Would there have been value, pre-LLMs, in attaching a screen recording of what a developer did in the three hours before posting their diff (be it Google, stack overflow, reading a book, or trying a sandbox experiment) to their PR? The PR is a synthesis of their efforts, and it would actually be more effort to review and understand their screen recordings, wouldn't it? In my experience striving for fewer artifacts is the right move, so long as they are sufficient to describe the outcome. What exactly is lost between sessions and code that would help you debug something?
Also, if your business has agents writing most of the code, why would your business care about human reviews at all? In for a penny, in for a pound, after all. Wouldn't you be better off looping your agents into your support tickets and autofixing bugs?
Not GP, but pre-LLM, who's gonna go watch that footage? Unless you're Jia Tan and there's a forensic reason to scrutinize every last little thing, who's gonna watch that video?
If there was value to be had there, you would. It's an indictment of the cited value, if you wouldn't. So are you asking me to argue my own point again? I don't think your position is adversarial to mine?
Thanks for the reply. It would be great if you could introduce yourself somewhere in this comment section or in your HN profile, I cannot tell whether you intend to speak on Karthik's behalf.
"We founded Entire on a single belief, human developers no longer write most of the code."
This isn't a belief. What do you actually believe about the future of software?
Let me put it this way. The premise of agents is that some combination of programming languages and programming tools suck so incredibly much that humans don't want to use them.
You're effectively betting that this problem can never be fixed. AI is a layer of kludges on top of the problem of bad programming tools. Haven't you ultimately made a rather cynical bet that the underlying problems that make programming suck cannot and should not be fixed?
Agents are such an amazing building tool, similar to how compilers and high-level languages were. It superchargers builders and that's why so much code is now being written (not always by humans.) The bottleneck was never typing, but to me, it's deciding what to build, verifying it's right, and keeping it all coherent, which is what we're rebuilding the forge around.
Spoken like a true AI zombie. 10/10 at reciting the official propaganda. But do you have any actual hard-won knowledge? Are you unique? Individual? Again I put this question: have you ANY idea what you BELIEVE???
This feels insincere coming from a venture-backed software startup. Do you have a unique ownership structure, or a particular emphasis on open-source or self-hosting?
> because the diff is cheap and the “why” vanishes when the session ends.
But why should I use a tool like Entire, if the "why" is usually tracked somewhere else, in a ticket under the form of user or business requirements?
Once the specs are clear, and the intent is fixed or validated, the resulting code is just an implementation detail, and it can follow a continous merge approach as long as it doesn't drift away.
> Let your agents loop until evals are green
Exactly what I'm saying: if you think about it, it's just the job of a CI.
If for the "why" you mean why an engineer choose that approach, I'm not interested into digging in their own prompt with the agent: to rebuild a mental model, I can just ask another agent.
Another one: I'm also very skeptical on the "Join the rebellion" punchline. Rebellion against who, exactly?
Nothing in the AI narrative has the flavour of something built from the bottom, against an established power; I would say it's the opposite.
I'll suggest something more streamlined, and banal: "Try it now!", or "Join the alternative"
The graph generator looks interesting, but the rest of the blog post is filled with so much marketing it's a slog to get through to the good bits. I struggle to imagine a scenario where I willingly choose the "Trails" view even if, and god help us if it is, that's the direction PR review is going.
Hey, Haimantika here from the Entire team. Thank you for the feedback on blog, we will work on it for our future announcements.
For Trails: There’s agent sessions, gates, agents(evals basically) and checks - so it gives you all the information you need to review better (compared to the diffs for example).
Throwing out some thoughts after reading the docs page(s):
1. The "What are trails" section does not actually tell me what trails are; it tells me it brings agents and devs together, and that branches are involved somehow through "changes", but it doesn't actually tell me what they are
2. I am never going to willingly watch a Youtube video embeded in docs. I'm barely going to watch a video in a docs page at all. I'm here to learn how to use something, not see a sponsored ad for NordVPN.
3. The marketing blurb, the top half of the docs, and the bottom half ("Enable Trails" onwards) all feel like their describing different things. The marketing blurb describes a total reinvention/view of the PR layout where instead of seeing diffs you see different bars that you can balance by telling the bots to keep reviewing/changing. The top half of the docs sounds like some sort of spec description system and absolutely reeks of LLM speak.
4. The rest of the docs make more sense: Under the web UI tab for "Create a Trail" I finally see what a Trail looks like (a simplified Jira ticket or GH issue) and I start actually understanding that this is an elaborate "built for AI" version of stacked PRs, CI checks, and project management.
5. The Agents and Gates subdocs are where content starts getting interesting and the documentation quality is a lot better. I am actually getting interested in this product.
I still don't fully understand what and why I would want Trails, but I suspect I'm not the target audience. There's bits of it that certainly look interesting but having to swap all my infra over to Entire is a hard sell.
Their version of the PR is called a “Trail”, and they have a feature called “Runners” which can automatically review commits on a trail based on certain factors— you can customize which factors but their defaults were good enough for me. My main project was a large monorepo and Runners did a great job of catching “drift” where an agent would do something in a non-standard way, or fail to appropriately update documentation. In a nutshell, Runners make adversarial review really easy and nicely visualized in Entire’s UI (or CLI). Other than that though, I would give entire credit for basically creating a fast drop-in replacement for GitHub that just works for me. While I do like their AI features and tools for agents, I wouldn’t be using their product if they didn’t get the fundamentals right and so far it’s just worked.
Very cool. I think a focus on AI code review and continuous knowledge graph synthesis are both right directions, and any system that provides the infrastructure to automatically handle these tasks eventually must do the job of a Git Forge, even if it runs locally.
I am tackling the problem from a different direction, but I think there's a lot here to be inspired by.
39 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] threadAlso, if your business has agents writing most of the code, why would your business care about human reviews at all? In for a penny, in for a pound, after all. Wouldn't you be better off looping your agents into your support tickets and autofixing bugs?
is the carrot JUST the time savings for large dev orgs?
You can read more about session storage on our docs here: https://docs.entire.com/guides/checkpoints/checkpoint-storag...
This isn't a belief. What do you actually believe about the future of software?
Let me put it this way. The premise of agents is that some combination of programming languages and programming tools suck so incredibly much that humans don't want to use them.
You're effectively betting that this problem can never be fixed. AI is a layer of kludges on top of the problem of bad programming tools. Haven't you ultimately made a rather cynical bet that the underlying problems that make programming suck cannot and should not be fixed?
But it's not like I've EVER heard an AI user talk about why.
You would have to care about human user experience to care that it is fundamentally broken.
This feels insincere coming from a venture-backed software startup. Do you have a unique ownership structure, or a particular emphasis on open-source or self-hosting?
But why should I use a tool like Entire, if the "why" is usually tracked somewhere else, in a ticket under the form of user or business requirements?
Once the specs are clear, and the intent is fixed or validated, the resulting code is just an implementation detail, and it can follow a continous merge approach as long as it doesn't drift away.
> Let your agents loop until evals are green
Exactly what I'm saying: if you think about it, it's just the job of a CI.
If for the "why" you mean why an engineer choose that approach, I'm not interested into digging in their own prompt with the agent: to rebuild a mental model, I can just ask another agent.
Another one: I'm also very skeptical on the "Join the rebellion" punchline. Rebellion against who, exactly? Nothing in the AI narrative has the flavour of something built from the bottom, against an established power; I would say it's the opposite.
I'll suggest something more streamlined, and banal: "Try it now!", or "Join the alternative"
For Trails: There’s agent sessions, gates, agents(evals basically) and checks - so it gives you all the information you need to review better (compared to the diffs for example).
Here’s our docs link too: https://docs.entire.com/guides/trails/overview
Here if you have additional questions!
1. The "What are trails" section does not actually tell me what trails are; it tells me it brings agents and devs together, and that branches are involved somehow through "changes", but it doesn't actually tell me what they are
2. I am never going to willingly watch a Youtube video embeded in docs. I'm barely going to watch a video in a docs page at all. I'm here to learn how to use something, not see a sponsored ad for NordVPN.
3. The marketing blurb, the top half of the docs, and the bottom half ("Enable Trails" onwards) all feel like their describing different things. The marketing blurb describes a total reinvention/view of the PR layout where instead of seeing diffs you see different bars that you can balance by telling the bots to keep reviewing/changing. The top half of the docs sounds like some sort of spec description system and absolutely reeks of LLM speak.
4. The rest of the docs make more sense: Under the web UI tab for "Create a Trail" I finally see what a Trail looks like (a simplified Jira ticket or GH issue) and I start actually understanding that this is an elaborate "built for AI" version of stacked PRs, CI checks, and project management.
5. The Agents and Gates subdocs are where content starts getting interesting and the documentation quality is a lot better. I am actually getting interested in this product.
I still don't fully understand what and why I would want Trails, but I suspect I'm not the target audience. There's bits of it that certainly look interesting but having to swap all my infra over to Entire is a hard sell.
I would happily try this out if it were going to be free for the next 1-2 years, or if I knew that the upcoming bill would be reasonable
I am tackling the problem from a different direction, but I think there's a lot here to be inspired by.
Entire (this post)
DeltaDB (by Zed) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187256
Git 3.0 / SHA-256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49924179
Anthropic Scion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073633
East River Source Control / jj https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49525297
Cursor Origin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334209
Radicle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147603
Probably more. I wonder what besides LLMs are driving this.