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 four 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 from scratch today?

This started a multi-year long adventure where I built a version control system in my free-time called Jam. It handled large files really well and was 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 with AI I’ve been able to do way more in the previous four months than I did in the past four years of my work. Some devs are still against using 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.

Oak is what I’ve been working on. It comes with a branching model to better match how people work today. A mount command to let your agents instantly access massive repos in parallel over the network. And chunking that is super fast and efficient for huge files. Also, the web UI is designed to be as quick as possible. I want to make a new system that doesn’t waste you or your agents time. It should be fast, creative and fun to write and collaborate on code.

Oak is currently fully self-funded and made by me with design help from Adam Morse.

If you would like to join today and try it out while it’s in beta, it’s $10/mo for 100GB of storage. Also for the first 500 users that subscribe I will send you a personalized e-ink display with a unique Oak species (I don’t know how this will look yet).

Or if you would like to join the Discord or chat, I would love your thoughts.

— Zach