The Version Control Wars Are Back—and This Time AI Is the Battleground
Version Control Second Coming
Twenty years after Git upended version control, a new wave of startups is challenging GitHub's dominance. Driving it: AI agents committing code at unprecedented rates, and a hunger for alternatives. The author, who co-founded Plastic SCM and now works on Origin, surveys the field—Entire, Pierre, GitButler, East River, Diversion—and explains why the next few years will reshape how software is built.
While we all stopped coding manually around December 2025, something else was cooking: the biggest revolution in version control since 2005.
- teiferer
2/3 down the article I gave up. What are you trying to tell me? What is this revolution about? How are agent things fundamentally different and how are they being solved? What is this "second coming"?
Also, why "second"? Was git the first? But then what about all the other things before it? CVS was huge before, for better or worse.
- bolangi
Dreaming of "virtual filesystems everywhere". Hmm, sorta sounds like Plan 9.
Great to have an inside view of wrangling technologies for these behemoth data sets.
- pjmlp
What second coming? If I had the option I would still be using either Mercurial or SVN.
In fact, the way I use Git is hardly any different, I have no interest in getting a black belt in git magic.
- rjsw
People complained about having to use ClearCase back then, it wasn't just the price that was wrong with it.
- bob1029
It sounds like the author went through a lot of pain to avoid using git+lfs or perforce.
I use git+lfs for unity projects and it works out great. If I had a real studio I'd buy some perforce seats.
Reinventing the wheel like this is quite exhausting. There are options that are proven to work. AI authorship does not fundamentally violate the idea of some thing owning a specific commit. We don't need new schemas in our source control system. "Provenance" is a bullshit word used to make the AI sound like it's some kind of oracular source with superhuman capabilities.