Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents (oak.space)

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.

[0]: https://i.sstatic.net/4vbd9.png

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.

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.

* 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."

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.

> 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"?

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

Now, every brain fart is published as a finished product no one wanted.

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