Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

https://blog.gitbutler.com/true-grit

by cbrewster • 1 month ago

178 299 1 month ago

blog.gitbutler.com

rvz2• 1 month ago

the result is Grit, a from-scratch, library-based, memory-safe, idiomatic Rust reimplentation of Git that passes over 99% of the entire Git test suite.

Why not 100%?

It's not actually passing every single test, though that is on purpose. I did mark some parts of the testing suite as "skipped" because I don't think it's worth recreating them in a library like this
41,715 / 42,001 tests passing (99.3%)

So it is not entire then but somehow that was worth burning $8,000~ dollars worth of tokens?

insanitybit2• 1 month ago

So .7% tests fail therefor it was 100% a waste of time?

Zopieux• 1 month ago

Regardless, what's the point?

rvz2• 1 month ago

Given the author already admitted that the implementation was slow anyway, you are no better off of using gitoxide instead and that has support for Windows where-as Grit does not.

fg1374• 1 month ago

I think we are talking about ROI in terms of solving real world problems and making real impact, not the fact that a tool has been ported from language X to language Y.

bryanlarsen3• 1 month ago

It depends whether the 0.7% failures are testing deliberately unimplemented features like email or is in corner cases in implemented features. It sounds like it's at least mostly the former, hopefully it's 100% the former.

I don't care if any git I use has email features. IIUC, even most of the people that use git with email don't directly use the email features, they use the patch set features like `git am`. I expect `git am` to work, I don't expect git to actually do email.

ianm2187• 1 month ago

There is often good reasons for these purposeful digressions. I.e. in nginx the unit tests cover cyphers that are considered unsafe and not supported by modern libraries like rustls https://github.com/rustls/rustls. It is reasonable to make a new implementation and leave behind a bit of baggage.

gpm10• 1 month ago

Why not 100%?

From the article

It's not actually passing every single test, though that is on purpose. I did mark some parts of the testing suite as "skipped" because I don't think it's worth recreating them in a library like this - email related stuff, i18n, perforce/svn importers, some of the midx/bitmap stuff - things of that nature. However, for everything that I'm sure is relevant to nearly anyone reading this, the Grit library/CLI can now fully pass the Git test suite.

MBCook9• 1 month ago

The author actually estimated $10-$15,000 worth of tokens.

tonymet3• 1 month ago

they still haven't explained why I should bother. Is it faster, easier, more efficient, more capable, more scalable on large codebases, supports better workflows?

In fact, I would rather it stay C for 15 more years.

schacon22• 1 month ago

I'm assuming you didn't read the article, since I'm pretty sure I covered all of this, but I'm happy to respond.

Don't bother.

It's probably not for you. It's slower, more obtuse, more bloated, less capable, exponentially less scalable at any size. Canonical Git is better in every way, except being a linkable library.

Even in the arena of being linkable libraries that can do Git stuff, both Gitoxide (Rust) and libgit2 (C which has git2 crate Rust bindings) are both better, they're just not feature complete. That is the only point of this project.

tonymet3• 1 month ago

grep didn’t indicate anything interesting. S/n was very low. Thanks.

heyts• 1 month ago

I'd be really interested in the opposite, just for the sake of experimentation since that's what these projects mostly are. They all seem to be rewrites for the sake of "performance", because the cost is now lower bc of AI. I'd be interested to see something like a port of Quake III in Python or Kubernetes in Perl, even Rails in Python would be goofy and really fun to see

jamesfinlayson2• 1 month ago

Quake III in Python

Probably doable - I remember most of Natural Selection 2 was Lua and it's more than a decade old at this point.

jordand• 1 month ago

For Natural Selection 2, it was mainly the gameplay logic that was Lua, all running on their bespoke C++ game engine called Spark. But yeah, modern Python and Lua can be pushed to high performance.

Link: https://unknownworlds.com/en/news/spark-engine-questions-and...

MBCook9• 1 month ago

They all seem to be rewrites for the sake of "performance".

And yet this performs dramatically worse.

A slower, untested, incomplete git implementation, all for the low low price of $10-$15,000.

And don’t forget it wasted a bunch of human time in the process.

So if someone mentioned somewhere else there is already a Rust port a group is doing somewhere. How much could they have accomplished with this much money and time in software development resources?

Ok. AI can seemingly port stuff if you don’t test it thoroughly. I think that’s already been proven. At this point I’m seeing less and less value from these kind of things. I’m sure it was fun for the author, but how does it help other people?

blastonico• 1 month ago

But... it's memory safe. Not that git has any important memory issue, but now people with skill issues in C can contribute to it without breaking stuff.

Ferret7446• 1 month ago

It's not for performance, it's for Rust.

If the first stereotype of Rust programmers is announcing that a project is in Rust before any other desirable software property (e.g. stable, performant, etc), the second stereotype is that Rust programmers love rewriting stuff in Rust, just for the sake of Rust.

(The 2.a. corollary is that they love rewriting GPL projects specifically and downgrading them to MIT/Apache)

lenkite• 1 month ago

A slower, untested, incomplete git implementation, all for the low low price of $10-$15,000.

That $15k is indeed a very low low subsidized AI price. It will be $150k next year.

lelanthran7• 1 month ago

They all seem to be rewrites for the sake of "performance", because the cost is now lower bc of AI.

If that was true they'd use the original license. They are not. The whole RiiR movement is very obviously switching away from a pro-user license (GPL).

fg1374• 1 month ago

Does anyone plan to use this?

Similarly, is there any momentum left for Cloudflare's EmDash? I can barely find any discussion after April.

gpm10• 1 month ago

It'd seem weird to plan to use this until the readme stops saying

it has been nearly entirely written by agents and has not been used for realsies. It's probably currently unusably slow or completely broken in ways that are not exercised in the test suite.

Right now it's someone else's experiment that is still in the "might or might not pan out" stage.

There are a bunch of projects using the similar (not vibe coded, less fully featured) gitoxide project - there is demand for git-as-a-library.

schacon22• 1 month ago

I would not use this except to help us test it if interested. I'm announcing it because it's interesting and a milestone in the breadth of test coverage it can pass. It almost certainly cheated on a bunch of those tests and is not feature complete yet.

The author of gitoxide is also working on GitButler (who worked on this project) and we're pushing both projects forward and actively using and developing Gitoxide as well. This is simply a different and hopefully complimentary approach to the same problem.

Yokohiii6• 1 month ago

Wordpress is/was successful because it's braindead and has a solid userbase. I am not to flame WP, but it's a quality to target a specific group of consumers.

It's an organic success, hard to replicate. If at all, CF can only make people migrate with massive effort. Marketing effort, selling lots of snake oil in the process. WP wont just hop on the hot new thing, WP is the definition of the opposite. It works for them. Why change.

Git is the same on the other side. It requires maintenance and improvements, surgical and correct. No git maintainer has time to learn a gigantic new codebase and they will stick with what works for them. For git users there are no advantages. So similarly it would require a long time effort to push the project, building trust that it is somehow better, probably requiring Linus to say "it's great".

linsomniac• 1 month ago

I was immediately excited about this wrapped in Python because the current Python git bindings are kind of obtuse, but they do work so I guess I can't complain.

MBCook9• 1 month ago

But why switch to this?

Why not just make better Python bindings to libgit?

Philpax• 1 month ago

In looking at the code that the LLMs have produced for the project, especially given the pretty massive and widespread architectural changes needed to make the implementation libified and memory safe, we decided that the codebase is not a derivative work that would require carrying forward the GPL license and have decided to release the code under the MIT instead.

Hmm. That's going to be interesting.

nextaccountic• 1 month ago

they would be just wrong. I hope someone with standing sues

gpm10• 1 month ago

I don't think it's that clear cut. The functional parts probably aren't copyrightable, only the stylistic ones. It's going to be a mix of courts applying laws in new ways that hasn't been done before and fact specific questions about what actually persisted through the LLM if it goes to court.

I'd be fascinated to see what happens if it does. Both in the analyses that we'd get of what the LLM did to the codebase and on the legal decisions on what the copyrightable creative elements in code actually are.

If I was the author though... there would be no way that I would be volunteering to be a test case like this. Also seems just rude for no reason.

joshka20• 1 month ago

I suspect that the issue is more likely that the LLM code doesn't have an author and hence some parts of it can't be licenses, it's less likely that it's infringing on git's copyright for various reasons. (I am not a lawyer, but I do read copyright law for funsies).

sourcegrift2• 1 month ago

Make a small contribution to git then sue

jhayward• 1 month ago

I'm not a copyright lawyer, but it seems pretty clear to me you can't wash a license using an LLM.

[US jurisdiction]: Anything in the result written by the LLM can not be copyright by anyone.

Anything in the result written by a human can be, and if it was all emitted by the LLM then that portion originally written by a human carries its own copyright.

As a work of an LLM, the entirety presumably can not be copyright, at all. Portions written by humans presumably carry their original copyright.

joshka20• 1 month ago

[US jurisdiction]: Anything in the result written by the LLM can not be copyright by anyone.

This is a bit stronger than the actual report where this has been discussed finds. See part 2 in https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ for details, but TL;DR, parts where humans have control over the expression may be copyrightable. But working out which parts those are is likely a difficult question (would likely require proof of provenance across many of those LLM sessions)

xiaoyu2006• 1 month ago

Obligatory: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

thewebguyd3• 1 month ago

Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software and releasing under permissive licenses. Also why I'm not a fan of UUtils nor Canonical's early adoption of it in Ubuntu.

The intent here is extraction of all the value provided by copyleft projects without the obligation to give back. Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.

Ar-Curunir• 1 month ago

That’s explicitly not what’s happening with uutils; they have contributed fixes and test cases back to upstream

trimbo• 1 month ago

Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.

GNU was originally developed to "clean" UNIX from the AT&T license.

sunsunsunsun• 1 month ago

I agree, I certainly can't comment on the legality of this license laundering but I would call them an asshole.

xorcist4• 1 month ago

It is also rather ungrateful. The only reason we have Linux desktops today, and the only reason companies like Red Hat and Canonical has a billion dollar business model is the GPL.

The BSDs had a head start, and were superior in almost every way for the better part of a decade at least, but have remained niche compared to Linux. It's not even close. Now, there may be many other reasons to this, including the personalities and culture of the Linux developers, but you simply can't ignore the impact of the license which have kept all the commercial Linux products inside the fold.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

Knowing what you don't know is such an important skill in life and your career. And I 100% agree with you that the author is, well, off their rocker.

Let me give an example: I could take Goldeneye from the N64, extract the binary and then run it through an LLM to disassemble it and possibly rewrite it in a modern higher-level language. Do you think Nintendo would look at that and say "well, he did a lot of work so he's escaped our license"? Of course not. It's just silly.

ingesting the source code and producing output in another language is quite clearly a derivative work. You don't need to be an IP lawyer to figure that out.

Now, if you went to Calude and gave it documentation and told it to produce something that was compatible, would that be a derivative work and thus covered by the GPL? I would guess probably. But I'm not 100% sure anymore. I wouldn't risk it however.

Here's another thought experiment: what if someone takes this supposedly MIT licensed source tree, plugs it into another LLM and asks it to produce the output in C? Now how is it licensed? It might be very similar. After all, there are only so many ways to produce a SHA1 hash and so many ways to do a command line parser.

But this then makes it an interesting legal issue. In the Oracle v. Google court case, this was a key issue. Google successfully argued there's only so many ways to write a loop so just because a loop is similar to the source, that doesn't mean it's copyright infringement (as Oracle argued).

Anyway, it's a crazy position to take.

beacon294• 1 month ago

Well that is already how it is done with numerous multi-decade open rewrites of closed games. They usually require the asset pack.

I don't know how this squares with law, but Oracle v Google gave a very valuable judgment to the public that an API is not copywritable. If we take the LLM out of it, that's all we are talking about in the pure case.

Of course, we can't take the LLM out, but it is the starting point.

lelanthran7• 1 month ago

Knowing what you don't know is such an important skill in life and your career. And I 100% agree with you that the author is, well, off their rocker.

They aren't the only ones - look at the number of people in this thread who are arguing that this is analogous to producing a movie with ffmpeg - just because ffmpeg is GPL, does not make your movie GPL.

I am struggling to understand how such a high level of cognitive dissonance is possible: They believe both a) that the license can be laundered in this manner, and that b) the license they put on the result is effective!

thedevilslawyer• 1 month ago

heh - https://github.com/n64decomp/007

game decompilation and emulation is as old as computing

selfmodruntime• 1 month ago

Do you think Nintendo would look at that and say "well, he did a lot of work so he's escaped our license"? Of course not. It's just silly.

That's because you're re-using assets.

jbotz• 1 month ago

A translation of a book to a different language is a derivative work. So a translation of a computer program to a different programming language is also. But if in the translation of the book you start altering the plot and the personalities of that characters, does it at some point become not a derivative work? What point? IANAL, and I have no real idea, but I imagine that point has been probed significantly in case-law with respect to creative works. Given the current climate of ever-expanding scope of "intellectual property", if they admit that the LLM had access to git source code then I would say their case is weak at best.

anilgulecha• 1 month ago

translation.

It's not technically a translation, it's a re-implementation, with test suites acting as the destination. If it was a file by file translation your argument would have been valid.

spwa42• 1 month ago

Yes, but as soon as copyright became a problem for very rich people parts of it were cancelled.

1) re-implementation for compatibility (which was quickly "reestablished" through use of copyright-protecting encryption. In other words: do you get to write software that connects to MS/Apple/Google/Facebook servers without authorization from those companies? Yes. Do you get to copy an encryption key from their software to make it possible? No)

and, more recently,

2) violating copyright for LLM training

and, currently mostly attempted:

3) "uncopyrighting" run software through an LLM, and some people "believe" it comes out with your copyright on it! Because very rich people want to sell uncopyrighting.

Ie. the jury's still out what will happen when it's billionnaire vs billionnaire.

Of course, the question is what happens the second someone does this with a disney movie, or a big microsoft application ...

miohtama• 1 month ago

Related, software API compability is not a derivate work, or eligible to protection, as ruled in the US and in the EU. Google, SAP R/3, etc. cases.

Or SCO Vs IBM.

If everything would be a derivate work we would not Linux.

WD-423• 1 month ago

The agents.md says “here’s the git source code” https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...

This isn’t even a question of training data, thy fed the full git source code directly to the llm.

kisper• 1 month ago

Mathematically, does similarity/intelligibility of one equation to another have any bearing on whether the one was derived from the other? Philosophically? Legally? I'm not a copyright lawyer, but that's the crux of the matter to me: did you start with something, and iterate from it (even if it was so many times as to be transformed beyond recognition), or is it something more akin to clean-room reverse engineering?

Brian_K_White3• 1 month ago

I don't care if they can convince a judge. The fact that they even want to in the first place tells me what kind of people they are.

F-ing scumbags. It's already free, but they still decide to steal it.

NietTim• 1 month ago

This is not a proper black-box reimplementation, I doubt they can get away with that. And that's not mentioning all other obvious ethical concerns of course.

rcxdude6• 1 month ago

black-box/clean-room isn't necessarily required, though. It does make it a lot harder to argue in court, of course.

silon42• 1 month ago

An idea...

Take this (assuming it's not slop), relicence as GPL, submit upstream (imagine it's accepted for a moment...).

If they proceed with license washing then from the Rust version, it's certainly derived work.

schacon22• 1 month ago

Well, there's lots of really interesting opinions here from a lot of armchair lawyers.

To clarify, my stance on this is that the reimplementation did not copy protected expressions (Jplag reports less than 1.8% max similarity between the codebases), it's done in good faith, and it's what's best for the broader Git ecosystem (assuming Grit even becomes usable, which it's currently not purported to be).

From a copyright standpoint, however, only the first argument there is relevant. Grit is an independently authored implementation of Git-compatible behavior, with negligible similarity to Git source code.

I think antirez summarized the situation quite well and I broadly agree with his position: https://antirez.com/news/162

I think that those in the community who know me and have worked with me in the Git and open source communities for the last 20 years know that my intentions are to contribute, share and foster innovation and learning. Many of the main authors of the Git source code are friends of mine and I have no intention to steal anything from anyone, only to make their great ideas more broadly useful.

dayjaby• 1 month ago

Hey AI, please change my stolen code in a non-breaking way so that jplag reports less than 1,8% similarity.

cmrdporcupine10• 1 month ago

My question here is not whether it's legally permissible. I'll leave that to others.

It's WTF is wrong with this next generation of devs ? ... that they have such a problem with the GPL that they think it's important to rewrite and relicense and take away a legal structure which is supposed to protect our free software?

I can imagine some concerns with Git being written in C.

I cannot understand any legitimate concerns with its license that it needs to change.

What does the GPL stop people doing with git? And if there are some... why are people trying to do that? And why would you work for free to help people do it? [Edit: I see, you're not working for free.]

Missing an 'f' in the project name.

mplanchard• 1 month ago

Have you addressed anywhere why you chose not to keep the copyleft license? It burns a lot of goodwill to use an AI for what many people will see as copyright laundering, and git has done just fine with the GPL, so it doesn’t seem like a blocker for adoption. What do you get from stripping the copyleft?

GoblinSlayer• 1 month ago

Is there a point in license laundering? Where GPL stifles git adoption?

conartist6• 1 month ago

You know I think if you'd just committed to clean rooming it you'd be fine, but you didn't.

Now you're caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: if the AI did no creative work, then you're definitely in violation of the original GPL license.

If the AI did do creative work that breaks GPL, you still didn't, which leaves you with the problem that you cannot in good faith license a thing which you don't own. No creative work? No ownership claim. There's precious little (if any) of your creativity in copy pasting 4000 tests and a link to the original source code and saying "copy this in Rust".

The flagrant display of cynicism you make in arguing that the ends justify the means (even if a result is the wholesale looting of open source) disgusts me, and if I could communicate to you only one thing it should be that you should not be surprised that other people are also disgusted by behavior like that even when it falls within the letter of the law (a claim I have not yet seen you rigorously defend).

ssddanbrown• 1 month ago

Many of the main authors of the Git source code are friends of mine and I have no intention to steal anything from anyone, only to make their great ideas more broadly useful.

By working-around/subverting the terms they provided their contributions under? While you claim to be doing this in good faith, and state "it's what's best for the broader Git ecosystem", that's all based on your own opinion which appears to ignore the benefits and intent of licenses such as the GPL.

Out of interest, Would you be happy for someone to do the same with the GitButler source code? (Feed it through an LLM and re-publish the result under an MIT license with different branding)

keybored5• 1 month ago

Are you a trained lawyer? Okay but presumably not practicing in the last twenty years.

You know that all contributions to the Git project has to be signed off as either being made by yourself or being handed over by someone who has signed off on that certficate of origin. For everyone on every change. Even the lead developers so to speak. And you spend some thousands of dollars and run an AI analyis tool to wash your hands?

Who are you to do that? Oh wait I forgot, you are Mr. Chacon. A hand in everything Git and friendly with everyone in Git who matters for twenty years. Remind us next time as well so I don’t forget.

alberto-m• 1 month ago

Malus – Clean Room as a Service https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47350424

Just like for 1984 and the Torment Nexus, someone took the concept not as warning but as instruction manual.

Escapade5160• 1 month ago

Particularly because LLM generated code is not licensable in any way. If you wrote it with an LLM you cannot own it.

gdgghhhhh• 1 month ago

So, they "decided" it's not a derivative and thus can be listened under MIT instead of GPL....

subygan• 1 month ago

a lot of things are just "decided" really.

it's just in this case it's the author. we'll have to wait and see who decides to challenge it

madeofpalk• 1 month ago

Yeah, that's usually how contracts work.

You decide whether you have followed it or not. The other party will decide if they agree. If in dispute, you go to a judge and they decide also.

cmrdporcupine10• 1 month ago

Where's the crowdfunded lawsuit I can donate to?

imoverclocked• 1 month ago

What’s the long term strategy for this code base? Does the author expect community code contribution or just bug reports or maybe just test contributions?

fg1374• 1 month ago

In 6 months, seeing no adoption, move the repo to maintenance mode. Archive in 12 months.

Yokohiii6• 1 month ago

He will be probably super happy for starring the project.

0x000xca0xfe• 1 month ago

The agents did all the work but _somebody_ has to test it for real on their own data to find the edge cases overlooked by AI. That's what users are for nowadays.

schacon22• 1 month ago

I'm happy to take contributions if you want to throw some tokens at it. Bug reports would be amazing, since I haven't tested it for real very much (enough to know you can do basics).

I want to get it to the point where we can replace fork/exec'ing to an unknown Git binary or having said binary be an external dependency for GitButler. The networking stuff (push/fetch) is currently an external dep for both GitButler and Jujutsu (and pretty much every other Git-based tool in the world). I'm pretty sure I can get the project good enough at these networking ops (including all the hairy credential stuff) to be able to not need those fork/exec calls.

witx3• 1 month ago

I won't touch relicensed code even if you payed me.

This is morally, if not legally, wrong.

ianm2187• 1 month ago

I have been working on the same problem in other areas. My ultimate goal is to rewrite nginx in Rust passing as much as the upstream tests as possible while leveraging the strongest aspects of Ruts ecosystem - i.e. rustls (modern memory safe OpenSSL), Tokio (async runtime), h2 (http 2 impl) rather than implementing from scratch like the upstream. I started with Lua, then porting over Valkey, and now working on nginx. The reason was because I wanted to learn the ins and outs before taking on the most complex portion.

[1]. https://github.com/ianm199/lua-rs/tree/main Lua

[2]. https://github.com/ianm199/valdr Valkey/ Redis

[3]. https://github.com/ianm199/nginx-rs-port nginx

Happy to answer any questions on the approach! When I started a few weeks ago the harnesses on their own were not good enough to get very far without a "meta harness" of sorts but that is changing largely with Claude Workloads and Mythos. A lot of the work is developing some custom tooling to move these along faster.

jabwd3• 1 month ago

Yeah I got one, why? You aren't learning anything, you are just copying code from other codebases and smashing it together to make some nginx-rust thingie... for what actual goal?

ianm2187• 1 month ago

Well the biggest goal was to be useful. Nginx serves ~20% of the web, memory unsafe languages might just become untractable for critical exposed to the web infra if the rate of critical CVE's on these rises faster than they can be patched, so a drop in replacement would be a big deal in that world.

But in terms of learning I'm learning relatively little about how to type Rust into an editor but a lot about how to set up agentic loops that can autonomously get tests to pass and improve performance.

For example if you just tell a frontier model (gpt5.5 or Claude Code 4.8) to make some portion of the tests pass they will take forever and just bang their heads against it. I developed a framework to mimic a lot of these tests in nginx... but in minimum non blocking ways so you can run many in parallel with short feedback loops.

Similar for performance - how to make tons of performance benchmark and expose maximum telemetry for agents to go and analyze the hotpaths etc.

jauntywundrkind2• 1 month ago

One very strong draw I feel, that's mentioned in this article: Rust's portability, it's ability to be compiled to wasm & run very well anywhere.

bitwize• 1 month ago

Because C code in production is a ticking time bomb.

dabedee2• 1 month ago

This is coming from a cofounder at github, someone who probably knows precisely what the GPL is for. Whatever the legal merits, building on a GPL3 project's complete test suite and relicensing under MIT is not acting in good faith toward the original authors. I really find it disgusting and it makes me want to avoid gitbutler entirely.

joshka20• 1 month ago

I think you're saying that you don't believe in the freedoms to use the GPL licensed test suite for certain purposes which are explicitly allowed by the GPL.

You don't get to choose a license and then add extra terms to it when you don't feel like it's up to scratch. That's something explicitly not allowed by the GPL license.

MBCook9• 1 month ago

Where does the GPL say you have the freedom to relicense code or derivatives under MIT by fiat?

Isn’t having to stay under the GPL a very big part of the GPL license?

Aperocky2• 1 month ago

A pretty fun experiment and I think we can shape this into something truly useful to the whole community.

Agree with first half of this sentence, we should all have fun with experiments.

It was never based on a linkable and reentrant library, but instead on a "Unix" philosophy of chaining together simpler commands, which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for everything.

Ahhh now we have philosophical disagreement in the only place in the entire article that says "why". Unix is a feature, it's arguably more important in current time: https://aperocky.com/blog/post.html?slug=unix-philosophy-age...

Levitating• 1 month ago

You cut that citation conveniently short.

It was never based on a linkable and reentrant library, but instead on a "Unix" philosophy of chaining together simpler commands, which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for everything.

Aperocky2• 1 month ago

Added it in full. It still squarely falls under "this is for fun/are you seriously doing this for this purpose" territory for me.

git operate on the filesystem level, the unix behavior is just getting buried. You cannot rewrite git into a linkable library and decide it's now not unix. It's entire behavior is unix, which is why it's awesome.

MBCook9• 1 month ago

Isn’t git already just an interface over libgit? How is that different?

tredre32• 1 month ago

Git is famously not built around a (reusable) library, hence why we have things like libgit2 (unrelated to git) and why any porcelain on top of git has to resort to calling the binary and parsing its text output.

schacon22• 1 month ago

libgit.a isn't reentrant. It will call `die()` on many errors. If you link to it in a long running binary, it will kill your process on error.

Libgit2 is meant to address this and I was heavily involved in the development of that project 15 years ago. It's great but it's not feature complete and it's development is also completely separate from git development, so it's out of sync and constantly struggling to keep up.

boredatoms• 1 month ago

Theres already git-in-rust project that is making good progress

https://github.com/gitoxidelabs/gitoxide

jauntywundrkind2• 1 month ago

Gitoxide is mentioned in this write up, yes,

Currently both Gitoxide and libgit2's networking functionality is either partial, slow or non-existant. Both GitButler and Jujutsu rely on forking out to Git in order to push or pull data. A big reason for this is the incredibly complicated credential logic involved, but all of this is (theoretically) currently covered in Grit.

schacon22• 1 month ago

Gitoxide is also developed primarily by Byron, who also is part of the GitButler team. We're pushing both projects forward.

dabedee2• 1 month ago

You're asking people to trust you and hand their codebase/IP to your tool while showing them exactly how you treat other people's code/licenses by "deciding" to not carry forward the GPL license.

schacon22• 1 month ago

GitButler's source code is available, so we're not asking you to trust us much at all.

https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/gitbutler

ersatz-matty• 1 month ago

That's great because we don't.

ewy1• 1 month ago

pretty dystopian to ask a robot to recreate your favorite software just so you can relicense it for your business venture

schacon22• 1 month ago

We're choosing a license that is usable by the entire community. Our goal is a linkable library, which makes GPL impossible. If we had chosen to go with LGPL or GPL with linking exception (like libgit2), it would have the same issue of changing the license, so we went with whatever was the most permissive so everyone could use it for anything if they wish. This has nothing to do with business - I hope I can get the project to the point where Jujutsu or whomever can use whatever is valuable here for whatever they want.

We clearly learned from how Git does operations and emulated it in order to function interoperably, the same way that Gitoxide and libgit2 have, and released it under a license that would be the most valuable for people wanting to use a linkable library, the same way that Gitoxide and libgit2 have.

201984• 1 month ago

We're choosing a license that is usable by the entire community.

What a weaselly way to put it.

A GPL library, as I'm sure you know, is perfectly usable by anyone including jujutsu and anyone else. They just have to also license under the GPL and this is no barrier to open source projects.

jraph3• 1 month ago

Our goal is a linkable library, which makes GPL impossible

Not impossible. It forces the code using the library to be under a GPL-compatible license and requires the binary to be released under the GPL license.

The distinction is quite important. It's only impossible in the mind of someone who wants to release proprietary software. Even for people releasing software under permissive license it's not impossible, just highly inconvenient (and the LGPL is always an option in this case).

witx3• 1 month ago

We're choosing a license that is usable by the entire community. Our goal is a linkable library, which makes GPL impossible.

And what issues did GPL impose on the community all these 21 years of git existence?

boomlinde• 1 month ago

We clearly learned from how Git does operations and emulated it in order to function interoperably

So you didn't just let an AI go nuts with access to the source code of Git so as to produce a derivative work?

squidsoup• 1 month ago

I guess software licenses are meaningless now since anyone can decide their llm clone is not derivative.

Yokohiii6• 1 month ago

Currently some act like it is fine to translate a project and change the license.

Recently Casey Muratori said in a adjacent context that the microsoft AI push may be related to the fact that they have a long standing and elaborate codebase. A large historic software company could have advantages to train models. They could provide extra value with their IP.

Now their IP is potentially in their models and accessible to anyone. If they actually train models on their IP, anyone could implement their APIs and slap a GPL license on it.

At that point, things will get very interesting.

dakolli2• 1 month ago

No one is training their models on their closed sourced proprietary code. They own github, why would they need to do this.

wongarsu3• 1 month ago

A lot of their IP has been leaked over the years anyways. Source code of Windows XP is easily available, and there was the 2022 leak that contained the sources of Bing, Bing Maps, Cortana, etc

trumpdong6• 1 month ago

They were already quite meaningless since nearly every FOSS copyright owner doesn't sue violators.

esafak2• 1 month ago

A legal fund would help?

anonova• 1 month ago

Grit was the name of a _Ruby_ implementation of git way back when: https://github.com/mojombo/grit/. I believe it's actually what GitHub was built on then.

Yokohiii6• 1 month ago

Okay name is taken. Let's rename it to Grift.

mojombo• 1 month ago

I created and named the Grit library that used to power GitHub. Scott Chacon (fellow GitHub cofounder, now CEO of GitButler) specifically asked my permission to re-use Grit as the name of this project, which I gladly granted. R is for Ruby. R is for Rust! Grit is dead. Long live Grit!

schacon22• 1 month ago

I started the project as Gust, but felt like Grit was such a better name. I asked Tom if I could boot the name back up again because I always liked it and he said it was fine.

Also, I worked on the Ruby Grit pretty extensively during the early days of GitHub, so hopefully I earned the right to carry on the mantle. :)

stefanha• 1 month ago

The full build of all Git functionality in Rust is currently around 27M, but since a large part of it is a library, it could clearly be easily split up into domains of functionality - subcrates that do specific things.

I downloaded v0.3.99 for Linux x86_64 and stripped the binary. It ends up at 31 MB. The .text section is 25 MB.

I'm surprised by the large size. On my system /usr/bin/git is 4.7 MB, although git is split up into multiple programs. I'm not comparing apples to apples, but this is weird.

If anyone digs into the binary size, please share what you find.

schacon22• 1 month ago

I would also be interested.

I haven't dug into this at all yet, nor have I tried to optimize the size (or really, anything else).

However, the library part will be less than half of this - a lot of code is spent on the CLI specific stuff and would not be part of the library, which is mostly what I care about for the purposes of this project. The CLI part is just to try to prove the point that it actually does what Git does. The library part is what might be useful in that nothing else exists that does all of the things that it does (provide a reentrant linkable library that is feature complete with Git).

andwur• 1 month ago

Looking at just the `grit` executable, 58 of the top 200 largest file->resulting code sources are from clap-rs' derive functionality i.e. it's the command-line parsing. The #1 largest is, surprisingly, merge_trees[1] which comes in at 183kiB final binary size. There isn't so much code in that file that it seems reasonable, so it's potentially one of the derives in use (Debug being a common culprit for bloat) that's blowing it out. After those outliers it starts to level out quickly.

Splitting it by crate: `grit` is 13.6MiB, `grit_lib` is 4.8MiB and then it's `std`, `rustls` and `regex_automata` that are the next largest. So as pure library you could hopefully shave off quite a bit of that 25MiB.

[1] https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/grit-lib/src/...

hankbond• 1 month ago

It's like giving wishes as a genie. You gotta be super explicit with the ground rules. I have used the genie analogy before. It used to feel more like a Golem but now with the whole Fable sabotage mode https://jonready.com/blog/posts/claude-fable5-is-allowed-to-... it certainly feels more Genie-like.

Previously I described it as "Models give you what you ask, for not what you want". Now with Fable they don't even give you want you want so idk.

usernametaken292• 1 month ago

I’m all for memory safety and such but honestly what’s the use case for this? Showing off agentic development? In 10+ years git has never failed on a memory overflow or else. Sometimes software is “good as is” and I’m pretty confident git classifies as such. I’ve also never really hit the limitations of git, even with teams of 20+ developers and lots of binary artefacts. You got to really stretch git limitations, in which case you might need to move away from git, and a rust rewrite will not help in any way whatsoever. So again … why?

WD-423• 1 month ago

License washing

jraph3• 1 month ago

"Grift"

(The f is for "feft")

schacon22• 1 month ago

I addressed this in the post, but Git has no linkable library and never has. If you want to do even something small, you need to fork/exec a process and communicate with it via stdin/out. Or completely reimplement it and all of the edge cases - for example, reading even one object can be either loose (easy) or in a packfile (much more difficult). Reading a reference (what SHA does a branch point to) can be in a loose file, a packfile, or a reftable. etc.

There is no way anyone would ever use this for it's CLI - it will almost certainly always be slower and worse in every way, even if I get it stable (which it's currently not). You can use libgit2 (a project I also helped kickstart), or Gitoxide (a project GitButler also currently helps drive) - they are faster and better in nearly every way, but they are not feature complete.

This isn't for the person using Git. This is for someone trying to build a tool that wants to use parts of Git, which is different.

eminence32• 1 month ago

But libgit2 exists, right? It may not have 100% feature parity with git, but that's a linkable library that gives you a lot of functionality when working with git repos.

gritzko• 1 month ago

Nice experiment, but a bit expensive.

I work on Beagle, a git-compatible SCM [1]. I use ABC, Abstractionless C [2] dialect with slices, optional range checking, etc. So far, memory safety was the least of my concerns, frankly. Most of the thorny issues would be equally thorny in Rust (e.g. right now: reflog zeroed when VM ran out of disk space; must be some state machine issue or an OS level glitch). Also, forking off a C process (no runtime) is cheap enough that you actually want to do that more.

But, those are all technicalities. The key issue I see with the approach: the data structures and algos of git have been fanatically fine tuned for that particular application with those particular usage patterns. By very sophisticated low-level C programmers. So, quite likely, any other app/lib working with that store will always be a suboptimal fit. I would recommend read-only access only, esp for LLM code.

Meanwhile, git's underlying data model (blobs/trees/commits) is very simple and very much internet-standard level. Decoupling at that interface is so much easier with so much less issues looming.

May look differently from your vantage point though.

[1] https://github.com/gritzko/beagle

[2] https://replicated.wiki/blog/abc

usernametaken292• 1 month ago

This isn't for the person using Git. This is for someone trying to build a tool that wants to use parts of Git, which is different.

I’m going out on a limb here but I’ll say that you are over engineering for the wrong problems. I’ve done it before, I tried libgit for some use case. At the end of the day it really is much simpler to use git. If you don’t want git at runtime use something like the git-gradle-properties plugin or the likes for your build system of choice. I really can’t think of a super duper use case where forking processes is a massive enough issue that I’d want to instead port over all of git to another language. Git for the most parts also offers a wide variety of export formats such that you get machine readable output too. If you really really need to fiddle with its internals, git pack lets you browse through the index fairly well. Again, my humble opinion, but you’re trying to solve the wrong problems

pramodbiligiri• 1 month ago

I hadn’t heard of libgit2. I wish more applications would expose library-style access, preferably available across different languages!

May not work for apps that want to launch their own threads and processes. But for almost everything else, I prefer function calls to launching processes, managing their lifecycle, communicating via stdout etc. If I wanted to do that, I’d be writing Bash ;)

well_ackshually• 1 month ago

How else could they launder the git license and set themselves up for a bait and switch later down the line?

djha-skin• 1 month ago

In the age of AI, writing things that used to take years can now be done in months or weeks if you have deep enough pockets for it.

Reimplementation is a particularly juicy target because it's easy to test. Imagine someone writing a better browser than Chrome from scratch in just a year.

Because of this moats around business due to difficulty of implementation are effectively gone.

jraph3• 1 month ago

can now be done in months or weeks if you have deep enough pockets for it.

Especially if there's the same thing that already exists in open source that the model can plagiarize for you.

keybored5• 1 month ago

This looks more like a blog-blurb (if blogs had blurbs) than a comment.

aeon_ai• 1 month ago

I continue to be surprised by the lack of understanding around copyright law when it comes to AI.

jsLavaGoat• 1 month ago

I did something similar and called it gitredoxide since I started with gitoxide.

dstanko• 1 month ago

In 15+ years of using Git, I have not had a single crash. What problem are you solving???

dakolli2• 1 month ago

This is a problem with people with LLM psychosis who now think they have superpowers, they are completely unaware and just do things naively, they've lost all ability to think for themselves. The LLMs that are thinking for them certainly aren't going to tell them doing X is a bad idea, they're there to produce as many tokens as possible for their owners.

Daishiman• 1 month ago

The motivation and rationale is there and was mentioned early on in the article.

I’m all for the hundreds of reasonable objections but this sort of trash mindless critique is as useless as what it denounces.

schacon22• 1 month ago

A feature complete, reentrant, linkable library. Reading the article often helps with questions like this.

lelanthran7• 1 month ago

In 15+ years of using Git, I have not had a single crash. What problem are you solving???

The pro-user license (GPL).

not_a_bot_4sho• 1 month ago

I've seen plenty of crashes over the years. Primary in one private repo where gc and pruning triggered unexpected exits for a fixed duration of time.

That said, stability overall has been nothing short of fantastic. And I can't answer the question of "why?" for this particular rewrite.

yanhangyhy• 1 month ago

if we conquer the universe, i would love to leave one planet alone for rust users. in this planet, the only allowed programming langauge is RUST! everything should be written in RUST

rockmeamedee• 1 month ago

I don’t understand. Gitoxide exists and is great.

It might have missing pieces, but it’s easier to vibecode any needed networking additions to Gitoxide (which is maintained) than to just go and burn tokens trying to clone all of git again.

Git wants to add Rust. Gitoxide is a multi year project that’s going to be more maintained than an ad-hoc “it says it passes the test” vibeclone.

I’m not even against vibecloning things when it’s useful, but this shows no benefits. Git is a beloved tool that few people dislike, it’s not like vinext (people disliking the vendor lock-in they have with nextjs).

Also execs should keep in mind that “we burned thousands of dollars on tokens to re-create this beloved software so we can have our own copy”, even without the copyright/licensing argument, just isn’t something positive that the community will react positively to.

It doesn’t feel nice to see your favourite works cloned for no benefit. We’re past the “it was an experiment to see how far AI can go” stage now.

dochtman• 1 month ago

GitButler now employs/has hired the gitoxide maintainer, I think? So no doubt they’re aware.

I guess they found that gitoxide isn’t good enough and/or to expensive to extend/improve for their use cases?

schacon22• 1 month ago

I think Byron (Gix author/maintainer) is one of the most excited people about the Grit project.

Gitoxide is great and we will continue to push it forward. Grit is an orthogonal project. Perhaps we can use one in the other or maybe Grit goes nowhere. But we thought that a small investment in a different approach is worth the effort.

schacon22• 1 month ago

As mentioned, we also work on the Gitoxide project and Byron is a member of our team. We are well aware of all large community efforts and we're also cohosting the Git Merge conference this year.

There is a recent effort to vibe-loop more Git into Gitoxide, which is interesting:

https://github.com/GitoxideLabs/gitoxide/pull/2538

I still think that this is a project that can have value with a little more work. This announcement is merely a milestone, not the end product. I wasn't sure it was really possible to do, even halfway through the project. There has been a lot learned and there is a lot to learn, but I think there are useful applications for both a high quality, hand crafted, opinionated partial Git library (Gix) as well as a vibed, fully implemented, partially sloppy LLM Git library (Grit). We think it's worth exploring and investing in both options for now.

Also, I am the exec involved and I've done quite a lot for the Git community over the years. I would never try to have my "own copy" of it, that's ridiculous. I wrote and open sourced the Pro Git book (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2) and Git community book before it (https://schacon.github.io/gitbook/index.html), I created the official Git website (https://git-scm.com), I cofounded GitHub which hosts nearly all open source in the world, I have evangelized and supported the Git ecosystem for almost 20 years now. I restarted and funded development of libgit2 15 years ago, which you could similarly argue was an exec trying to have our "own copy" of Git under a more permissive license and would have been a similarly ridiculous argument.

keybored5• 1 month ago

Also, I am the exec involved and I've done quite a lot for the Git community over the years. I would never try to have my "own copy" of it, that's ridiculous. I wrote and open sourced the Pro Git book (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2) and Git community book before it (https://schacon.github.io/gitbook/index.html), I created the official Git website (https://git-scm.com), I cofounded GitHub which hosts nearly all open source in the world, I have evangelized and supported the Git ecosystem for almost 20 years now. I restarted and funded development of libgit2 15 years ago, which you could similarly argue was an exec trying to have our "own copy" of Git under a more permissive license and would have been a similarly ridiculous argument.

This "I am Scott Chacon" part doesn't matter. 95% of people here already know.

People are critiquing your current actions.

GreenDolphinSys2• 1 month ago

This is simply plagiarism of GPL-licensed code, and license-washing as well. I can understand working backwards from a test suite, but this literally just reads the original source:

https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...

LLM users seem to live in another world where stealing everything that isn't bolted down, and passing it off as their own work, is acceptable.

schacon22• 1 month ago

I see it differently. I look at it as if I had written this code myself, using this same approach. Look at the docs, look at the tests, look at the source, implement something that is interactively compatible but a very different approach.

For example, this is exactly what I did when I tried to get SSH commit signing working properly in GitButler:

https://blog.gitbutler.com/signing-commits-in-git-explained

You can see in the post that I dug through the C source to figure out how it was canonically done and then implemented something that accomplished the same thing in Rust but without copying source code.

There are some similarities between the Grit Rust source and the Git source, but it's mostly around time/formatting type things or byte offset type things needed to make packfile parsing and whatnot work, but as far as I can tell, there is no straightforward copying of code. The approach needed to make this a reentrant, memory safe, library driven codebase is so different that copying is generally not useful. But nobody can _guess_ how packfiles or reftable binary formats are specified, since they're not really documented. I'm aware of this because I'm pretty sure I _personally_ am one of the only ones who has ever attempted to document the packfile binary format: https://schacon.github.io/gitbook/7_the_packfile.html

You have to read the source. Which means that libgit2 and Gitoxide and every other Git reimplementation is also "license-washing" per this definition because they also had to reference the Git source to see what the technical specification is.

If you find any code in Grit that is clearly line-for-line copied, please point it out and I will replace it. But the Git source is the Git specification and every reimplementation, LLM or not, is forced to use this approach to build anything compatible.

GreenDolphinSys2• 1 month ago

Yet, you didn't write the code yourself.

On Gitoxide: Given that the author read the docs and source code [0], and literally copied files over from the git source [1], it also is license-washing. At least libgit2 is GPLv2 with a linking exception. I don't think people would have much to say if these projects honored the original projects' intents and kept a copyleft GPL license. But they don't.

The approach needed to make this a reentrant, memory safe, library driven codebase is so different that copying is generally not useful.

This is obvious given how different Rust is from most languages. So are licenses pointless as a concept now, because anyone can argue their Rust implementation of a GPL (or whatever) project is meaningfully different? Nice loophole there.

Stripping away the GPL in favor of MIT/ASL2.0 seems to be the trend for rust projects (see uutils, etc). I'm really glad that we can make it easier for large companies to extract value from community labor and, in general, not contribute much of anything back.

0: https://github.com/GitoxideLabs/gitoxide/discussions/253

1: https://github.com/GitoxideLabs/gitoxide/issues/925

keybored5• 1 month ago

I see it differently. I look at it as if I had written this code myself, using this same approach. Look at the docs, look at the tests, look at the source, implement something that is interactively compatible but a very different approach.

I could look at a C to Zig compiler in the same way: I read some C code, write the equivalent Zig code, repeat.

The compiler could also do some circumlocutions in order to provide an apparently different approach.

I'm aware of this because I'm pretty sure I _personally_ am one of the only ones who has ever attempted to document the packfile binary format: https://schacon.github.io/gitbook/7_the_packfile.html

gitformat-pack?

If you find any code in Grit that is clearly line-for-line copied, please point it out

Please hunt for specific lines to disprove your bold claim.

and I will replace it.

Assuming the current claims here, that would just be license washing with volunteer assistance.

dabinat• 1 month ago

If you find any code in Grit that is clearly line-for-line copied, please point it out and I will replace it.

Why is it everyone else’s job to figure out if you’re compliant with the license? That’s your responsibility.

lelanthran7• 1 month ago

You have to read the source. Which means that libgit2 and Gitoxide and every other Git reimplementation is also "license-washing" per this definition because they also had to reference the Git source to see what the technical specification is.

This makes no sense:

1. A court might agree with you if a human read the sources, then wrote a new implementation. Doesn't apply to trade secrets (i.e. cleanroom implementations), but certainly for copyright.

2. A court is not going to agree that passing the original sources through a machine means you own the results!

I mean, that's what it comes down to - as far as the courts are concerned, passing copyright stuff through a machine results in the output retaining the original copyright. Passing copyright material through a person is not so clear cut.

sourcegrift2• 1 month ago

Ignore the haters, this site is turning into MAGA

gspr7• 1 month ago

I'm terrified that this somehow seems acceptable to a large group of people.

I'm baffled that other IP holders (say those who own valuable pieces of proprietary software, or music, or movies, or even the LLMs themselves) don't think leopards will come eat their faces next. This erosion of IP has to stop, or anyone who does any intellectual work will be absolutely screwed. If that only meant FOSS people, I'd be worried that we'd just be thrown out with the bathwater – but surely this applies across the board!?

Brian_K_White3• 1 month ago

I might even be fine with the loss of IP if everyone lost it.

rcxdude6• 1 month ago

The people doing the intellectual work are usually not the primary beneficiaries of IP laws. In fact it often constrains them unnecessarily.

xiphias2• 1 month ago

Of course they are afraid of it, haven't you seen Dario being angry of Chinese companies paying for Claude access (tokens = test cases) and training their own model from those?

asp_hornet2• 1 month ago

It’s all a bit voodoo to me but wouldn't the entire original source code be in the training data also?

20k5• 1 month ago

Yes, and LLMs have been shown to store and be able to output their training data, so this is at best very sketchy

Herbstluft• 1 month ago

Is there a term yet for Rust projects rewriting GPL code to get it under non-gpl licenses?

Rustwashing?

ninkendo• 1 month ago

What does rust have to do with it?

The pattern I see here is people vibing slop rewrites of GPL projects to get them under more favorable licenses. Rust just happens to be the language this one picked (for various reasons that are not very relevant here.)

witx3• 1 month ago

Stealing is the word you're looking for

rbbydotdev• 1 month ago

This is great, does it work in the browser via wasm? There’s an emcripten libgit2 out there but the wasm is a little big too be any fun

schacon22• 1 month ago

Not yet. I have a PR with a WASM experiment based on an earlier build, but it's not integrated. It's on my list of things to try. I _did_ get it working for some things, so it's clearly possible, but I need to put some more effort into it.

csomar• 1 month ago

Another possible use case is a WASM build that could be used to do a super wide range of interesting things. Run nearly any Git command in an edge Vercel function for example. Or maybe you could build things like Cloudflare Artifacts without relying on partial implementations like isomorphic-git but instead a fully compliant WASM build of Grit.
You had me at WASM...

What does this mean? Does the OP want us to convert his AI-vibed code to a WASM-compatible build? Does the OP even understand what that entails?

theknarf• 1 month ago

Why not just rewrite the networking part of gitoxide with an agent? Wouldn't gitoxide already be 90% there for your usecase? Why slopfork all of git?

sepisoad• 1 month ago

i wish there was an option in hackernews so i could filter out such crappy titles! DUH

konovalov-nk• 1 month ago

I'm exhausted seeing this same mistake happen over and over and over. Why nobody tries to write a spec from existing code is just crazy to me.

The git test suite is a behavioral spec. But at the same time it is not, why? It's archaeological site... I'd say. You can dig, and dig, and dig, and find some truth, but also a lot of historical decisions that doesn't matter today.

Here's the flow I suggest:

- first, reverse-engineer the behavioral intent from tests/docs/code

- build a taxonomy of what git promises

- group that into small "conformance slices"

- hand those slices to agents/humans/whatever

- start writing Rust... Or Visual Basic... At this point it doesn't matter almost

Without this critical layer, agents are optimizing for "make this test green" instead of "preserve this semantic contract". And this is exactly where the funny stuff happens... shelling to real git, hardcoding expectations, implementing sha256 metadata but not the behavior, etc.

Why are we doing stupid things and winning stupid prizes? I have to admit they are impressive, but I STRONGLY believe if we did this in two passes you would have not $15k check but maybe closer to $1-5k.

Who should I talk to, to make this happen? Making the first pass is almost deterministic. LLMs help. The only problem is making sure that YOU understand the spec, and this will be a bottleneck for a while (i.e. can't outsource understanding).

I can guide what exactly needs to happen. I already validated this idea on my own project and it worked: 10k LoC -> 250 acceptance criteria. And you can find it on my GitHub, I even described steps. If you're too lazy here it is:

You need a SCIP graph. Agent goes over it and builds ledger, one symbol at a time, looks at what kind of problem this symbol solves. This leads you to v0 specs, then you can figure out taxonomy, then you try to fit all those thousands of specs into taxonomy / groups that make sense. And that would be v1 spec but you might want to refine it to v2/v3. And then the only thing would be left is figure out what kind of tests those specs should have (e2e/unit/integration/api/whatever). This is tricky part but doable. I'm thinking for git you wanna do e2e specs. Yes, that's a lot of e2e but the purpose is that we build same expectations for git, and then we replace git with grit and spec should still stay green, right?

Hope that makes sense.

tstansel• 1 month ago

The section about handoffs being frustrating is the same thing ive experienced and why i built https://github.com/TStansel/handoff.

Goal is to be able to transfer context from one agent to another when switching which provider is being used. So when i hit usage limits on claude i can can run handoff claude codex and codex is given a md file to start from and continuing working.

Still early but ive found it useful in my daily flows already!

Footprint0521• 1 month ago

$10-15k in tokens??? Holy frick someone tell this man about deepseek-v4-pro and quick

socratic_weeb• 1 month ago

Of course it has the MIT license, when the original was GPL. To hell with these Rust rewrites!

explodes• 1 month ago

The license change is more than just concerning. This isn't the first time it happens, and won't be the last, without legal action.

lanycrost• 1 month ago

Never had even single issue with the git for a 10 years, doesn't see real reason to switch to this :D

Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

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