Q: What would prevent them from using git style version control under the hood? User doesn’t have to understand git, Claude can use it for its own purposes.

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twosdai 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Didn't actually check out the app, but some aspects of application state are hard to serialize, some operations are not reversible by the application. EG: sending an email. It doesn't seem naively trivial to accomplish this, for all apps.

So maybe on some apps, but "all" is a difficult thing.

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CuriouslyC 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For irreversible stuff I like feeding messages into queues. That keeps the semantics clear, and makes the bounds of the reversibility explicit.

	▲	TeMPOraL 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tool calls are the boundary (or at least one of them).

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huflungdung 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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nikkwong 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can’t easily snapshot the current state of an OS and restore to that state like with git.

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madeofpalk 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe not for very broad definitions of OS state, but for specific files/folders/filesystems, this is trivial with FS-level snapshots and copy-on-write.

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alwillis 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At least on macOS, an OS snapshot is a thing [1]; I suspect Cowork will mostly run in a sandbox, which Claude Code does now.

[1]: https://www.cleverfiles.com/help/apfs-snapshots.html

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nikkwong 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ok, you can "easily", but how quickly can you revert to a snapshot? I would guess creating a snapshot for each turn change with an LLM become too burdensome to allow you to iterate quickly.

	▲	alwillis 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For the vast majority, this won't be an issue. This is essentially a UI on top of Claude Code, which supports running in a sandbox on macOS.

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bigyabai 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All major OSes support snapshotting, and it's not a panacea on any of them.

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Imustaskforhelp 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well there is cri-u for what its worth on linux which can atleast snapshot the state of an application and I suppose something must be similar available for filesystems as well

Also one can simply run a virtual machine which can do that but then the issue becomes in how apps from outside connect to vm inside

	▲	nicoty 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Filesystems like zfs, btrfs and bcachefs have snapshot creation and rollbacks as features.

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viraptor 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure you can. Filesystem snapshotting is available on all OSes now.

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Analemma_ 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wonder if in the long run this will lead to the ascent of NixOS. They seem perfect for each other: if you have git and/or a snapshotting filesystem, together with the entire system state being downstram of your .nix file, then go ahead and let the LLM make changes willy-nilly, you can always roll back to a known good version.

NixOS still isn't ready for this world, but if it becomes the natural counterpart to LLM OS tooling, maybe that will speed up development.

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samuelstros 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Git only works for text files. Everything else is a binary blob which, among other things, leads to merge conflicts, storage explosion, and slow git operations