Show HN: Git for AI Agents
github.com50 points by doshay 4 hours ago
50 points by doshay 4 hours ago
hi guys. been working on something i think is fundamentally missing in today's workflow with ai agents.
vcs.
i find myself struggling with questions that agents can't answer like "why did you do it?", "when did u delete this folder? why?", etc. or trying to /rewind (after a /compact...) or basically `bisect` to find when and why something was done by the agent in the current / previous session.
just like git did for code, i think we are the same core capabilities with ai agents
so...
i developed an open source solution for that (currently supporting claude code)
would love to get feedback, contribution or maybe other ideas or solutions you find for those problems.
People in this thread seem to be too focused on the agent creating a git log. This seems to be solving a different problem than that does. When you're interacting with agents, multiple prompts may reasonable culminate in a single commit. It may be useful to track or undo things between commits - at the prompt level. I personally have a workflow when I use Jujutsu (jj) for git already, and this slotted in very nicely to solve this problem. The auto-committing in jj makes it very easy and natural to compare diffs between prompts, and undo specific chunks or restore previous states without making a new commit every prompt. I only finish a commit, giving it a message and advancing the branch, once I've iteratively dialed in the changes I want. I probably won't use this tool since I already have a flow that works for me, but maybe this will help people see why such a tool can be helpful. Edit: fixed typo Just use git. If your agent (especially claude) doesnt seem to know how, there are skills and hooks and other options to make it work. My 2c. I have found that git.exe outperforms any other codebase representation with GPT5.x once you figure out how to not mangle the arguments. Commands like grep and log can replace a lot of other tools if you can use them reliably. Exactly like I didn’t do anything super important - but I just tell agent “commit after successful build. I think it would work with “commit before you want to delete stuff” the same way. Very cool approach! We build something super similar, also going for content addressed storage and compare&swap as fundamental primitives. Also commit dag based, but we also wrote this whole knowledge graph / triple-store CRDT data format on top.[1] We also have p2p syncing of the history so you can use it to track your local work but also to have your agents coordinate within your team. We had our agents build their own tools on top of that substrate, that way we're vendor independent, this stuff works everywhere from claude web, to self hosted openclaw, you only need to tell your agent to use the faculties. Because the substrate takes care of everything, every new faculty you write on top of that inherits all of the same properties. I think the idea of tracking intent in git commits is a great idea but it feels to me like this might be reducible to some prompts/extending git/pre-commit hooks? Small recommendation: Speed up the demo on the Github page. That would reduce the number of folks that drop off the page waiting for the command-line typing. 1. Tests look anemic: https://github.com/regent-vcs/re_gent/tree/main/test 2. How does it compare with http://usegitai.com/ and https://entire.io/ ? Another Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057104 3. Please add it to other registries, esp. those compatible with mise, e.g., https://github.com/aquaproj/aqua-registry Agents can use git FWIW, and you can tell them to search old sessions by saying "Search through sessions in ~/.codex/sessions" and it'll find the most appropriate tools for doing so that is installed already. You can even add this to your system prompt or AGENTS.md and now you don't even have to prompt for it, it'll just look up the session history by itself. Why this isn't built-in, I dunno, but been possible and easy for a very long time already, and works for any agent harness out there (as long as they persist sessions that is). Personally I make the agent justify and explain things in the git commits, where is where that info went before agents anyways too, then have some sentences in my AGENTS.md about reading recent commits before doing changes, and using it whenever I prompt for history that isn't part of the current session. Seems to work perfectly fine. I think codex has done something along the line: https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/6041 But it is trying to use git as a backend to save file states, and at the same time NOT showing it in the user's git history. I haven't tried it, but conceptually I can imagine that it is good to have a separate VCS for the agent. This way I can keep git clean and easy to understand for humans and still keep all the verbosity the agent needs. > This way I can keep git clean and easy to understand for humans Personally I like it best when both humans and agents find it clean and easy to understand, but we all like different things :) Branches and worktrees exist and can effectively act as a "separate" history. At the end of the day you would still merge the changes in, possibly with a squash if you don't care about the little commits. It's really not. Anything the LLM can benefit from people can too. Keeping minimal explicit information in git history is a cultural norm not proven best practice. The best codebases I've worked on have very large commit messages and searching them is very useful. We should have been doing it that way all along. This is brilliant. Does it only work with Claude right now? Will it work with any agent built on the Claude Agent SDK? just curious since it reminds me a bit. Have you / someone tried https://entire.io/ (I'm not affiliated at all, so it is not a plug). None of these X-for-agents seem to motivate why they don’t use X. Git is a particularly egregious one, imo. It has a simple cli and solves all of the problems presented here! Worktrees for "exploratory" work that you might throwaway, and otherwise atomic commits just make tracking changes and reasoning for changes easy. I think of git more like a defense and quality control against AI slop than something that should be automated Cool idea. Time will tell how it matures. It doesn't look trivial. Definitely should beat my current "scan the history" approach. Couple questions arose while reading the README: - Would it integrate with rtk? Rtk is a token saver that shortens native output of got (and other) commands.
- Does it track feature branches?
- Is there garbage collection when history is rewriting (rebase before PR or removal of credential files.. ) or "simplification" of data as it gets older (Claude session logs lost...)? Wishing you all the best with the project.
Zambyte - an hour ago
tfrancisl - 2 hours ago
bob1029 - 23 minutes ago
ozim - 2 hours ago
j-pb - 2 hours ago
sudb - 2 hours ago
deferredgrant - an hour ago
esafak - an hour ago
embedding-shape - 2 hours ago
cosimo-dw - 9 minutes ago
_ink_ - 2 hours ago
embedding-shape - 2 hours ago
tfrancisl - 2 hours ago
giraffe_lady - 2 hours ago
radial_symmetry - 2 hours ago
shcheklein - 2 hours ago
keybored - 2 hours ago
tfrancisl - 2 hours ago
boombapoom - an hour ago
_blk - 2 hours ago