Git is forever. I'm building Oak anyways.

Git is extremely good at what it was built for: humans making deliberate changes, reviewing patches, and preserving a distributed history that can survive decades. It was purpose-built for Linux kernel development and I don’t believe anyone can make a better tool for that. Git is forever.

But even though git is wonderful at many things, I started to wonder years ago if there could be something better. Almost everyone has their own problems with version control. What would a version control system look like if we created it from scratch today?

This started a four year long adventure where I built a version control system in my free-time called Jam. It was designed to handle large files and focused on keeping people as up-to-date as possible. I sold it to a company very early on so I could continue working on it full-time.

That company ended up shutting down in a little over a year.

However, I did get to see how good version control could be if we just started over. There’s so much freedom in building on something new. I’ve been thinking about version control systems every day since then.

With AI, I feel like my dreams have come true. Version control systems are really hard to make, and even harder to make well. But I’ve been able to do way more in the previous four months than I did in the past four years of work. Some devs are still against AI, and that’s ok, but I’m thankful that I don’t have to spend years of my life working on something only to have it not be good and fail.

I’ve been working on Oak. It's a version control system designed to solve some problems that people have with branches; better matching how people work today. Virtual file system functionality to let your agents instantly access massive repos in parallel over the network. Chunking that is more efficient for huge files. And a web platform that gets out of your way. I don't want to waste you or your agents time. It should be fast, creative and fun to collaborate on code.

It's currently in beta, but you can try it out now. For the first 500 users that subscribe to a paid plan I will send you a personalized e-ink display with a unique Oak species (I don’t know how this will look yet).

It's currently self-funded and made by Zach Geier (me) with design help from Adam Morse. It’s built on an open-source core and CLI. You can self host with `oak serve` and export your repo to a git repo with `oak export` at any time.

Oak is still early in development. There's no Windows build and missing plenty of features. Notably, no CI, no issues, no comments. We still use GitHub Actions for building Oak now, but we've been fully bootstrapped on Oak with no Git backup for several months. I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts. Please, join the Discord if you're interested in following along or want to reach out.

— Zach