Show HN: Git for AI Agents
github.comhi 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.
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.
Just read before posting. 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.
I think this is very interesting but you need a better slogan.
Many people here made comments such as “why do I need another SVC since agents are pretty good with git”, which means they barely read your blurb and did not understand your project.
Agree. The slogan or header should what is in the first sentence. “Version Control for AI agent activity”
maybe the intro sentence needs changed then. if your elevator pitch is losing the room, change the pitch.
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
That's actually the one feature of cursor that i really miss in claude, even though I need it a lot less often.
This seems easily solved with a tool use hook that calls git add .; git commit a -m "<tool description>", specifying an alternate .git directory if desired
Everything but trivial changes should go through a prompt -> plan -> impl phase where you revise a concrete plan file until it's ready for impl.
Now impl is just a derivation of the plan, and the plan gets checked in with the same commit so that you can see the why, the intent, the objective, the research that informed the decisions.
Much simpler, and a much, much more effective process than prompt -> impl.
yep. i built recursive-mode for this. it offers full traceability with workflow run docs that are human-readable. as a bonus, you can also use this to train or finetune your model. https://recursive-mode.dev/introduction
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.
1: https://github.com/triblespace/triblespace-rs
2: https://github.com/triblespace/faculties
I found LLMs to be really smart with command-line git.
This week I told DeepSeek v4 Flash (max variant) to scavenge for all changes and additions of a specific feature of the project and build a report of the feature timeline with example code and rationale behind the changes.
It fired a ton of read-only git commands (isolated inside Docker) and came up with a neat markdown report of the feature from inception to current state.
If DS4 Flash can do it, for SOTA LLMs like GPT 5.5 and Opus it should be a walk in the park.
That said I don't let LLMs commit. I like to take a close look at every change before committing. Early changes are cheaper.
Great idea! I was really baffled when I found out that that's not how agents, or also Chat-based IDEs like Cursor, work by default (guess how).
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?
Hey, that's cool. Does this support conversation lookups? Like, "find this conversation we talked about yesterday"? I built a similar tool to this, although Regent seems much more elegant: https://github.com/divmgl/clancey/
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.
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes
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.
Hey, this is cool work. By any chance, did you see Cloudflare Artifacts?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/artifacts-git-for-agents-beta/
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.
quite interested in this but I'm working pi/omp only at the moment.
Inspired by entire.io I've vibed a super small extension that seems similar to this: https://github.com/janmechtel/pintire
I expect this feature to eventually end up in the harness
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
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).
That's a good idea. I think you should develop it to make it more versatile.
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 am all for extremely granular control of agents. Good work.
What's git for AI agents? git. What's a browser for AI agents? a browser. What's a Flux Capacitor for AI agents? a Flux Capacitor. You get the point.
I'm really pleased how wildly all the other commenters are misunderstanding this.
I was counting on this concept as competitive advantage.
But since the algorithm isn't going to surface me anyhow, for giggles I'll say I'm leaning more toward darcs than git.
Nice project. The interface feels clean and fast.
can’t you just make agent hooks that do this with plain git?
my agent rebased and forcepushed with conflicts...
Fun idea! There's frankly a lot to learn from reviewing agent sessions.
hm, I can’t find the link?
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.
I think of git more like a defense and quality control against AI slop than something that should be automated
unfortunately, agents have decades of examples for how to use git, bearish on any tool that deviates from git
every show hn now is now
cool but look at myproject.com
it's more like:
This is a great idea! / Cool approach / This looks amazing ... We / I did something similar ... <steal attention>
Bonus points if it looks like an AI generated response for an AI coded project.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]