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- Hacker News
- I'm the CEO of a company that's focused on version control for structured data ie. SQL tables and JSON documents. We share the "version control for everything" vision and think an agentic world needs it.by timsehn
- Methinks AI hasn’t been as successful in non-verifiable domains, because they are non-verifiable, not because there’s no version control…
- This is why I’m convinced we’ll see a lot more “plaintext-first” apps going forward.
As agents take over more of our workload, it becomes increasingly important to store the data in a dumb and simple format that’s easy to diff and verify.
I talked about some of this at LocalFirstConf: https://youtu.be/2ZEBH5Clrnc
by t4t5 - I've been working for a long time to be ready for this need! Blab is an (un-announced) version control system designed to support "everything".
It's built on top of a content-hashable XML-ish data modeling language called CSTML: https://docs.bablr.org/guides/cstml
Binary document support isn't done yet, but it is planned.
by conartist6 - I still don't understand why NILFS2 isn't more popular for these reasons. I've recently been experimenting with "workspace" VMs that use it. Instead of Git, I had Codex put together a simple system to "tag" useful snapshots, right now pre-post bits of work. I like it because sometimes something you'd normally gitignore gets changed when you didn't want it to. Plus you can cover system state outside of the project.by eturkes1
- LLMs are irremediably broken (agents also) for delivering software.
The most you can do is to accelerste subworkflows and review as hell.
Noone wants middle term maintenance nightmares or unreliable code. Can look good the first month, that's it.
I think they have been overselling it so much but you need to know exactly what you are doing and I think for generating code they are pretty bad. And they will improve as they sniff some more data but that's it. Something new, something LLMs do pretty bad.
by germandiago - > Why not put issues alongside the codebase?
That's the idea of Epiq: https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/
> In my view, the main obstacle here is that without serious dedication, the user experience for humans would be a major downgrade. This isn’t insurmountable, but it would be a lot of work.
I think Epiq does a decent job of addressing this.
Take a look at the second animation on the page above. It even lets you "scrub" your way through the timeline to very quickly glance at what an agent (or junior developer) did to your code recently.
by samuell - > We use issue trackers and pull requests to manage work, people write documentation and communicate over email, instant messaging, and in meetings. Keeping all of the information in these channels synchronized and up to date is a full time job.
The crux of what OP wants seems to be transparent interfaces to the data store backing each of these services. Version control would be about tracking changes when this data mutates, which seems somewhat orthogonal to this stated need.
I wonder whether a nice solution to this would be to have a distributed architecture where each node can publish / subscribe to updates and maintain a local copy it operates on, with conflict resolution for eventual consistency.
PS: Checkout Perkeep for a take on aggregating all your data in one place.
by ssivark - Ah, we've got back to the "we should event source everything, and allow ourselves to change history and re-snapshot current state", idea gaining followers again.
Well, yeah. But it's hard. Also, git is not the solution to this, it's just the screwdriver you have in your hand right now.
by PaulRobinson - As the saying goes, “when you have a screwdriver, everything looks like nail”
<proceeds to hammer down the screws with the back of the screwdriver>
- Funnily enough, git doesn't actually allow you to 'change' any history.
It allows you to make new history, and the old history might get garbage collected eventually.
by eru - > Design docs from Google Docs to checked-in markdown?
This worked pretty well for the team I'm in. Design docs in Google Docs were really hard to keep in sync with decisions and not properly agent accessible. Initially, we were concerned lack of comments would be an issue, but this didn't really came true - a Slack channel does a good enough job. With this flow, the design author makes a decision and review results, agent propagates it to individual areas, and from those to tasks (those are in MD too), and then copies descriptions to Jira. No more "we changed a thing but missed one place that depends on it", or at least not as bad as before.
by Klaster_1 - Would you mind elaborating on
please?from those to tasks (those are in MD too)We're doing the design docs in MD thing, but are you saying you've gone a step further and have the backlog represented in git too?
- The approach of having everything next to the code seems good in theory but it's just a nightmare in practice for big projects.
Imagine your git history filled with commits from project managers where every little change in requirements and docs has its own commit. We've tried that and ended up having to rebase our branches multiple times a day while we lost the overview of code changes completely.
The main issue that code can live in multiple branches while development but you can't apply that to docs and requirements where you need to have one centralized source of truth for everyone.
I think we will start to see more adaptation from collaboration tools to provide/accept the info in text format making it suitable for agents as a working solution. Meanwhile, I've seen that having two repos (One for Code and one for docs) is the best solution for the current tools available
by ammar_az - Maybe what I'm saying is stupid or malinformed, but why not having the doc as a separate repo, and set it as a submodule to the repo where the code lives? Agent should be able to push code to the submodule independently from the code, and it should not be problematic for the main repository
- “ every little change in requirements and docs has its own commit”
I think this would be a great thing to have and know who changed what and when. It seems it’s more of a problem of the tools being able to help the user see only what he needs to see in a certain context.
by vjvjvjvjghv - The issue you describe seems to be related to the tools you're using and how you use them, not to the core idea itself.
I've worked in several gamedev companies where everything was in a Perforce repository. In fact in one company EVERYTHING was in it, not just code and game data, but also documents, concept art, plans, everything. If it wasn't in P4, it didn't exist.
Yet nobody thought it was a pain (after learning to use P4V at least :-P but that's a different topic) because P4 a) can handle big files just fine and b) you don't really care about the history of the entire repository, but only about the part you're working on. For example personally i had my history tab display just the engine's code directory (and even then i rarely checked it since i don't really care what Joe working on the animation code did, my main interest was on the stuff i worked - and P4V showed me both if someone else is working on the same files i am and if my files have been modified, with easy GUI tools to see both diffs and the file's development history visually - the timeline feature is honestly great for that).
Perforce has some fundamental issues in how it works that creates problems, probably because of some deeply ingrained assumptions stemming from the 90s when it was first made that were never addressed, but it also has a lot of features (especially on the P4V GUI client) that makes working on a huge monolithic repository where everything goes in pretty much seamless.
- I really really want to do version control for everything, but most of my data is binary so it really doesn't agree with git; I tried using LFS as well but it didn't work for my specific workflow. Hopefully something less text oriented comes along in the future.
Lore looked interesting for this purpose. https://github.com/EpicGames/lore
by cfjgvjh - Why not just fork git and make it better at binary files?
- It's interesting you brought up Lore. I also wonder whether importing VCS tech from the games industry for versioning general agentic work would be a good idea.by 2001zhaozhao
- I guess it kinda depends on your use case. If you're versioning software artifact binaries and want to have support for rules for retention (keep n number of builds around), version numbering (you can only write a release artifact with a version number once), etc., using Git for text and Artifactory for artifact binaries has worked pretty well for me.by TYPE_FASTER
- But versionning everything is not really great idea. Probably 90% of your files are static. Archives, Media, LIBs. Not worth versioning. But for that 10%, having any (D)VFS is handy. Thats why I wrote DOT for myself, to handle that niche need to version every document I work with.
Its private for now, but here is printout of help: http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?dot
by Borg3 - Hash the files and commit the hashes. Store the large files somewhere convenient, keyed by the hash. Voila, you’ve invented an LFS.