask their agents to do it? Why can't they ask their own agents?
Tokens be too expensive. Outsource to subs of all the devs over the world. OpenAI inverstors gonna take the inference L on subsidized tokens.
You don't get infinite monkeys writing Hamlet with just a few monkeys
Free marketing
The next platform for Agentic SCM is just… Fossil. Fossil is an SQLite database that can store anything an agent would ever need.
I use beads + git; you just need to put the bead id at the beginning of the commit msg. The agents do the rest.
Centralization is antithetical to the whole idea of the internet
Right, because I want a stupid Cloudflare captcha before every git operation.
I can see that blogpost: "flashcha - ssh extension for Cloudflare CAPTCHA during git operations"
I wonder if they still use Bitbucket internally.
Of course cloudflare wants you to bring more data and money to cloudflare. Is any of this actually useful though? Do agents need git? Are agents even useful?
Us? Ask the agents.
No, thank you.
> We want you to build
Strangest tech announcement ever.
Git, as a protocol, is probably part of the problem for the scale that they are talking about here (1000s of agents). You probably want something between multiplayer editing and commits. That being said, I am terrified about the degree of slop that would be generated with 1000s of agents actually working on a codebase.
"The first-place team will also receive $25,000 in Cloudflare credits, along with invitations to the VIP speaker dinner on Monday night at Connect."
Whoever in Cloudflare thought that this is an appropriate compensation for the work is delusional. This is insulting.
Have to point this out because it annoys me every time:
Cloudflare is perhaps most famously and most significantly an international, global platform. That's kind of the whole point.
Only in the smallprint does it mention you must be a United States or Canada resident to enter.
I'll be honest: I saw the prize was a trip to SF and — while I was vanishingly unlikely to enter anyway — that was enough to kill any idea of entering. It's been over 20 years since I was last in the USA, and I have no intention of visiting again any time soon.
Thank you for pointing this out! I always love a good competition and since I already have a workers paid plan it seemed fun. But I'm not eligible, so I guess I'll rebuild github without giving any IP to Cloudflare
Me too, dont have enough tokens.
Lololol. This is probably the dumbest sounding competition I've ever heard. Git for bots? Uhhhh ok, whatever.
> So in this new world where you have hundreds, or even thousands, of agents working on the same codebase at the same time, what does the foundation look like?
So, would it maybe make sense to question this whole bit, before we starting creating platforms for something like that?
Why do you need hundreds of thousands of agents working on the same codebase? In my experience, and what I see around me, quality code that actually works in production isn't produced by "software factory autonomously run by 1337 agents", but instead one human sitting and interacting with maybe 1-3 agents max, back and forth, pair programming rather than letting hundreds of them output million of tokens over hours.
Are others seeing the same thing, or am I in my own little bubble here? All the "software factory with agents" approaches I've spent time looking into, literally produces trash on top of trash, while I see senior developers 10x their productivity while producing better code than before and they have one terminal open with three panes, a text editor, a agent TUI and a general shell, that's it. Is what I'm seeing (and doing myself) not the typical situation out there in the wider world?
It would make sense for a monorepo at big tech company, where a single source control system contains many thousands of common libraries and the apps that use them. And now with AI, maybe a small company could build a large, sprawling monorepo?
But I don't think it's actually a good idea. Keeping everything on the same version is difficult. We have package managers that do a better job.
There is that, there are a handful of companies with mono repo they have solved the checkout build deploy test cycle. The other approach is the separate the monorepo for build deploy and test loop.
Similar experiences here
That's my experience as well
lol, spec work anyone? For maybe-maybe-not $25k, you build something that could create millions in enterprise value.
Advice for everyone considering this: if you're passionate about ideas in this space and have access to an LLM — build it yourself and start your own company. In fact, message me easting.exe [at] gmail. I'll throw in $25k to get us started. I'm a prior founder with an exit. Because this offer from Cloudflare is ridiculous.
Badass offer and even badder gmail address
There remain fundamental patterns for the future of software development that are missing.
Orchestrating an agent free for all tends to invite more chaos management.
At the same time there’s folks who quietly have this working.
25k seems like a small bounty for such a large prize.
https://www.cloudflare.com/git-competition/?cf_page=next-git...
So they want to take someone’s idea for peanuts and then vibecode it later.. also, any word on training AI on the code there?
Fuck everything about this.
Not even for 25 millions
“We want you to use our product” said every SaaS company ever. “Our product is designed for AI” says every SaaS for the last two years.
None of this is very clever or very compelling.
No thanks. No more US based infrastructure for me.
> We want you to build the next Git platform on
the computer under your desk!
Roll your Own, don't depend on billionaire platforms to get your work done...
There is no computer under my desk
Ok the computer on your desk then? I guess it’s probably a laptop and not on all the time, but that shouldn’t prevent it from working for you when you need it. Probably want a good backup strategy though
Put a computer under your desk then use it to host your git repos.
Can we please have it decentralised and without any single entity having control over the lifecycle of a product ? Lessons learnt.
Git is already decentralised, just stop using platforms and self host