But but it's "written in Rust™" it is "safe" to use, and it has lots of tests! Surely the author has written lots of Rust before in the past? /s
We are in the era where anyone can call themselves a "software engineer" and never checks or understands the code or writes the tests (or knows what to test for) at all.
p-o 3 hours ago [-]
This is going to be a meta comment, my apologies.
But I now understand the growth in Github's activity that led to its instability recently. Folks just see a project (Cursor's Origin), open up a claude session with a couple harness, and just throw a lot of money, and external energy at generating what will most likely end up being garbage.
But this garbage looks and feels good at the onset, and so a few iterations happen, more PRs, more commits until it dies down.
In the end, almost nothing of value was created, it was just machine creating stuff for other machines, while humans were mostly spectators of an illusion.
Rinse and repeat.
horsawlarway 2 hours ago [-]
I don't really see a problem.
Prior to this it would have been the millions of throw-away "hello world" intro projects, or "todo app" websites. Hell - think of how many people wrote "facebook clones" back in the day.
The author is likely still gaining some skills & experience - although they're more likely project management & ops style skills than technical coding skills (ex - what does interaction with this look like, what's the desired cli surface, how do I configure/deploy it, etc).
Intellectual property is pretty much always going to be a case where 99.999% of everything gets thrown away. Because the cost of duplication is zero, so the model trends very hard towards a "winner take all" popularity contest. A very small number of projects will see large success, everything else will likely be gone in a couple years.
---
If anything, I quite like this new space. I no longer have to worry about trying to make software "big enough" for other people to use. Previously, it would take a large enough investment that simply scratching my own itch was prohibitively expensive - so I had to be picky about what I would pick up and work on.
Now I can bang out all sorts of things designed just for me.
I needed a way to limit screen time for kids, and existing apps are both expensive and junk. Cool - local llms wrote me a new home app for my android tvs in an hour. It does exactly what I want, and nothing else.
I wanted to point my Home assistant audio satellites at unsloth studio instead of ollama. Cool - local ai in unsloth picked apart the ollama implementation and updated it to work with unsloth.
Wanted a new ph monitor for my hydroponics setup, with an auto-doser (some super cheap peristalitic pumps), awesome, an old arduino plus an llm and it runs just fine.
etc...
I love it. It's simple to get relatively effective results on a scale of 1, for a scale of 1. I don't have to worry about trying to get community help or onboard people, or pitch it as a product, etc... It's mine, it'll last as long as I want. It is trash? Sure - to you (seriously, it'd be hard to run, is explicitly designed for my stuff, has no docs, etc... I'm under no illusions that it's not garbage in the broader context). But it's treasure to me.
forestry 2 hours ago [-]
Someone has to pay for it, one way or another.
themgt 7 hours ago [-]
We've created Walinux, a Linux that runs as a durable object in S3, so it's diskless, serverless, transistorless, electricity-less, scales to zero and infinity simultaneously, and can be traded as an NFT ape. Mathematicians are dumbfounded.
The thirty-five thousand other "S3-backed CLI tool for AI" projects are now obsolete.
pelagicAustral 7 hours ago [-]
What would be really cool would be to host apps in your own brain, that way we can harness the power of your own heart to run the stack.
oooyay 4 hours ago [-]
Why use my brain when I can rent space in yours? Hell, I could see building the fee structure in such a way that three close proximity humans run the same app just in case one gets hit by a bus.
ethersteeds 3 hours ago [-]
That's a new one for the cyberpunk dystopia bingo card: poor people renting capacity in their brains to multinationals. Makes you stupider, and the DRM implants give you mood disorders, but have you seen how much apartments go for in 2036?!
That one is upfront that it's vibecoded as an experiment. I can respect that.
xena 2 hours ago [-]
I've been thinking about circling back to improve it. Right now one of the major limitations is that it uses a filesystem abstraction as the main bridge from git to object storage. I really wanted to see how far I could go by kitbashing parts together from software I'd already made. Turns out you can go pretty damn far!
Turns out this is kind of a horrible idea in practice in ways that only really turn up when you try to square peg -> round hole as hard as I did (pushing gcc.git took multiple hours due to filesystem iops latency, turns out a thing designed for nanoseconds of latency copes poorly with a setup that has milliseconds of latency). I'm probably going to end up using the filesystem as a staging area and then have the git server asynchronously unpack git objects into individual S3 objects. I'm still not sure how to best implement merging or other git operations, but this is just kind of a hard problem in practice.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
Could you modify Git itself to access several objects at the same time? Possibly not in C, but how about the Go reimplementation since concurrency is quite easy in Go?
xena 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know enough about how the relevant libraries and primitives work to give your question the meaningful response it deserves. A lot of the problem here is that most of this implementation requires me to really deeply understand the plumbing of Git in ways I currently don't. This is part of why my prototype was done with heavy assistance from agentic coding tools. I was hoping that those hard parts could be abstracted away for later with load-bearing hacks. It seems that the chickens came home to roost much faster than I expected.
ShinyLeftPad 12 hours ago [-]
Just show us the prompt(s) ;)
lloydatkinson 7 hours ago [-]
Even the README… ugh.
> no state that matters
datastru 7 hours ago [-]
How did this project get more than 1000 stars in just a few days? Are GitHub and Ycombinator (both company and chatbot-community) just fake and manipulative?
skrebbel 7 hours ago [-]
Because it was made/vibed by the Shopify CEO who has a pretty good twitter game
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
Uh, obviously yes to both?
gravypod 5 hours ago [-]
Is there a market for an actual GitHub competitor now that everyone is looking around and is very angry about stability?
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
There are already several but it turns out that network effects dominate all else, so there is not and never will be a market. Just like Sourceforge, nothing will ever replace it until it actually dies.
But if you weaken what you want there are several already.
zoobab 5 hours ago [-]
Tarballs over FTP was better.
fasdarasa2000 2 hours ago [-]
Please camouflage Claude use a little bit better, the README is so cringe it makes it actually hard to understand what the value proposition really is
kimos 1 hours ago [-]
He’s goal isn’t to camouflage. Shopify is full AI maximalism, and Tobi’s goal as the CEO is to prove that he can change the world with AI and that his employees should follow.
Up to the reader to believe it or not.
the_alchemist 12 hours ago [-]
I'm confused by the usage of the word consensus in the explanation, to me it seems like a last-write-wins strategy, no consensus involved?
brunes 6 hours ago [-]
The description came from an LLM. It's slop.
drifkin 11 hours ago [-]
the compare-and-swap prevents out-of-sync instances from stomping on the source of truth manifest
baalimago 12 hours ago [-]
I am working on a very similar mcp server which allows agents to communicate and share notes without race conditions, using git and s3 as the driver [0]. Funny how "inventions" like these pop up independently.
[0]: slivingdoc.dev
ksajadi 10 hours ago [-]
looks very similar to markbase.cloud
lionkor 8 hours ago [-]
I struggle very much to understand the "why".
There's a git server, it's installed when you install git, and it really does work very well.
> every instance is a disposable cache that revalidates with one conditional GET. No database, no Redis, no gossip, no leader, no node identity.
Git famously doesn't use that either...? What is the point?
> "just put the repositories on NFS" failed at every large host that tried it
Yeah, that's a terrible idea. You can just host Git on a server or two. Where's the limit? How much does it scale to put a single 64 core server with a 10 gbit link on a local network and put ONLY git on it? Is that really that slow and bad? You can give it 20+ TB of RAID storage for VERY cheap. What is the limit you're hitting? 200ms ping to it from across the world? Is that the issue we're solving?
> walgit takes that as-is, and adds what a monorepo on small machines needs: serving refs and web pages for a repository whose packs will never fit on the instance (a remote reader over HTTP range requests), keeping commits and trees local while blobs stay in the bucket (the history pack), and moving clone bytes out of the server entirely (bundle-uri: fresh clones and catch-ups are static files the bucket or a CDN hands out).
So it's about monorepos that, for some reason, have blobs large enough to be impossible to serve via range requests, shallow clones, etc? Are people committing binary blobs of 1TB+ to their git? There's Git LFS, that hooks up an object store (like S3) to git for large files.
As an aside, I kind of adore that Tobi's latest post on his website, from 2019, talks about shopify's carbon emissions, meanwhile today his github is full of AI slop projects and enabling others to "vibe" even harder. He also missed that his clanker wrote an announcement post; https://github.com/tobi/walgit/blob/main/docs/announcing-wal...
unshavedyak 2 hours ago [-]
> There's Git LFS, that hooks up an object store (like S3) to git for large files.
As an aside i keep meaning to review Git LFS to see if there's some fundamental reason that it requires a server. Eg could Git LFS write directly to an Object Storage?
I run a lfs proxy at home and it bothers me that it exists heh. Though i don't run ObjectStorage (minio/etc), so i guess swapping out my lfs server for OS wouldn't really net me anything - but still, feels like it was designed first and foremost for the Github API rather than generically for Git users with Git principles.
The blog article explains why this is needed — that is, needed by any git-based code forge that wants to scale to many, many repos.
ljm 7 hours ago [-]
The irony is that S3 is a database, so the first assertion that there is no database is fundamentally incorrect.
gexla 6 hours ago [-]
My understanding was that it was totally an experiment to create something that works like Cursor's Origin or whatever it's called. Just the idea of it is probably not something you would care about for your own usage.
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
Pedantically the .git folder is a database, but so is S3.
brunes 6 hours ago [-]
You're debating with AI slop...
Tobi didn't write any of this. He probably has never even read it.
Yet another fine example here! Data comes in, we make sure we don't overwrite work, we write what we have.
merb 12 hours ago [-]
Fun thing Google cloud storage supported that for a long time now. Just AWS took its time.
cavisne 59 minutes ago [-]
The challenge is not the functionality, it’s doing it cheaply at scale. Google Cloud storage has raised prices a few times, and added various quotas and limits when they realized they couldn’t sustain the service as is.
chanux 10 hours ago [-]
I immediately headed to a search engine to see if Terraform state (lock) on S3 is finally unshackled from a DynamoDB.
And it has since Terraform v1.11
bluerooibos 4 hours ago [-]
Oh cool, vibe-coded slop from Tobi Lutke, the right-wing fash CEO who wants wealthy folks' votes [1] to carry more weight than the rest of us (the plebs) - no thanks
We are in the era where anyone can call themselves a "software engineer" and never checks or understands the code or writes the tests (or knows what to test for) at all.
But I now understand the growth in Github's activity that led to its instability recently. Folks just see a project (Cursor's Origin), open up a claude session with a couple harness, and just throw a lot of money, and external energy at generating what will most likely end up being garbage.
But this garbage looks and feels good at the onset, and so a few iterations happen, more PRs, more commits until it dies down.
In the end, almost nothing of value was created, it was just machine creating stuff for other machines, while humans were mostly spectators of an illusion.
Rinse and repeat.
Prior to this it would have been the millions of throw-away "hello world" intro projects, or "todo app" websites. Hell - think of how many people wrote "facebook clones" back in the day.
The author is likely still gaining some skills & experience - although they're more likely project management & ops style skills than technical coding skills (ex - what does interaction with this look like, what's the desired cli surface, how do I configure/deploy it, etc).
Intellectual property is pretty much always going to be a case where 99.999% of everything gets thrown away. Because the cost of duplication is zero, so the model trends very hard towards a "winner take all" popularity contest. A very small number of projects will see large success, everything else will likely be gone in a couple years.
---
If anything, I quite like this new space. I no longer have to worry about trying to make software "big enough" for other people to use. Previously, it would take a large enough investment that simply scratching my own itch was prohibitively expensive - so I had to be picky about what I would pick up and work on.
Now I can bang out all sorts of things designed just for me.
I needed a way to limit screen time for kids, and existing apps are both expensive and junk. Cool - local llms wrote me a new home app for my android tvs in an hour. It does exactly what I want, and nothing else.
I wanted to point my Home assistant audio satellites at unsloth studio instead of ollama. Cool - local ai in unsloth picked apart the ollama implementation and updated it to work with unsloth.
Wanted a new ph monitor for my hydroponics setup, with an auto-doser (some super cheap peristalitic pumps), awesome, an old arduino plus an llm and it runs just fine.
etc...
I love it. It's simple to get relatively effective results on a scale of 1, for a scale of 1. I don't have to worry about trying to get community help or onboard people, or pitch it as a product, etc... It's mine, it'll last as long as I want. It is trash? Sure - to you (seriously, it'd be hard to run, is explicitly designed for my stuff, has no docs, etc... I'm under no illusions that it's not garbage in the broader context). But it's treasure to me.
The thirty-five thousand other "S3-backed CLI tool for AI" projects are now obsolete.
The buckets then are actual remotes and double as static sites. GitSocial website itself is hosted on Cloudflare R2.
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661938
Turns out this is kind of a horrible idea in practice in ways that only really turn up when you try to square peg -> round hole as hard as I did (pushing gcc.git took multiple hours due to filesystem iops latency, turns out a thing designed for nanoseconds of latency copes poorly with a setup that has milliseconds of latency). I'm probably going to end up using the filesystem as a staging area and then have the git server asynchronously unpack git objects into individual S3 objects. I'm still not sure how to best implement merging or other git operations, but this is just kind of a hard problem in practice.
> no state that matters
But if you weaken what you want there are several already.
Up to the reader to believe it or not.
[0]: slivingdoc.dev
There's a git server, it's installed when you install git, and it really does work very well.
> every instance is a disposable cache that revalidates with one conditional GET. No database, no Redis, no gossip, no leader, no node identity.
Git famously doesn't use that either...? What is the point?
> "just put the repositories on NFS" failed at every large host that tried it
Yeah, that's a terrible idea. You can just host Git on a server or two. Where's the limit? How much does it scale to put a single 64 core server with a 10 gbit link on a local network and put ONLY git on it? Is that really that slow and bad? You can give it 20+ TB of RAID storage for VERY cheap. What is the limit you're hitting? 200ms ping to it from across the world? Is that the issue we're solving?
> walgit takes that as-is, and adds what a monorepo on small machines needs: serving refs and web pages for a repository whose packs will never fit on the instance (a remote reader over HTTP range requests), keeping commits and trees local while blobs stay in the bucket (the history pack), and moving clone bytes out of the server entirely (bundle-uri: fresh clones and catch-ups are static files the bucket or a CDN hands out).
So it's about monorepos that, for some reason, have blobs large enough to be impossible to serve via range requests, shallow clones, etc? Are people committing binary blobs of 1TB+ to their git? There's Git LFS, that hooks up an object store (like S3) to git for large files.
As an aside, I kind of adore that Tobi's latest post on his website, from 2019, talks about shopify's carbon emissions, meanwhile today his github is full of AI slop projects and enabling others to "vibe" even harder. He also missed that his clanker wrote an announcement post; https://github.com/tobi/walgit/blob/main/docs/announcing-wal...
As an aside i keep meaning to review Git LFS to see if there's some fundamental reason that it requires a server. Eg could Git LFS write directly to an Object Storage?
I run a lfs proxy at home and it bothers me that it exists heh. Though i don't run ObjectStorage (minio/etc), so i guess swapping out my lfs server for OS wouldn't really net me anything - but still, feels like it was designed first and foremost for the Github API rather than generically for Git users with Git principles.
The blog article explains why this is needed — that is, needed by any git-based code forge that wants to scale to many, many repos.
Tobi didn't write any of this. He probably has never even read it.
PicoMQ also showing up today, a Durable Streams implementation on object store (S3). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421806 https://picomq.com/
Celld, a Durable Objects implementation, is also heavily heavily using conditional put, for all manners of coordination. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185430 https://celld.dev
Longstanding SlateDB is built around it too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714858 https://slatedb.io/
Yet another fine example here! Data comes in, we make sure we don't overwrite work, we write what we have.
And it has since Terraform v1.11
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-...
Amazing he still codes. But likely more experiment than prod level.