We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare (blog.cloudflare.com)

71 pointsby geoffbp3 hours ago63 comments

btown an hour ago

Sometimes I think back to Google Wave, that beautiful glimmer of real-time collaborative canvases, announced in 2009 when Angular and Backbone hadn't even been invented, and think it launched almost two decades too early.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berli...

We're now in a world where we expect real-time interfaces to be developed and immediately deployed for our feedback by agents, in business-critical settings where classic SDLC timelines are far too slow, but code quality is becoming more difficult to manage at scale.

Git, at its core, is a fundamental notion that behavior is an auditable tree of immutable changes, where any participant can rearrange or rewind or remix this sequence on a local machine to show, and interact with, a provisional combination of those changes.

Google Wave, with its operational transformation (OT) and federation systems, was similar in many regards. We have CRDTs now, and far better techniques for auto-merging workstreams - including agentic systems that can resolve conflicts intelligently!

Wave fundamentally had a concept that people would come together and evolve a simple chat interface, into a customized real-time application for their use cases, and that that iteration could happen in real-time, with data and behavior both evolving in collaboration with bots. Wherever Git and the broader notion of SDLC goes, I hope it brings the best of this thinking.

arianvanp an hour ago

When I tried out Delta by zed in Private alpha my first feedback was "wow this reminds me of Google Wave"

lucideer 26 minutes ago

The Wave release was the event that really kicked off my starting to rethink my own framing of what Google's engineering culture actually produces. I was so excited for its release, possibly moreso than any major innovation before then, & what was delivered was pure crap implementation wise. The idea was brilliant, & open, so theoretically someone could have done it well, but Google poisoned the well by releasing such a turd.

Throughout it's existence Google has been revered as a company for its engineering output, but if you interrogate that even a little bit, you end up with a very small minority of gems among a massive ocean of over engineered crap. Even the huge objective open successes like k8s are to this day sold with the massive caveat of "it's heavy & over engineered, but": nobody's calling k8s elegant. Pretty much all of their good products are acquisitions, many of which they've subsequently degraded.

One can certainly make this argument about almost any large corporation, but I do think there's very few with such a stark divide between how the quality of their engineering work is revered & the reality.

switchbak 20 minutes ago

Wave's failure and that of Google+ might have been the turning point for Google, never really to return to its former glory.

Animats an hour ago

We want to have less, not more, dependence on Cloudflare.

Single point of failure, for both technical and political failures.

ivanjermakov 42 minutes ago

Cloudflare wants all dependence on Cloudflare they can get.

bartread 18 minutes ago

I agree with both you and the person you’re responding to.

camcil 2 hours ago

$25k to build the next GitHub for $125B company? How generous.

robot_jesus an hour ago

And not even cold hard cash but “Cloudflare credits.”

What an offensive slap in the face.

Rapzid an hour ago

It's SCRIP!!!

b3lvedere 43 minutes ago

I”m so sick of all these weird credits and points. Can’t pay food or bills with it.

Topfi 36 minutes ago

And only if you are a US or Canadian citizen/team and doubly so only if you use a permissive license like MIT, Apache-2.0 or BSD-2/3. Having even a moderate degree of control over your project is too much to ask for. But you do get a dinner, which might make it all worth it.

Tone deaf to the nth degree.

Rapzid an hour ago

The whole thing seems a bit uncouth. I get a real gross feeling from it.

mannanj 41 minutes ago

I agree that the compensation was a miss.

tomlis 20 minutes ago

I really hope that was a purposeful understatement.

ttul 39 minutes ago

That was my reaction. I was expecting, "The winner receives $500,000 in cash, $1M in Cloudflare credits, and an introduction to our venture team."

gkoberger 37 minutes ago

They don't want to own the next GitHub. They want people to build the next GitHub on Artifacts (and pay Cloudflare for storage and compute).

I don't have a strong opinion here, but giving away compute as a prize for hackathons isn't anything new.

tchalla 27 minutes ago

On brand for Cloudflare which is typically a cheap company.

hmokiguess 2 hours ago

If it’s for agents why don’t you make this a challenge towards them? What sort of human element is desired here?

flamethrower123 2 hours ago

The element of irony.

bogwog an hour ago

> What sort of human element is desired here?

The human wallet

thih9 an hour ago

Who said it’s for humans?

I’m tempted to ask an agent to submit an entry for me.

bakugo an hour ago

Why do they need others to ask their agents to do it? Why can't they ask their own agents?

airstrike 42 minutes ago

You don't get infinite monkeys writing Hamlet with just a few monkeys

somehnguy 40 minutes ago

Free marketing

magackame 30 minutes ago

Tokens be too expensive. Outsource to subs of all the devs over the world. OpenAI inverstors gonna take the inference L on subsidized tokens.

jester997 an hour ago

The next platform for Agentic SCM is just… Fossil. Fossil is an SQLite database that can store anything an agent would ever need.

mtzaldo 37 minutes ago

I use beads + git; you just need to put the bead id at the beginning of the commit msg. The agents do the rest.

bensyverson an hour ago

Centralization is antithetical to the whole idea of the internet

zorked 35 minutes ago

Right, because I want a stupid Cloudflare captcha before every git operation.

Insimwytim 20 minutes ago

I can see that blogpost: "flashcha - ssh extension for Cloudflare CAPTCHA during git operations"

babelfish 13 minutes ago

I wonder if they still use Bitbucket internally.

rickette 2 hours ago

Us? Ask the agents.

thereisno 41 minutes ago

Of course cloudflare wants you to bring more data and money to cloudflare. Is any of this actually useful though? Do agents need git? Are agents even useful?

ivanjermakov 40 minutes ago

> We want you to build

Strangest tech announcement ever.

zamalek 25 minutes ago

Git, as a protocol, is probably part of the problem for the scale that they are talking about here (1000s of agents). You probably want something between multiplayer editing and commits. That being said, I am terrified about the degree of slop that would be generated with 1000s of agents actually working on a codebase.

throwaway29303 23 minutes ago

No, thank you.

skullone 36 minutes ago

Lololol. This is probably the dumbest sounding competition I've ever heard. Git for bots? Uhhhh ok, whatever.

gste an hour ago

Have to point this out because it annoys me every time:

Cloudflare is perhaps most famously and most significantly an international, global platform. That's kind of the whole point.

Only in the smallprint does it mention you must be a United States or Canada resident to enter.

aleda145 an hour ago

Thank you for pointing this out! I always love a good competition and since I already have a workers paid plan it seemed fun. But I'm not eligible, so I guess I'll rebuild github without giving any IP to Cloudflare

andrewaylett 36 minutes ago

I'll be honest: I saw the prize was a trip to SF and — while I was vanishingly unlikely to enter anyway — that was enough to kill any idea of entering. It's been over 20 years since I was last in the USA, and I have no intention of visiting again any time soon.

quincepie 27 minutes ago

"The first-place team will also receive $25,000 in Cloudflare credits, along with invitations to the VIP speaker dinner on Monday night at Connect."

Whoever in Cloudflare thought that this is an appropriate compensation for the work is delusional. This is insulting.

mrcwinn an hour ago

lol, spec work anyone? For maybe-maybe-not $25k, you build something that could create millions in enterprise value.

Advice for everyone considering this: if you're passionate about ideas in this space and have access to an LLM — build it yourself and start your own company. In fact, message me easting.exe [at] gmail. I'll throw in $25k to get us started. I'm a prior founder with an exit. Because this offer from Cloudflare is ridiculous.

airstrike 41 minutes ago

Badass offer and even badder gmail address

debarshri an hour ago

Me too, dont have enough tokens.

embedding-shape 2 hours ago

> So in this new world where you have hundreds, or even thousands, of agents working on the same codebase at the same time, what does the foundation look like?

So, would it maybe make sense to question this whole bit, before we starting creating platforms for something like that?

Why do you need hundreds of thousands of agents working on the same codebase? In my experience, and what I see around me, quality code that actually works in production isn't produced by "software factory autonomously run by 1337 agents", but instead one human sitting and interacting with maybe 1-3 agents max, back and forth, pair programming rather than letting hundreds of them output million of tokens over hours.

Are others seeing the same thing, or am I in my own little bubble here? All the "software factory with agents" approaches I've spent time looking into, literally produces trash on top of trash, while I see senior developers 10x their productivity while producing better code than before and they have one terminal open with three panes, a text editor, a agent TUI and a general shell, that's it. Is what I'm seeing (and doing myself) not the typical situation out there in the wider world?

harel 2 hours ago

That's my experience as well

skybrian an hour ago

It would make sense for a monorepo at big tech company, where a single source control system contains many thousands of common libraries and the apps that use them. And now with AI, maybe a small company could build a large, sprawling monorepo?

But I don't think it's actually a good idea. Keeping everything on the same version is difficult. We have package managers that do a better job.

zaphirplane an hour ago

There is that, there are a handful of companies with mono repo they have solved the checkout build deploy test cycle. The other approach is the separate the monorepo for build deploy and test loop.

Nashooo an hour ago

Similar experiences here

j45 2 hours ago

There remain fundamental patterns for the future of software development that are missing.

Orchestrating an agent free for all tends to invite more chaos management.

At the same time there’s folks who quietly have this working.

25k seems like a small bounty for such a large prize.

https://www.cloudflare.com/git-competition/?cf_page=next-git...

goodpoint an hour ago

Not even for 25 millions

tamimio 33 minutes ago

So they want to take someone’s idea for peanuts and then vibecode it later.. also, any word on training AI on the code there?

skinfaxi 39 minutes ago

Fuck everything about this.

badgersnake 40 minutes ago

“We want you to use our product” said every SaaS company ever. “Our product is designed for AI” says every SaaS for the last two years.

None of this is very clever or very compelling.

spiderfarmer an hour ago

No thanks. No more US based infrastructure for me.