Money is not given to good ideas (though, it doesn’t hurt). Money is given to friends. If you look at how VC (or really any network) funding circulates, it’s just people who are allowed to enter that circle and money just flows between them constantly. On one hand, you have trusted people who you are willing to give money, on the other hand, this inherently creates a clique.

It reminds me how the Bohemian Club’s slogan, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is a bit farcical given that it is impossible for the club members not to engage in commerce.

> ... and sort LEGO bricks by colour

You never sort by color, ever! You sort by form, and then throw every color of that specific form in one bin. If you throw every red brick in the same bin, you'll never find a specific formed red brick because to many red bricks. But if you first search by form and then by color, you are much faster.

> Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

Because solving problems isn’t the goal, the goal is money (and sometimes a little fame) with the least possible effort, and software can be changed on a whim and is very cheap to manufacture and distribute and “fix in flight”, it’s the perfect vehicle for those who are impatient and don’t really care about understanding and studying a need.

> For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.

Just write down how you'll spend the money to make that, what it'll eventually cost to produce, what the market size will be, and what the price will be, and if it's enough return you can easily convince someone to give you $17m to do it all.

> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.

The world doesn’t need this. It would just be more plastic and electronic trash.

You and your kids have hands. Pick them up. It’s what we do in my house.

If you don’t have hands, use your feet.

> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably ...

People complaining about investors throwing stupid sums of money at stupid or trivial things unrelated (or only marginally related) to AI? ...sounds to me like the first glimpse of hope I have come across in this industry for half a decade.

For what it's worth, that LEGO vacuum does exist[0], it was on Shark Tank[1]. I assume they stole the idea from The Office. It doesn't sort the bricks, but I assume that was more of a stretch goal based on the insane amount of money being discussed. After all, the LEGO vacuum only cost $495k to get to market.

[0] https://pickupbricks.com

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25MIpQqLIU

> But instead, we get a replacement for Git. And I didn’t even bother to click the link because I’m fine with how Git works.

Perhaps you should have. Based on the link it seems like it's more an extension to than replacement for Git.

The page is mostly sort of fluffy AI hype, but the concrete bits are things like integrating issue tracking and PR logic in one tool/repo, like e.g. fossil does.

Also git proper could use some love too. The UI is still a mess. And the large file support and the submodule/subtree/subrepo situations are quite dismal.

> $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size.

Doing this robustly is probably quite far from robotics SOTA.

> one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.

And what's the next step? I can't even imagine how rich (and how large the their houses) the parents need to be for them to comfortably buy such dedicated tool. Perhaps 100x~1000x richer than me?

And, while this is just pulled out from my rear side, I feel even getting this passed safety regulation would cost your $17M. It's a fully automated machine working next to toddlers!

On the contrary Github is a proven product.

Not to shoot down your comment with sarcasm, I'm being really honest: I changed my shower gel with an expensive one this week, and it really had an unexpected, exciting effect. Small stuff can really have consequences much bigger than themselves.

That said, if you ever decide solve the tidying the toys problem, start a kickstarter, I pledge to pledge support! :D

I like git, it works perfectly fine on my command line.

I do wonder, though, if it would have been designed differently if the whole “code forge” sort of application (or whatever GitHub and the like are called) was envisioned at the time. Pull requests aren’t even a concept in git proper, right?

It seems like a kind of important type of tool. Even though git is awesome, we don’t need a monoculture.

Thing i learned about raising capital it, you need to build or have a network. Thats YC is great, accelerators, incubators help you do that. Network and story you tell. Also, every stage you raise, you have to make sure the folks you raise from help you craft the narrative for thr next round.

I think if you have a healthy busy growing well, you shouldnt raise unless you have ambition and urge to go faster.

Irony of thr market is, just like tinder 20% of the companies attract all the attention rest of them try to gran the attention. Those who need capital get the capital, those who need the capital die trying.

Enough friday pessimisim.

To be fair, discovering a new shower gel that smells better or feels better is a nice experience.

Unsure if you want the real answer, but the financials on gitv2 will be much more appealing to a VC. Hardware is hard, slow, expensive, risky. Finally, China is the place to build physical things not the US.

granted how much did Linus spend on Git? probably well south of $17M and he's not beholden to the likes of a16z

You didn't click the link. Who are you to say that they aren't solving actual problems? You might not be their target. The whole article is dedicated to explaining why they're building their product.

> But instead, we get a replacement for Git. [...] Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

While I personally doubt that for $17M one could build such a vacuum robot prototype (for a vacuum cleaner company, investing this amount of money - if it worked - would be a rounding error), I will rather analyze the point that you raised:

It is a very common situation that the workflows of companies is deeply ingrained into some tool

- that they can't get rid of (be it Microsoft Excel (in insurance and finance), be it Git (in software development), ...)

- that is actually a bad fit for the workflow step (Git and Excel often are)

So, this is typical for the kind of problem that companies in sectors in which billions of $/€ are moved do have.

I am actually paid to develop some specialized software for some specialized industrial sector that solves a very specific problem.

So, in my experience the reason why nobody [is] solving actual problems (in the sense of your definition) anymore is simple:

- nobody is willing to pay big money for a solution,

- those entities who are willing to pay big money often fall for sycophantic scammers/consultants.

VCs have no clue. They have money and therefore they are in a dominant position. Everybody around them (professionally) is trying to flatter them and convince them that they should invest in their project.

I had a few interactions with VCs (both professional and personal), where I didn't care because I wasn't benefitting from them. One of them was "an expert in CRISPR and blockchain" (WTF?) and... well I didn't need much time to see that he did not understand what a "hash" was. He was mostly an expert at repeating stories he had been told about how he would make a ton of money with the latest bullshit he didn't understand.

The truth is, it's like trading. You diversify the investments and hope that the economy goes up (respectively that one of the startups you invested in gets profitable). The only thing a VC has to do is verify that they don't invest in a fraud, but even that is hard given that they never understand the technology enough to say it's worth it (they often invest in shiny bullshit).

But we are not even get a replacement for git, we are getting a CLI on top of git. Since agents can use GH CLI and mcp very well, I'm very interested to see what is it that Git butler can do so much better (I also might be a bit sceptic, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt).

One reason I don't read HN as much as I used to is because I can't help translating numbers like that into the amount of research that could be accomplished with the same amount, and then I get angry.

The author is a founder of GitHub, he could raise $17m for “git but it’s called pit and a repository is a hole and committing code is called burying it” if he wanted to, investors care about pedigree.

> Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

Because that’s too risky for investors.

>Scott Chacon is a co-founder of GitHub

Thought so until saw this. Man, he is the co-founder of Github and already seed-funded. How can someone refuse him? 17M is a small amount considering the valuation VS Code Agent wrappers are getting

> I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money

Well, cofounding Github helps

It's primarily focused on "take from someone else" rather than create something new and useful.

Consider that many of the tech posts here are of the form, "i did X but with Z" as the poster hopes they will be recognized as some master of execution.

When the sock bot dries the socks, matches and folds them together we're at peak robot. Come to think of it, its got to not lose either of them also. Current tech falls short of this.

Git is still pretty lacking in the area of big files. This is quite annoying if you're dealing with big deep learning data. So your LEGO vacuum robot could actually benefit from a better Git.

You see, the actual problem is raising the money.

I feel exactly this way

Why are we trying to replace git? What is the problem with git?

I feel like git started to feel outdated overnight as the company I work for went agentic development first.

I fought for years trying to convince my colleagues to write good commit messages. Now Claude is writing great commit messages but since I'm no longer looking at code - I never see them. I don't think Claude uses them either.

Branches are now irrelevant since all agents work in worktrees by default. But worktrees are awkward since you run out of disk space fast (since we're in a monorepo).

There is a constant discussion ongoing whether we commit our plans or not. Some argue that the whole conversation leading up to the PR should be included (stupid imo).

The game changed completely. It isn't weird that people are wondering if the tools should as well.

Definitely feels like there's opportunity to build something better

I've long had the same idea.. this one has legs.

4 McDonalds. That’s a better way of measuring it.

You missed the boat, baskets that open out into a giant play mat have flooded amazon and temu. Something like this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toy-Storage-Organizer-Lego-Play/dp/...

>Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

They went over this, in the documentary titled "Idiocracy".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFRzIOna2oQ

Yes!

I mean who tf gives some small team millions to put some Nvidia GPU into space and thinking we will have market disrupting GPU clusters in space in 10 years?!

There are so many low hanging fruits in IT Industry to just being solved.

Even just having something like well build, open smart home products whould have been disruptive years ago (until someone like ikea decides to enter that space).

> sort LEGO bricks by colour and size

I just looked into this out of idle curiosity, after watching some guy build a LEGO sorting machine. (They work in a warehouse that sells used bricks for model builders.)

Interestingly, this is on the cusp of viability, but training the ML model would still be cost-prohibitive (for me). With $17M, it's within reach, but there's still the obvious mechanical hurdles: Kids don't disassemble their Lego, the conditions are "less than ideal", and even vibrating belts in a warehouse scenario have a lot of trouble keeping bricks separated for the camera to get a clear image.

Robot hands are nowhere near the point where they can reliably (or even unreliably!) take apart two arbitrary Lego bricks that are joined, let alone anything of even mild complexity. This is hard for most humans, and often requires the use of tools! See: https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/help-topics/article/lego-...

The machine vision part is... getting there! You could pull some clever tricks with modern hardware such as bright LED lights, multi-spectral or even hyper-spectral sensors, etc. The algorithms have improved a lot also. Early attempts could only recognise a few dozen distinct shapes, and the most recent models a few hundred, but they're about 2-3 years old, which means "stone ages".

A trick several Lego recognition model training runs used was to photo realistically render 3D models of bricks in random orientations and every possible color, which is far faster than manually labelling photos of real bricks.

These days you could use the NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to heavily accelerate and automate this.

17M seems like a rounding error these days with all the AI investments. Probably some spare cash in a fund that needed to be closed or something.

Solving actual problems are hard, and even harder to get money for (see research). Most VC’s are in it for the returns only, not actually making a change, there are some exceptions but they are far and few apart.

I’m also contemplating a lego sorting machine.

Solutions to more actual problems are more expensive. It’s easier to ask millions of people for $0.01 than it is to ask thousands for $100. Things that are easy to sell to millions of people for $100 are rarely innovative (transportation, food, entertainment, etc), and if they are, they’re world-changing (cars, supermarkets, smartphones, etc).

Definitely sounded like a shower gel moment.

@fxtentacle I’m at the airport and spat out my coffee reading your comment .. this is legendary and super funny ! Happy Friday to you kind sir

You mean the one they try to build in The Office?

On the other side, people who were using, say, Perforce, also thought there can't be anything better. Still, BitKeeper appeared as an innovation in the area, eaten later by Git, created by angry Linus (because of BitKeeper licencing changes).

So, even though Git seems to be ok (people who store large binary files or who run huge monorepos would probably disagree), maybe we can do better.

Altavista was kind of okeish for search, yet Google managed to figure out something that was (at that time) way better.

i am actually fine with how svn works.

17M isn't a lot of money. It is for a person sure. Retire. Cessna. etc. But not to build a butler!

I for one can't wait for open Ai to buy them and reroute every git commit to chatgpt.

Your kids need to learn how to clean up after themselves.

All you need is a camera pointing at the floor with image detection... when there's legos on the floor it triggers a video playing that explains how the kids need to pick up the legos. /s

Yes, you may be fine with git, but can you say the same thing about AI agents? /s

> Why is nobody solving actual problems anymore?

Let me just state the obvious. Of all the major problems of society, sorting legos isn't one. If you disagree, try emerging from the cellar.

Tbf, git is very much a problem that needs solving. It only works well for text data, the fact that it is decentralized adds a lot of complexity but doesn't matter for 99% of users since they use a centralized git forge like Github or Gitlab, and the UX is pretty much non-existent.

I think it’s always good to dig a bit deeper on these things.

This seems ridiculous to you, compared to a very obvious win with a Lego sorting vacuum.

Lego isn’t niche, and the explanation isn’t a weird technical thing that only experts would get and understand how important or valuable it is.

Yet it’s not being done.

Is there nobody who has realised this gap but you? Has nobody managed to convince people with money that it’s worthwhile? Have you tried but failed?

Or is it not many many thousands of people who are wrong but you?

Is the problem harder than you think? I’ve worked with robotics but not for a long time and I think the core manipulation is either not really solved or not until recently. I don’t know about yours but my kids also don’t fully dismantle their Lego creations either so would the robot need to take them apart too? That’s a lot of force. And some are special.

How people want Lego sorted is pretty broad. Kids don’t even need it sorted that much. And the volume can be huge for smaller buckets of things.

Is the market not as big as you think? Is it big enough for the cost, I’d buy one for £100 but £1000? £10,000?

How does it compare for most people against having the kids play on a blanket and then tipping it into a bucket? Or those ones that are a circle of cloth with a drawstring so it’s a play area and storage all in one? I 3d printed some sieves and that’s most of the issue right there done.

People are solving actual problems, but lots of problems are hard, and not all of them are profitable.

As a gut feeling, there is such a large overlap of engineers and large Lego collections and willingness to spend lots of money and time saving some time sorting Lego that the small number of implementations usually split over many years is very telling about the difficulty.

For what it’s worth I want this too.

Gitbutler is backed by git. Gitbutler is essentially just ui for git which also allows you to have multiple branches. It isn't meant to replace git.

Bingo

Git is fine. I would like something better than fine though, especially for dealing with rebase/merge conflicts where I would say Git is mediocre.

It’s not 17m for an idea to improve git.

It’s 17m for a tool which hopes to serve companies and charge money and make more than 17m in profit as a result.

If you look at the set of dev tooling, teams will frequently pay many hundreds per dev on things like CI, Git tools, code review, etc.

And to be fair, GitHub is really quite bad for a lot of workflows. I haven’t used gitbutler, but my team pays ~$30 a month per dev for tools which literally just provide a nicer interface for stacking PRs, because it saves us WAY more than that in time.

This isn’t even an egregious example of VC, it’s just an enterprise dev tooling bet.

It’s just gambling without the stigma of being called an addict.

After a decade of negative interest, there is still a lot of excess capital looking for high-risk-high-gain investments. Perceived future economic value is unfortunately not in the stuff we know and understand to be useful, essential.

Use value != sales value; hype sells.

Ps. not too sure how far $17M gets you toward mini nuclear power plants, but I catch your drift.

You'd have thought the same about all the big tech companies when they were startups. Yet now they're making piles of money and contributing to America's overall economic success.

But then again, for a fraction of the money US-Americans pay for health insurance, we actually have public health insurance here...

Yes, we have higher taxes, yes, we pay more in social security... but in the end we have far less "Working Poor" and I know very, very, very, very few people who have more than 1 job.

But I guess that's just socialist bullshit.

What I am trying to convey is: The US lives in its own bubble, just like the rest of us does.

The difference is that the US hears the US propaganda and the rest of us heard the US propaganda for decades as well, through Hollywood and media.

I also concluded based on the video:

4. GitButler is a terrible name for this

5. No one will use the "but" command over "git"

6. The founder needs to learn to enunciate the name of his new product better

And also, your central premise is exactly right. The solution to agents and humans working faster will not be better manual oversight of what they're doing. It's like missing the most important principle of agentic development. Supervise, don't gatekeep.

I watched video to see where my prompts etc are stored in a way that makes sense. But no, this is just a nicer git. We need a solution to all these 10k loc PRs.

Makes sense to me. The new coding agents are drastically changing software development, and I think there's a lot of space for innovation in how version control tooling works in this new world.

They actually started before the LLM craze. The original pitch was just better Git.

Yes, it’s fantastic. I have a post-tool-use hook for Claude Code to snapshot the repository for every edit. It’s like the built in file history feature but native in my VCS and works for my edits too. Don’t want to froth too much but JJ is my favourite piece of software in a while, and the fact that it’s not VC-funded is a major plus point.

What's the difference between "snapshots" and git commits? In my mind a git commit is already a snapshot of the repo and the changes one staged. In what way can you move around more freely than what one can do with magit, deciding for files, hunks, or even single lines of code, whether or not they get staged and committed?

I gotta say, jj was not something that interested me before, but that's a compelling pitch.

The biggest problem with Jujutsu is the name. I would love to hear a Swedish person try to pronounce it.

is there a jj hosting service?

I was doing something with jj snapshots with AI now that you have mentioned.

I will admit, I didn't know jj but I wanted snapshots so I used it, so then when AI made some changes and kept on going and I wanted to go back to a particular change and I used ai to do that. It was actually really frustrating. To the point that I think I accidentally lost one of the good files within the project and I had to settle on good-enough which I had to try to get for hours to that particular point.

My point feels like I should either learn jj properly to use it or to at this point, just ask AI agents to git commit. Another point but I was using ghostty and I had accidentally clicked on the title bar and somehow moved the folder to desktop, I wasn't thinking the most accurately and I just decided to delete it thinking that it must have copied it rather than moved it. (Also dear ghostty why do you make it so easy to move folders, it isn't the best of features and can lead to some honest errors)

My face when I realized that I have deleted the project:

Anyhow decided to restore it with ~/Trash but afterwards realized that the .git/.jj history is removed because it deletes hidden folders (from my understanding) so I definitely lost that good snapshot. I do have the binary of the app which worked good but not the source code of it which is a bit frustrating

These were all just an idea of prototyping/checking how far I can move things with AI. Yeah so my experience for that project has been that I could've even learnt a new language (Odin) and the raylib project to fix that one specific bug in lower time than AI which simply is unable to fix the bug without blowing the whole project in foot.

I think the takeaway is to have good backups man. I mean I was being reckless in this project because I had nothing to lose and was just experimenting but there have been cases where people have lost databases in prod. So even backups should be essential if you find any source code which is good to be honest.

I am sure you guys must have lost some source code accidentally which you have worked upon, would love to hear some horror stories to hopefully know that I haven't been the only one who has done some mistake and to also learn something new from these stories. (I am atleast happy in the sense that I learnt the lesson from just an tinkering thing and not something truly prod)

"I can iterate freely without thinking".

Vibecoding moto.

So they decided to start "embrace, extend, and extinguish" directly with with "extinguish".

Apparently it takes $17M and a whole team full of people to do what one guy with a chip on his shoulder could do for free.

Thinking it for bit it comes to "what comes after Git" and what does "Git" mean there.

To build better tool than git, probably a few months by tiny team of good developers. Just thinking of problem and making what is needed... So either free time or few hundred thousand at max.

On other hand to replace GitHub. Endless millions will be spend... For some sort of probable gains? It might even make money in long run... But goal is probably to flip it.

Linus built git in 8 days or something.

Many investment decisions are taken by people who get cut of investment as fees.

Wealthy people don't have time to do all due diligence and vetting specially when random startups become unicorn.

If you think like that why invest in software at all; the AI will do everything?

Does AI make reading or writing stacked PRs any nicer? No, it does not.

git isn’t Saas.

git ≠ GitHub

Just a reminder that even if you managed to amend those commits and force-push, the commits would still exist and will be addressable given the hash is known.

Idk how git works under the hood but those both seem like they could both be easily accomplished with git itself .

but if not just your own work flow, have a dir dedicated to storing prompt history and then each file is titled with the commit id.

As for the flag just agree to some convention and toss it in the commit message

> I could imagine having different flags for whether a contribution was created by a human or not.

Only useful if it can be reliably verified, which is challenging at best.

The point of git is that it has strong authentication built into the fabric of the thing.

What do people expect to do with these saved prompts/contexts? Nobody is going to read through them, right? I suppose the thinking is LLMs will, but any decently active codebase will soon contain far too much context for any current LLM. Is this the same thinking behind cryonics, ie. we may be able to use this stuff one day so let's start saving it now? Hoarding has ruined many people and it will ruin us all if we're not careful...

I was going to be snarky, but Scott Chacon is a serious person, so we'll see!

I'd like to pretend that inability to render large diffs is a feature. Nobody is going to actually read the multi-thousand line diff; you need to make smaller PRs, or just admit that the diff in that particular view isn't helpful. I doubt that's the actual reasoning, but I can live with it.

> I am tired of using and waiting for alternatives of, Github.

Are you interested in giving https://tangled.org a try? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I created a cli called spotlight-testing to solve this pitfall with worktrees. I hope it helps! https://github.com/mblode/spotlight-testing

Linus didn’t build git. He built a proof of concept and then handed it over to real maintainers that wrote real code.

It was the early 2000s though, $17 got you like a weeks worth of snacks back then.

Yes, I think that “after git” claim is just marketing. This is indeed just a nice frontend to git. It looks interesting and seems to solve real problems, in the same way that jj already does. But it is not a radical change.

Also if they really wanted to “replace git” I think that would be much more difficult due to network effects. Everybody is already using git.

https://docs.gitbutler.com/why-gitbutler

There's `git diff -w`, and most forges expose a setting for that in their diff views.

Use difftastic. You can do so with current git :)

There is nothing inherently special about the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Why do they need $17m to build this? Vibe code it in a couple weeks, ship it.

This is is made for AI or ... something.

To me jj is an ok porcelain for git, but I find it worse than magit. Sure, it has some tricks under their sleves for merging, but I just don't run into weird merges and never needed more advanced commands like rerere.

What I'd would expect of the next vcs is to go beyond vcs of the files, but of the environment so works on my machine™ and configuring your git-hooks and CI becomes a thing of the past.

Do we need an LSP-like abstraction for environments and build systems instead of yet another definitive build system? IDK, my solution so far is sticking to nix, x86_64, and ignoring Windows and Mac, which is obviously not good enough for like 90%+ of devs.

Which version control system should we not tell?