45 points bananaboy 2 days ago 10 comments
bolangi 41 minutes ago | parent
Great to have an inside view of wrangling technologies for these behemoth data sets.
forrestthewoods 26 minutes ago | parent
Please universe I beg you.
Git is incredibly mediocre. But it's all most people know. It's a version control tool that can't handle binary files; and no GitLFS does not count. The end result is a version control tool that is unable to actually version control all the things you need for a project.
This results in a Meta VCS layer where a ton of critical assets are stored in Docker files and other misery. If you want to re-compile a project for 2015 then good luck and god speed.
Personally I think full toolchains belong in source control. And that you should be able to clone / materialize a repro, yank your network cable, and build. This is how big tech monorepos work. It is TheWay imho.
ahartmetz 11 minutes ago | parent
Consider a Linux desktop distro: if every little binary (out of order of magnitude 1000) acted like the center of the universe with gigabytes of build environment and "opinions" galore instead of portability, builds would take much more resources than they already do and parts wouldn't necessarily work together.
black_knight 16 minutes ago | parent
Oh, want to use that other machine as a gateway? Just mount its /net.
Oh, want to route audio through another machine? Just mount their soundcard into your /dev.
Oh, your machine is too puny to do the task at hand? Just run “cpu thebigmachine” which transplanted your entire environment over there (all the virtual file systems) so that you can continue doing what you were doing, but using that machine’s CPU and memory.
This solved the problem of having to transplant your setup to the remote machine, which you have with modern SSH. If you wanted a different environment you instead created it locally. Each process har its own virtual file tree with mounts.
There were cool things at the local level too: All the programs would expose virtual file systems to interact with. Text editor? Each window had a directory with files containing window content, current selection, even the UI “tagline” with commands. This meant you could write scripts for your programs in any language, because you just had to interact with files.
A modern take on plan 9 is definitely on my Christmas wishlist!
gigatexal 17 minutes ago | parent
shevy-java 14 minutes ago | parent
Well - Microsoft worsened GitHub in the last few months with regards to reliability. The next corporate slayer move is to worsen it feature wise. GitHub will indeed most likely remain strong, but the outer shell has some cracks and that means people will be more eager to look for alternatives. It is also a problem that Microsoft has a say in open source projects via GitHub - I never liked that, and many others did not like that either, even more so with Trump acting in a political and ideological manner with his TechBros (who all have nothing to do with Epstein ... right? because what if some of them do ...).
jillesvangurp 8 minutes ago | parent
Git is so far good enough for this. It's not particularly user friendly. But that's not a problem for AI agents. What is a problem is that GitHub is a shared resource that is bottle necked on massively increased usage. That's nice if you are sharing code with other people but it becomes a bottleneck otherwise with a clear solution in the form of maybe using faster and compatible (or completely different) alternatives that do things faster/better.
If you sit back and watch what agents do stuff with Git, it involves a lot of agents going through the moves of creating lots of pull requests, waiting for whatever CI systems to kick in, dealing with failures, etc. All that takes a lot of time and tokens and it's designed to compensate for human failures to properly follow processes. So, at least some of that is kind of becoming redundant. With AI we can compensate with more complicated processes instead.
There's definitely some optimization potential lurking there. If you have tens of thousands of agents working on a thing, it might be more efficient to share the burden of integration testing instead of each agent trying to do this independently and testing each micro change in isolation. Also you could question the logic of needing some centralized hub to dump and integrate code. Git is decentralized by design. GitHub is nice as a backup strategy but there are probably cheaper or different ways to do QA and integration with agents. As the development process changes and adapts to all this, the role of Git and Github also needs to be rethought.
As for the rest of the article, that seems a bit too people centric. Virtual file systems are cool. But do AI agents really need them?
teiferer 8 minutes ago | parent
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.
raegis 7 minutes ago | parent
IshKebab 3 minutes ago | parent
Come on at least say "many people". There are plenty of people still coding by hand.