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.
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.
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.
I think releasing Wave as its own product, via private beta, was a mistake. If they wanted to reinvent email, they should have done it with Gmail, similar to what Apple did with iMessage.
Gmail could operate as it always has, being an email client that integrates with every other email client. But when a Gmail user emails another Gmail user (or a group of them), have the thread automatically turn into a Wave, with everything that entails. This gets the new features where people already are, creates an incentive for people to move their email to Gmail, and doesn’t create yet another inbox for a person to manage.
I always saw Wave as a business failure, not an engineering one, for this reason.
Wave was a cool tech demo, and I was excited to see it. The teaser video was solid marketing. Me and my lab mates couldn’t figure out what use case it solved though.
Google+ was pure garbage being shoved down our throats. That was a huuuge signal that Google had changed.
They boldly claimed they'd beat Facebook in 100 days and began acquiring any startup that pretended to solve a social problem. Every team got a G+ OKR. In classic Google fashion, they chewed up the one social platform they had, Orkut, and gChat, which was filling the AIM void, also squandered its lead as it was subsumed. They never invested enough in their successful/functional video chat, and instead just had team after team launching new versions of the same damn thing. Looking through GCP and their AI/Vertex/Whatever naming soup, not much has changed.
Consider if they had focused on it instead of Android. Maybe we would still have Windows phones. Such are the tides of time. I think their present, malignant glory eclipses it financially but never will romantically.
Most of the tech unicorns are like this. Zuckerberg caught lightning in a bottle one single time and everything they’ve tried since has sucked. Instagram was an acquisition. So were oculus and WhatsApp. By contrast their next in-house flagship was temu Wii avatars.
Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle.
Surely it’s a consequence of being publicly traded that these companies cease to be able to develop good novel products rather than acquire competitors or iterate on past successes.
Same, but the real question is how. At this point, the things they are proposing are genuinely useful for the environment that we are finding ourselves in? How does one even begin to allow for less dependency here without appropriate substitute/mitigation for what cloudflare renders relatively painless.
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.
Cloudflare gets so much action on here, and the product they've put out the last 6-12 months has been pretty underwhelming in my opinion. Sometimes, as in this case, obnoxious even. A lot of it (most of it?) feels vibe-coded and derivative, just take whatever is big now or last month and throw "edge" on top. Anyone care for a moltworker?
Yeah, but at the same time compensation is meager enough that they won't get as much of a response. I am only kinda considering it and that is mostly, but the more I am reading through the details the more of a turn off the whole thing is.
I am curious what people think about the use case that is different for AI agents compared to humans. Aside from the things people use SCM for already that is.
Fossil fits the bill if you ask me because it has built in forum and stuff too, so Agentic discourse can happen there, commits happen in the SCM history. And it has auto sync so they can automatically sync their state.
After reading the rules and thinking about what I can use it finally hit me: https://entire.io/ this is basically design a better entire.io system using CF and NOT git but they want multi agents and they want that history of what and why the agents did that really isn't source code. And doesn't belong in git.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Ok the computer on your desk then? I guess it’s probably a laptop and not on all the time, but that shouldn’t prevent it from working for you when you need it. Probably want a good backup strategy though
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.
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.
Gmail could operate as it always has, being an email client that integrates with every other email client. But when a Gmail user emails another Gmail user (or a group of them), have the thread automatically turn into a Wave, with everything that entails. This gets the new features where people already are, creates an incentive for people to move their email to Gmail, and doesn’t create yet another inbox for a person to manage.
I always saw Wave as a business failure, not an engineering one, for this reason.
Google+ was pure garbage being shoved down our throats. That was a huuuge signal that Google had changed.
Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle.
Surely it’s a consequence of being publicly traded that these companies cease to be able to develop good novel products rather than acquire competitors or iterate on past successes.
Single point of failure, for both technical and political failures.
What an offensive slap in the face.
Tone deaf to the nth degree.
I don't have a strong opinion here, but giving away compute as a prize for hackathons isn't anything new.
The human wallet
I’m tempted to ask an agent to submit an entry for me.
I am curious what people think about the use case that is different for AI agents compared to humans. Aside from the things people use SCM for already that is.
Fossil fits the bill if you ask me because it has built in forum and stuff too, so Agentic discourse can happen there, commits happen in the SCM history. And it has auto sync so they can automatically sync their state.
I build them on machines I own placed in racks I have they key to.
There aren't any resource limits to hit and legal service is brought directly to me - not to a provider nor middleman.
There also isn't a global MITM inserting itself between me and my users.
I can't imagine doing it any other way and I implore you not to build things on complex, fragile, highly abstracted foundations.
Strangest tech announcement ever.
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.
Whoever in Cloudflare thought that this is an appropriate compensation for the work is delusional. This is insulting.
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.
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?
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.
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...
None of this is very clever or very compelling.
the computer under your desk!
Roll your Own, don't depend on billionaire platforms to get your work done...