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> Checkpoints are a new primitive that automatically captures agent context as first-class, versioned data in Git. When you commit code generated by an agent, C

> Checkpoints are a new primitive that automatically captures agent context as first-class, versioned data in Git. When you commit code generated by an agent, Checkpoints capture the full session alongside the commit: the transcript, prompts, files touched, token usage, tool calls and more. This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you.

hoten 8mo ago
I see the utility in this as an extension to git / source control. But how do VCs make money of it?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
konaraddi 8mo ago
100% agree because there’s a lot of value in understanding how and why past code was written. It can be used to make better decisions faster around code to write in the future. E.g., if you’ve ever wondered why code was written in a particular way X instead of Y then you’ll have the context to understand whether X is still relevant or if Y can be adopted. E.g., easier to prompt AI to write the next commit when it knows all the context behind the current/previous commit’s development process.
- majormajor 8mo ago
  I wonder. How often will that context actually be that valuable vs just more bloat to fill up future API calls with to burn tokens.
- buster 8mo ago
  But that's not what is in the whole context. The whole context contains a lot of noise and false "thoughts". What the AI needs to do is to document the software project in an efficient manner without duplication. That's not what this tool is doing. I question the value in storing all the crap in git.
nialv7 8mo ago
Sure... you `git add` the context text generated by AI and `git commit` it, could be useful. Is that worth 60 million?
- Klonoar 8mo ago
  It’s good to know that a few decades later the same generic Dropbox-weekend take can be made.
  - tjkatr 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    99% of projects the take applies to are massive flops. The Dropbox weekend take is almost always correct.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bastawhiz 8mo ago
      Yeah I guess why would anyone build anything, 99% of projects are flops.
      - Spivak 8mo ago
        I mean a dev tool that's seemingly failing to resonate with developers as to why they would pay for this is a pretty good way to tell if it's going to fall in the 1%. The Dropbox take was wrong because they didn't understand the market for the product. This time the people commenting are the target audience. You even get the secondary way this product will lose even if turns out to be a good idea, existing git forges won't want to lose users and so will standardize and support attaching metadata to commits.
        8mo ago
soulofmischief 8mo ago
I built out the same thing in my own custom software forge. Every single part of the collaborative development process is memoized.
- stitched2gethr 8mo ago
  And how are you using it now? Have you seen real value weeks or months on?
  - soulofmischief 8mo ago
    It's in active development in my free time. I've built various agent orchestration systems over the years for different reasons, ever since the GPT-3 API. I can tell you utility has continually risen, the models are just getting better, and late 2025 was an inflection point, which is why we're seeing all of these orchestration solutions pop up now. I still have kinks to work out in mine but it's already usable for building software. Once I get to v1 I think it will provide enough value to be useful for me in particular. I don't have enough data to speak about months on yet, but if I think the experiment is a success then I will do a Show HN or something. The gist is you can clone a repo or start a project from scratch, each engineering agent gets a worktree, you work with the manager agent and it dispatches and manages other agents. there are playbooks which agents contextually turn into specific tasks, each of which is tracked much like CI/CD. You can see all the tool calls, and all of the communication between both agents and humans. The application model is ticket-based. Everything revolves around the all-holy ticket. It's like a prompt, but it becomes a foundation for tying together every bit of work related to the process of developing the feature. So you can see the progress of the ticket through the organization kanban style, or watch from a dashboard, or look at specific tickets. There are multiple review steps where human review and intervention are required. Agents are able to escalate to humans whenever they think they need to. There is a permission system, where agents have to seek permissions from other agents or humans in a chain of command in order to do certain tasks. Everything is audited and memoized, allowing for extreme accountability and process refinement stages. Additionally, every agent "belongs" to either another agent or a human, so there is always a human somewhere in the chain of command who is responsible and accountable for the actions of his agent team. This team includes the manager agent, engineering agents, test agents, QA agents, etc, each loaded with different context, motivations and tools to keep them on track and attempt to minimize the common failure modes I experience while working closely with these tools all day.
tjkatr 8mo ago
[flagged]
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago
  I think if you add some more emotional vitriolic language to your reply you’ll finally, finally get your point across. /s
dpweb 8mo ago
I know about "the entire developer world has been refactored" and all, but what exactly does this thing do? Runs git checkpoint every time an agent makes changes?
bergheim 8mo ago
A year ago I added memory to my Emacs helper [0]. It was just lines in org-mode. I thought it was so stupid. It worked though. Sort of. That's how a trillion dollar company also does it, turns out. 0: https://github.com/karthink/gptel https://github.com/karthink/gptel
Aeolun 8mo ago
This is literally what claude code already does minus the commit attachment. It’s just very fancy marketing speak for the exact same thing. I’m happy to believe maybe they’ll make something useful with 60M (quite a lot for a seed round though), but Maybe not get all lyrical about what they have now.
- sothatsit 8mo ago
  Claude Code captures this locally, not in version control alongside commits.
  - otterley 8mo ago
    I wonder how difficult it would be for Claude Code to have such a feature in a future release.
bmurphy1976 8mo ago
I haven't read the article yet but this conversation reminds me of Docker. Lots of people "didn't get it." I told them at the time: if you don't get it you aren't ready for it yet so don't worry about it. When you do need it, you'll get it and then you'll use it and never look back. Look at where we are with containers now.
- darkwater 8mo ago
  And look where Docker Inc is now (which is one of the points some critics are making)
  - dasil003 8mo ago
    Sure, but long term business success aside, I’m sure most of the folks working at this company would die for a fraction of the adoption curve docker had.
vrosas 8mo ago
ehhhh is it really that useful though? Sounds way more noisy than anything, and a great way to burn through tokens. It's like founding a startup to solve the problem of people squashing their commits. Also, it sounds like something Claude Code/Codex/etc could quickly add an extension for.
- weird-eye-issue 8mo ago
  How would this use any extra tokens? Just seems like it's serializing the existing context
tbrownaw 8mo ago
[flagged]
- MrDarcy 8mo ago
  Look it’s obvious at this point to anyone who is actually using the tools. We can articulate it but why should we bother when it’s so obvious. We are at an inflection point where discussion about this, even on HN, is useless until the people in the conversation are on a similar level again. Until then we have a very large gap in a bimodal distribution, and it’s fruitless to talk to the other population.
  - tbrownaw 8mo ago
    Not really, because those details aren't actually relevant to code archaeology. You could have someone collect and analyze a bunch of them, to look for patterns and try to improve your shared .md files, but that's about it
- dang 8mo ago
  Please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. That's an internet snark trope and we're trying to avoid those on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
toraway 8mo ago
What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here? It's somewhat strange to regularly read HN threads confidently asserting that the cost of software is trending towards zero and software engineering as a profession is dead, but also that an AI dev tool that basically hooks onto Git/Claude Code/terminal session history is worth multiples of $60+ million dollars.
- elif 8mo ago
  The same moat that git had on svn, a better mental paradigm over the same fundamental system, more suited to how SWE changed over a decade.
  - _heimdall 8mo ago
    git didn't succeed based on the mental model. It got a foot in the door with better tooling and developer experience then blew the door open when GitHub found a way to productize it.
  - delusional 8mo ago
    Git doesn't have a moat. Git isn't commercial software, and doesn't need to strong arm you into accepting bad license terms.
  - dasil003 8mo ago
    I wouldn’t characterize it as a moat exactly. svn/cvs just had a braindead data model. Linus started git with a fundamentally better one. I definitely see the potential of AI-native version control, it will take a bit more to convince me this is a similar step-level improvement though.
- YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
  > HN threads confidently asserting I have never seen any thread that unanimously asserts this. Even if they do, having HN/reddit asserting something as evidence is wrong way to look at things.
throw10920 8mo ago
Maybe use critical thinking instead of a mindless dismissal? The fact that you aren't haven't offered a single counterargument to any other posters' points and have to resort to pearl-clutching is pretty good proof that you can't actually respond to any points and are just emotionally lashing out.
lubujackson 8mo ago
Wow, read through the comments and you weren't joking. I attribute this to crossroads of "this release is v0.1 of what we are building" and the HN crowd who have been scrolling past 120 AI frameworks and hot takes daily and have no patience for anything that isn't immediately 100% useful to them in the moment. I find the framing of the problem to be very accurate, which is very encouraging. People saying "I can roll my own in a weekend" might be right, but they don't have $60M in the bank, which makes all the difference. My take is this product is getting released right now because they need the data to build on. The raw data is the thing, then they can crunch numbers and build some analysis to produce dynamic context, possibly using shared patterns across repos. Despite what HN thinks, $60M doesn't just fall in your lap without a clear plan. The moat is the trust people will have to upload their data, not the code that runs it. I expect to see some interesting things from this in the coming months.
- vasachi 8mo ago
  Didn’t Juicero get more than a $100M? Do you think they had a clear plan? How much did Rome get? Did they have a clear plan?
vardalab 8mo ago
For the last three or four months, what I've been doing is anytime I have Claude write a comment on an issue, it just adds a session ID, file path and the VM it is on. That way, whenever we have some stuff that comes up, we just search through issues and then we can also retrace the session that produced the work and it's all traceable. In general, I just work through gitea issues and sometimes beads. I couldn't stand having all these MD files in my repo because I was just drowning in documentation, so having it in issues has been working really nicely and agents know how to work with issues. I did have it write a gitea utility and they are pretty happy using/abusing it. Anytime I see that they call it in some way that generates errors, I just have them improve the utility. And by this point, it pretty much always works. It's been really nice.
bambax 8mo ago
I currently develop small utilities with the help of AI, but am far from vibe coding or using agents. I review every single suggestion and do some refactoring at each step, before any commit (sometimes heavy refactoring; sometimes reorganizing everything). In my experience LLMs tend to touch everything all of the time and don't naturally think about simplification, centralization and separation of concerns. They don't care about structure, they're all over the place. One needs to breathe on their shoulders to produce anything organized. Maybe there's a way to give them more autonomy by writing the whole program in pseudo-code with just function signatures and let them flesh it out. I haven't tried that yet but it may be interesting.
- frumiousirc 8mo ago
  Yours matches my own experience and work habits. My mental model is that LLMs are obedient but lazy. The laziness shows in the output matching the letter of the prompt but with as high "code entropy" as possible. What I mean by "code entropy" is, for example, copy-paste-tweak (high entropy) is always easier (on the short term) for LLMs (and humans) to output than defining a function to hold concepts common across the pastes with the "tweak" represented by function arguments. LLMs will produce high entropy output unless constrained to produce lower entropy ("better") code. Until/unless LLMs are trained to actually apply craft learned by experienced humans, we must be explicit in our prompts. For example, I get good results from say Claude Sonnnet when my instruction include: - Statements of specific file, class, function names to use. - Explicit design patterns to apply. ("loop over the outer product of lists of choices for each category") - Implementation hints ("use itertools.product() to iterate over the combinations") - And, "ask questions if you are uncertain" helps trigger an iteration to quickly clarify something instead of fixing the resulting code. This specificity makes prompting a lot more work but it pays off. I only go this far when I care about the resulting code. And, I still often "retouch" as you also describe. OTOH, when I'm vibing I'll just give end goals and let the slop flow.
matsemann 8mo ago
> if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you. You could perhaps start by telling what value you see in this? And what this company does that someone can't easily do themselves while committing to GH?
benterix 8mo ago
>. This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you. It's almost a meme: whenever a commercial product is criticized on HN, a prominent thread is started with a classic tone-policing "why are you guys so negative". (Well, we explained why: their moat is trivial to replicate.)
rafaelmn 8mo ago
Is that sarcasm ? Dump a bunch of JSON from llm proxy and commit it ? Sounds like billion dollar secret sauce to me.
whh 8mo ago
I'm trying it out now. If it works, I think it'd be great for my agentic workflows where I need to figure out why something was done a specific way. I have a lot of concurrent agents working on things at the same time, so I'm not always sure why a piece of code is the way it is months later.
- whh 8mo ago
  I've used it for a couple of hours. A few observations: - It's nice to see conversation context alongside the change itself. - I wasn't able to see Claude Code utilise past commit context in understanding code. - It's a tad unclear (and possible unreliable) in what is called 'checkpointing'. - It mucked up my commit messages by replacing the first line with a sort of AI request title or similar. Sadly, because of the last point (we use semantic release and git-cz) I've had to uninstall it.
  - georgf 8mo ago
    This sounds like you're using the auto-commit strategy instead of the default manual-commit strategy. manual-commit does not automatically commit. It just adds a trailer to the git commit message to link the checkpoint to the commit.
csmpltn 8mo ago
[flagged]
- grimgrin 8mo ago
  I will never use this platform. i didn't even click into it. pathetically, i did click to view comments But I think commenting on someone's bio is the kinda harshness you only do in the moment. the kinda thing I'd approach differently in hindsight (one that isn't an attempt to be cruel)
  - csmpltn 8mo ago
    Harsher than the OP who is ridiculing everybody who criticizes the product being presented here in this thread?
    - grimgrin 8mo ago
      amongst all the threads, it appears they are quite outnumbered lol
    - stfp 8mo ago
      Yes, much harsher > This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you. Just an opinion and not ridiculing or attacking someone specifically
mikodin 8mo ago
I've found immense value in this, am already doing it with Pi(https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono) and it's very easy to replicate
hansmayer 8mo ago
> This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you. This sounds a lot like that line from Microsoft's AI CEO "not understanding the negativity towards AI". And Satya instructing us to not use the term "slop" any more. Yes we don't see value in taking a git primitive like "commit" and renaming it to "checkpoint". I wonder whether the branches going to be renamed to something like "parallel history" :)
soerxpso 8mo ago
Do you mean the value in this specific tool, or in the concept? You don't need a dedicated tool to store agent session transcripts and link them to commits. This can be accomplished by a 10-line bash script.
JPKab 8mo ago
The most active HNers are just extremely negative on AI. I understand the impulse (you spend years honing your craft, and then something comes along and automates major portions of it) but it's driven by emotion and ego-defense and those engaged in it simply don't recognize what's motivating them. Their ego-defense is actually self-fulfilling, because they don't even try to properly learn how to leverage LLMs for coding so they give it a huge task they want it to fail on, don't properly break it into tasks, and then say "i told you it sucks" when it fails to one shot it.
- lgrapenthin 8mo ago
  The negativity is driven by outrageous claims how AIs will replace programmers, or how english is the PL of the future. T
- BoorishBears 8mo ago
  Even this response shows why the most active ones are outwardly negative on AI. I use AI a ton, but there are just way too many grifters right now, and their favorite refrain is to dismiss any amount of negativity with "oh you're just mad/scared/jealous/etc. it replaces you". But people who actually build things don't talk like that, grifters do. You ask them what they've built before and after the current LLM takeoff and it's crickets or slop. Like the Inglourious Basterds fingers meme. There's no way that someone complaining about coding agents not being there yet, can't simultaneously be someone who'd look forward to a day they could just will things into existence because it's not actually about what AI might build for them: it's about "line will go up and I've attached myself to the line like a barnacle, so I must proselytize everyone into joining me in pushing the line ever higher up" These people have no understanding of what's happening, but they invent one completely divorced from any reality other than the reality them and their ilk have projected into thin air via clout. It looks like mental illness and hoarding Mac Minis and it's distasteful to people who know better, especially since their nonsense is so overwhelmingly loud and noisy and starts to drown out any actual signal.
tflinton 8mo ago
How does this differ from what Github Copilot does when writing its .github/copilot-instructions.md? That doesn't keep the transcript or prompts, but it does keep quite a bit of the context and a declarative state of the decisions/design considerations made so another AI bot can pickup and have enough context to understand the rationale. I'm also not really convinced that any AI agent wouldn't still parse the code to understand more about the context vs. just using the checkpoint.
abustamam 8mo ago
I think this is neat; in fact, I orchestrated my AI agents to do something similar (keep a log of files touched and why). And I have agents refer to the work log as well when they are unclear on why something exists. It's not 1:1 with checkpoints, but I find such things to be useful.

hoten 8mo ago

I see the utility in this as an extension to git / source control. But how do VCs make money of it?

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

konaraddi 8mo ago

100% agree because there’s a lot of value in understanding how and why past code was written. It can be used to make better decisions faster around code to write in the future. E.g., if you’ve ever wondered why code was written in a particular way X instead of Y then you’ll have the context to understand whether X is still relevant or if Y can be adopted. E.g., easier to prompt AI to write the next commit when it knows all the context behind the current/previous commit’s development process.

majormajor 8mo ago
I wonder. How often will that context actually be that valuable vs just more bloat to fill up future API calls with to burn tokens.
buster 8mo ago
But that's not what is in the whole context. The whole context contains a lot of noise and false "thoughts". What the AI needs to do is to document the software project in an efficient manner without duplication. That's not what this tool is doing. I question the value in storing all the crap in git.

nialv7 8mo ago

Sure... you `git add` the context text generated by AI and `git commit` it, could be useful. Is that worth 60 million?

Klonoar 8mo ago
It’s good to know that a few decades later the same generic Dropbox-weekend take can be made.
- tjkatr 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  99% of projects the take applies to are massive flops. The Dropbox weekend take is almost always correct.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bastawhiz 8mo ago
    Yeah I guess why would anyone build anything, 99% of projects are flops.
    - Spivak 8mo ago
      I mean a dev tool that's seemingly failing to resonate with developers as to why they would pay for this is a pretty good way to tell if it's going to fall in the 1%. The Dropbox take was wrong because they didn't understand the market for the product. This time the people commenting are the target audience. You even get the secondary way this product will lose even if turns out to be a good idea, existing git forges won't want to lose users and so will standardize and support attaching metadata to commits.
      - 8mo ago

soulofmischief 8mo ago

I built out the same thing in my own custom software forge. Every single part of the collaborative development process is memoized.

stitched2gethr 8mo ago
And how are you using it now? Have you seen real value weeks or months on?
- soulofmischief 8mo ago
  It's in active development in my free time. I've built various agent orchestration systems over the years for different reasons, ever since the GPT-3 API. I can tell you utility has continually risen, the models are just getting better, and late 2025 was an inflection point, which is why we're seeing all of these orchestration solutions pop up now. I still have kinks to work out in mine but it's already usable for building software. Once I get to v1 I think it will provide enough value to be useful for me in particular. I don't have enough data to speak about months on yet, but if I think the experiment is a success then I will do a Show HN or something. The gist is you can clone a repo or start a project from scratch, each engineering agent gets a worktree, you work with the manager agent and it dispatches and manages other agents. there are playbooks which agents contextually turn into specific tasks, each of which is tracked much like CI/CD. You can see all the tool calls, and all of the communication between both agents and humans. The application model is ticket-based. Everything revolves around the all-holy ticket. It's like a prompt, but it becomes a foundation for tying together every bit of work related to the process of developing the feature. So you can see the progress of the ticket through the organization kanban style, or watch from a dashboard, or look at specific tickets. There are multiple review steps where human review and intervention are required. Agents are able to escalate to humans whenever they think they need to. There is a permission system, where agents have to seek permissions from other agents or humans in a chain of command in order to do certain tasks. Everything is audited and memoized, allowing for extreme accountability and process refinement stages. Additionally, every agent "belongs" to either another agent or a human, so there is always a human somewhere in the chain of command who is responsible and accountable for the actions of his agent team. This team includes the manager agent, engineering agents, test agents, QA agents, etc, each loaded with different context, motivations and tools to keep them on track and attempt to minimize the common failure modes I experience while working closely with these tools all day.

tjkatr 8mo ago

[flagged]

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago
I think if you add some more emotional vitriolic language to your reply you’ll finally, finally get your point across. /s

dpweb 8mo ago

I know about "the entire developer world has been refactored" and all, but what exactly does this thing do? Runs git checkpoint every time an agent makes changes?

bergheim 8mo ago

A year ago I added memory to my Emacs helper [0]. It was just lines in org-mode. I thought it was so stupid. It worked though. Sort of. That's how a trillion dollar company also does it, turns out. 0: https://github.com/karthink/gptel https://github.com/karthink/gptel

Aeolun 8mo ago

This is literally what claude code already does minus the commit attachment. It’s just very fancy marketing speak for the exact same thing. I’m happy to believe maybe they’ll make something useful with 60M (quite a lot for a seed round though), but Maybe not get all lyrical about what they have now.

sothatsit 8mo ago
Claude Code captures this locally, not in version control alongside commits.
- otterley 8mo ago
  I wonder how difficult it would be for Claude Code to have such a feature in a future release.

bmurphy1976 8mo ago

I haven't read the article yet but this conversation reminds me of Docker. Lots of people "didn't get it." I told them at the time: if you don't get it you aren't ready for it yet so don't worry about it. When you do need it, you'll get it and then you'll use it and never look back. Look at where we are with containers now.

darkwater 8mo ago
And look where Docker Inc is now (which is one of the points some critics are making)
- dasil003 8mo ago
  Sure, but long term business success aside, I’m sure most of the folks working at this company would die for a fraction of the adoption curve docker had.

vrosas 8mo ago

ehhhh is it really that useful though? Sounds way more noisy than anything, and a great way to burn through tokens. It's like founding a startup to solve the problem of people squashing their commits. Also, it sounds like something Claude Code/Codex/etc could quickly add an extension for.

weird-eye-issue 8mo ago
How would this use any extra tokens? Just seems like it's serializing the existing context

tbrownaw 8mo ago

[flagged]

MrDarcy 8mo ago
Look it’s obvious at this point to anyone who is actually using the tools. We can articulate it but why should we bother when it’s so obvious. We are at an inflection point where discussion about this, even on HN, is useless until the people in the conversation are on a similar level again. Until then we have a very large gap in a bimodal distribution, and it’s fruitless to talk to the other population.
- tbrownaw 8mo ago
  Not really, because those details aren't actually relevant to code archaeology. You could have someone collect and analyze a bunch of them, to look for patterns and try to improve your shared .md files, but that's about it
dang 8mo ago
Please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. That's an internet snark trope and we're trying to avoid those on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

toraway 8mo ago

What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here? It's somewhat strange to regularly read HN threads confidently asserting that the cost of software is trending towards zero and software engineering as a profession is dead, but also that an AI dev tool that basically hooks onto Git/Claude Code/terminal session history is worth multiples of $60+ million dollars.

elif 8mo ago
The same moat that git had on svn, a better mental paradigm over the same fundamental system, more suited to how SWE changed over a decade.
- _heimdall 8mo ago
  git didn't succeed based on the mental model. It got a foot in the door with better tooling and developer experience then blew the door open when GitHub found a way to productize it.
- delusional 8mo ago
  Git doesn't have a moat. Git isn't commercial software, and doesn't need to strong arm you into accepting bad license terms.
- dasil003 8mo ago
  I wouldn’t characterize it as a moat exactly. svn/cvs just had a braindead data model. Linus started git with a fundamentally better one. I definitely see the potential of AI-native version control, it will take a bit more to convince me this is a similar step-level improvement though.
YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
> HN threads confidently asserting I have never seen any thread that unanimously asserts this. Even if they do, having HN/reddit asserting something as evidence is wrong way to look at things.

throw10920 8mo ago

Maybe use critical thinking instead of a mindless dismissal? The fact that you aren't haven't offered a single counterargument to any other posters' points and have to resort to pearl-clutching is pretty good proof that you can't actually respond to any points and are just emotionally lashing out.

lubujackson 8mo ago

Wow, read through the comments and you weren't joking. I attribute this to crossroads of "this release is v0.1 of what we are building" and the HN crowd who have been scrolling past 120 AI frameworks and hot takes daily and have no patience for anything that isn't immediately 100% useful to them in the moment. I find the framing of the problem to be very accurate, which is very encouraging. People saying "I can roll my own in a weekend" might be right, but they don't have $60M in the bank, which makes all the difference. My take is this product is getting released right now because they need the data to build on. The raw data is the thing, then they can crunch numbers and build some analysis to produce dynamic context, possibly using shared patterns across repos. Despite what HN thinks, $60M doesn't just fall in your lap without a clear plan. The moat is the trust people will have to upload their data, not the code that runs it. I expect to see some interesting things from this in the coming months.

vasachi 8mo ago
Didn’t Juicero get more than a $100M? Do you think they had a clear plan? How much did Rome get? Did they have a clear plan?

vardalab 8mo ago

For the last three or four months, what I've been doing is anytime I have Claude write a comment on an issue, it just adds a session ID, file path and the VM it is on. That way, whenever we have some stuff that comes up, we just search through issues and then we can also retrace the session that produced the work and it's all traceable. In general, I just work through gitea issues and sometimes beads. I couldn't stand having all these MD files in my repo because I was just drowning in documentation, so having it in issues has been working really nicely and agents know how to work with issues. I did have it write a gitea utility and they are pretty happy using/abusing it. Anytime I see that they call it in some way that generates errors, I just have them improve the utility. And by this point, it pretty much always works. It's been really nice.

bambax 8mo ago

I currently develop small utilities with the help of AI, but am far from vibe coding or using agents. I review every single suggestion and do some refactoring at each step, before any commit (sometimes heavy refactoring; sometimes reorganizing everything). In my experience LLMs tend to touch everything all of the time and don't naturally think about simplification, centralization and separation of concerns. They don't care about structure, they're all over the place. One needs to breathe on their shoulders to produce anything organized. Maybe there's a way to give them more autonomy by writing the whole program in pseudo-code with just function signatures and let them flesh it out. I haven't tried that yet but it may be interesting.

frumiousirc 8mo ago
Yours matches my own experience and work habits. My mental model is that LLMs are obedient but lazy. The laziness shows in the output matching the letter of the prompt but with as high "code entropy" as possible. What I mean by "code entropy" is, for example, copy-paste-tweak (high entropy) is always easier (on the short term) for LLMs (and humans) to output than defining a function to hold concepts common across the pastes with the "tweak" represented by function arguments. LLMs will produce high entropy output unless constrained to produce lower entropy ("better") code. Until/unless LLMs are trained to actually apply craft learned by experienced humans, we must be explicit in our prompts. For example, I get good results from say Claude Sonnnet when my instruction include: - Statements of specific file, class, function names to use. - Explicit design patterns to apply. ("loop over the outer product of lists of choices for each category") - Implementation hints ("use itertools.product() to iterate over the combinations") - And, "ask questions if you are uncertain" helps trigger an iteration to quickly clarify something instead of fixing the resulting code. This specificity makes prompting a lot more work but it pays off. I only go this far when I care about the resulting code. And, I still often "retouch" as you also describe. OTOH, when I'm vibing I'll just give end goals and let the slop flow.

matsemann 8mo ago

> if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you. You could perhaps start by telling what value you see in this? And what this company does that someone can't easily do themselves while committing to GH?

benterix 8mo ago

>. This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you. It's almost a meme: whenever a commercial product is criticized on HN, a prominent thread is started with a classic tone-policing "why are you guys so negative". (Well, we explained why: their moat is trivial to replicate.)

rafaelmn 8mo ago

Is that sarcasm ? Dump a bunch of JSON from llm proxy and commit it ? Sounds like billion dollar secret sauce to me.

whh 8mo ago

I'm trying it out now. If it works, I think it'd be great for my agentic workflows where I need to figure out why something was done a specific way. I have a lot of concurrent agents working on things at the same time, so I'm not always sure why a piece of code is the way it is months later.

whh 8mo ago
I've used it for a couple of hours. A few observations: - It's nice to see conversation context alongside the change itself. - I wasn't able to see Claude Code utilise past commit context in understanding code. - It's a tad unclear (and possible unreliable) in what is called 'checkpointing'. - It mucked up my commit messages by replacing the first line with a sort of AI request title or similar. Sadly, because of the last point (we use semantic release and git-cz) I've had to uninstall it.
- georgf 8mo ago
  This sounds like you're using the auto-commit strategy instead of the default manual-commit strategy. manual-commit does not automatically commit. It just adds a trailer to the git commit message to link the checkpoint to the commit.

csmpltn 8mo ago

[flagged]

grimgrin 8mo ago
I will never use this platform. i didn't even click into it. pathetically, i did click to view comments But I think commenting on someone's bio is the kinda harshness you only do in the moment. the kinda thing I'd approach differently in hindsight (one that isn't an attempt to be cruel)
- csmpltn 8mo ago
  Harsher than the OP who is ridiculing everybody who criticizes the product being presented here in this thread?
  - grimgrin 8mo ago
    amongst all the threads, it appears they are quite outnumbered lol
  - stfp 8mo ago
    Yes, much harsher > This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you. Just an opinion and not ridiculing or attacking someone specifically

mikodin 8mo ago

I've found immense value in this, am already doing it with Pi(https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono) and it's very easy to replicate

hansmayer 8mo ago

> This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you. This sounds a lot like that line from Microsoft's AI CEO "not understanding the negativity towards AI". And Satya instructing us to not use the term "slop" any more. Yes we don't see value in taking a git primitive like "commit" and renaming it to "checkpoint". I wonder whether the branches going to be renamed to something like "parallel history" :)

soerxpso 8mo ago

Do you mean the value in this specific tool, or in the concept? You don't need a dedicated tool to store agent session transcripts and link them to commits. This can be accomplished by a 10-line bash script.

JPKab 8mo ago

The most active HNers are just extremely negative on AI. I understand the impulse (you spend years honing your craft, and then something comes along and automates major portions of it) but it's driven by emotion and ego-defense and those engaged in it simply don't recognize what's motivating them. Their ego-defense is actually self-fulfilling, because they don't even try to properly learn how to leverage LLMs for coding so they give it a huge task they want it to fail on, don't properly break it into tasks, and then say "i told you it sucks" when it fails to one shot it.

lgrapenthin 8mo ago
The negativity is driven by outrageous claims how AIs will replace programmers, or how english is the PL of the future. T
BoorishBears 8mo ago
Even this response shows why the most active ones are outwardly negative on AI. I use AI a ton, but there are just way too many grifters right now, and their favorite refrain is to dismiss any amount of negativity with "oh you're just mad/scared/jealous/etc. it replaces you". But people who actually build things don't talk like that, grifters do. You ask them what they've built before and after the current LLM takeoff and it's crickets or slop. Like the Inglourious Basterds fingers meme. There's no way that someone complaining about coding agents not being there yet, can't simultaneously be someone who'd look forward to a day they could just will things into existence because it's not actually about what AI might build for them: it's about "line will go up and I've attached myself to the line like a barnacle, so I must proselytize everyone into joining me in pushing the line ever higher up" These people have no understanding of what's happening, but they invent one completely divorced from any reality other than the reality them and their ilk have projected into thin air via clout. It looks like mental illness and hoarding Mac Minis and it's distasteful to people who know better, especially since their nonsense is so overwhelmingly loud and noisy and starts to drown out any actual signal.

tflinton 8mo ago

How does this differ from what Github Copilot does when writing its .github/copilot-instructions.md? That doesn't keep the transcript or prompts, but it does keep quite a bit of the context and a declarative state of the decisions/design considerations made so another AI bot can pickup and have enough context to understand the rationale. I'm also not really convinced that any AI agent wouldn't still parse the code to understand more about the context vs. just using the checkpoint.

abustamam 8mo ago

I think this is neat; in fact, I orchestrated my AI agents to do something similar (keep a log of files touched and why). And I have agents refer to the work log as well when they are unclear on why something exists. It's not 1:1 with checkpoints, but I find such things to be useful.