Hey everyone, My name is Gustav (zegl) and together with Kiril (videlov) we are the founders of Sturdy (YC W21). We are building an online-first version contro

Hey everyone, My name is Gustav (zegl) and together with Kiril (videlov) we are the founders of Sturdy (YC W21). We are building an online-first version control focused on collaboration. You can think of it as asynchronous pair programming. It still allows parallel work tracks but because Sturdy is centralized and cloud based, it can offer some cool real-time insights. We felt that collaborating on code today is broken. It is difficult to get started and even after learning all the tools and commands, contributing effectively in a team takes too much effort. This got us sketching and building. Sturdy is very opinionated around early and continuous feedback. Here are the core principles we have built our VCS around: * Higher level and more leveraged than existing systems (eg. Git). The actions devs perform are closer to what a human might want. Like “ship this code to production” or “undo the things I did a few moments ago”. In a way this is similar to how high level languages like Python are more expressive than C, at the cost of giving up some control. * Focused on close collaboration. We are doing away with sharing batches of code (Pull / Merge Requests) in favour of continuous feedback. Developers can see each other’s work-in-progress code in real-time. Trying/running each other’s code is a one-click action and so is making code suggestions or comments. * Compatible. Despite being a cloud service, developers can still use their local text editor / IDE. We do this with two-way-synced directories on the workstations. Writing and debugging code is local while management and collaboration are done in the webapp. We have also built a Git compatibility layer allowing exporting & importing. We just finished writing a post telling the story of the mistakes, learnings and vision of our journey https://getsturdy.com/blog/2021-08-18-unbreaking-code-collaboration https://getsturdy.com/blog/2021-08-18-unbreaking-code-collab.... It turns out that building a new VCS is not just technically difficult but challenging Git also raises a lot of eyebrows (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25121416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25121416 ). What do you think? How can we make team VCS better? You can try out Sturdy today for free, we would love to hear what you think. Moving forward we plan to offer Sturdy as a SaaS with a free tier for smaller teams, and a paid tier for larger organisations and codebases. We would love to read any feedback you might have in the comments!