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> How does the modern "agent explosion" potentially affect this? This changes everything. Agents don't really care what versioning software is used. They can p

> How does the modern "agent explosion" potentially affect this? This changes everything. Agents don't really care what versioning software is used. They can probably figure out whatever you are using. But they'll likely assume it's something standard (i.e. Git) so the easiest is to not get too adventurous. Also, the reasons to use something else mostly boil down to user friendliness and new merge strategies. However, lately I just tell codex to pull and deal with merge conflicts. It's not something I have to do manually anymore. That removes a key reason for me to be experimenting with alternative version control systems. It's not that big of a problem anymore. Git was actually designed for massive teams (the Linux kernel) but you have to be a bit disciplined using it in a way that many users in smaller teams just aren't. With agentic coding tools, you can just codify what you want to happen in guardrails and skills. Including how to deal with version control and what process to follow. Where more advanced merge strategies could be helpful is the type of large scale refactoring that are now much easier with agentic coding tools. But doing that in repositories with lots of developers working on other changes is not something that should happen very often. And certainly not without a lot of planning and coordination probably.

lcbasu 7mo ago
>Agents don't really care what versioning software is used Strongly agree that agents don't care about the VCS as they will figure out whatever you throw at them. And you are right about that the merge conflicts are becoming a solved problem when you can just tell an agent to handle it. But I think there is a much bigger problem emerging that better merge strategies (CRDT or otherwise) do not even touch: the reasoning is gone. For example the situation taken from the blog is that one side deletes a function while another adds a logging line inside it. The CRDT will give you a better conflict display showing what each side did. Great. But it still doesn't tell you why the function was deleted. Was it deprecated? Moved? Replaced by something else? The reviewer is still reverse-engineering intent from the diff. This gets/will get much worse with coding agents as agentic commits are orders of magnitude larger, and the commit message barely summarises what happened. An agent might explore three approaches, hit dead ends, flag something as risky, then settle on a solution. All that context vanishes after the session ends. You are right about codifying guardrails and skills, and I think that is the more productive direction compared to replacing git. We should augment the workflow around it. I also started from a much more radical place, actually, thinking we need to ditch git entirely for agentic workflows [1]. BUT the more I built with agents, the more I realized the pragmatic first step is just preserving the reasoning trail alongside the code, right there in git[2]. No new VCS needed, and the next agent or human that touches the code has the full "WHY" available. [1] https://github.com/lcbasu/git4aiagents/commit/3a3b197#diff-b335630551682c19a781afebcf4d07bf978fb1f8ac04c6bf87428ed5106870f5R6-R9 https://github.com/lcbasu/git4aiagents/commit/3a3b197#diff-b... [2]https://www.git4aiagents.com https://www.git4aiagents.com

lcbasu 7mo ago

>Agents don't really care what versioning software is used Strongly agree that agents don't care about the VCS as they will figure out whatever you throw at them. And you are right about that the merge conflicts are becoming a solved problem when you can just tell an agent to handle it. But I think there is a much bigger problem emerging that better merge strategies (CRDT or otherwise) do not even touch: the reasoning is gone. For example the situation taken from the blog is that one side deletes a function while another adds a logging line inside it. The CRDT will give you a better conflict display showing what each side did. Great. But it still doesn't tell you why the function was deleted. Was it deprecated? Moved? Replaced by something else? The reviewer is still reverse-engineering intent from the diff. This gets/will get much worse with coding agents as agentic commits are orders of magnitude larger, and the commit message barely summarises what happened. An agent might explore three approaches, hit dead ends, flag something as risky, then settle on a solution. All that context vanishes after the session ends. You are right about codifying guardrails and skills, and I think that is the more productive direction compared to replacing git. We should augment the workflow around it. I also started from a much more radical place, actually, thinking we need to ditch git entirely for agentic workflows [1]. BUT the more I built with agents, the more I realized the pragmatic first step is just preserving the reasoning trail alongside the code, right there in git[2]. No new VCS needed, and the next agent or human that touches the code has the full "WHY" available. [1] https://github.com/lcbasu/git4aiagents/commit/3a3b197#diff-b335630551682c19a781afebcf4d07bf978fb1f8ac04c6bf87428ed5106870f5R6-R9 https://github.com/lcbasu/git4aiagents/commit/3a3b197#diff-b... [2]https://www.git4aiagents.com https://www.git4aiagents.com