Jujutsu Creator Martin von Zweigbergk Joins ERSC as CTO
The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC
East River Source Control has appointed Martin von Zweigbergk, creator of the Jujutsu version control system, as chief technology officer. von Zweigbergk, who started Jujutsu as a side project in 2019 and later made it his full-time work at Google, will lead engineering on ERSC's next-generation version control platforms. The company aims to address the scalability limits of Git-based remote storage, particularly as AI reshapes software development. ERSC Storage enters private beta this month.
Jujutsu improves the part of version control that sits on your laptop. But the remote server is still Git, which has a ceiling that comes fast for products at scale.
- umvi
I like the idea of jujutsu, but I must not operate at a scale where its "killer features" would truly shine. Git hardly ever gets in my way, I have never had to do complex octopus merges or anything like that. It's usually: feature branch, implement, merge, and occasionally fix a merge conflict. I've never thought to myself "git is so frustrating I wish there were something better" because I only use the same 5 commands over and over every day and they never get in my way. Not to mention jj has its own share of esoteric syntax with all the "@--+::" business and I'd have to re-write my brain to learn that instead of `ref~N`, etc.
- steveklabnik
Working with Martin has been a real pleasure, and we'll have some more stuff to talk about very soon!
- mturilin
At first I thought this post about martial arts…
- fallat
Someone will have to explain the value proposition to me...
We have git.
jujutsu works with git.
git can do everything jujutsu can do (otherwise, jujutsu couldn't work with git).
Thus, jujutsu is a UX / new steering wheel.
ERSC is trying to be a GitHub competitor with what surplus value?
Don't get me wrong, GitHub has a slew of its own problems, but I have not seen any commentary on how ERSC addresses any of the downfalls GitHub has too. We're jumping from one frying pan into another, currently-cooler one?
What about SourceHut? Codeberg? They could offer the same steering wheels.
Edit: Thank you to everyone who replied. The enterprise/teams infrastructure angle makes sense.
- minraws
jj is one of the few new devtools I was quite frustrated with while starting out but could see the value so stuck around and man is it so nice.
For anyone curious the big thing with jj is you can undo. Basically if you were running a rebase and bungled a commit sha or branch name, no worries undo your way out, if you forgot to push but abandoned a commit not issues undo it. Same with all jj commands.
Delta db takes this a step further and everything you edit is a change so your actual edits are also all saved.
I find non destructive-ness for as long as possible approach very nice, since there aren't as many constraints on us not being able to do it nowadays, we had limited storage and stuff in 2000s perhaps but in 2026 even with the killer SSD prices it's fairly cheap to buy more SSD, we can definitely waste 100MB per project storing redundant history we may not ever need.
Same way in photoshop non destructive editing took over, especially useful for humans, but works for AI and LLMs too, they can undo their mistakes as well.
- jph
Jujutsu is a better smarter git. It's a great convergence of better UX, plus more expressive, plus easier to use.
If you haven't tried jj yet, take it for a spin and see how you like it.
- ksymph
So if I understand correctly: ERSC is working on an alternative backend for jj other than git (and presumably providing related infrastructure)?
- Degorath
Thought I saw that announcement on LinkedIn a few weeks back already!