How Version Control Will Evolve for the Agent Boom
As AI agents become primary code producers, Git must evolve beyond storing text to capturing the 'why' behind changes through session logs. We need to return to Git's decentralized roots to handle massive parallel agent fleets, avoiding centralized bottlenecks. This shift enables a semantic memory layer where humans and agents collaborate seamlessly, ensuring provenance and faster reviews while maintaining digital sovereignty.
Our hypothesis is simple: session logs are now the most important artifact in software development, and should be stored alongside the code itself in the repository.
- sdevonoes
> Our hypothesis is simple: session logs are now the most important artifact in software development, and should be stored alongside the code itself in the repository.
I don’t think this scales. We recently have been doing “spec driven development” and we are committing the specs and prompts to our repo, alongside the generated code. At the beginning it seems fine: you wanna change something, you update the spec and ask the machine to regenerate the code. Easy. Over time, though, you have hundreds if not thousands if spec files in MD. It’s all English prose. There is duplication and subtle inconsistencies. It’s difficult to search for sections of a spec. Do you create a new file for this new requirement or update an existing one? What level of detail is enough here? Should I hint the machine about using the “saga” pattern or just let it know that we are dealing with non atomic transactions distributed across services? Etc. When a colleague opens a PR updating a spec, it’s hard to suggest objective changes (at least with code, you can demonstrate the presence of bugs… not so much with English prose. Sometimes I feel like a lawyer)
All in all, it seems as if maintenance of english prose is way worse than maintenance of actual code in big enough systems. You not only need to review the spec but also review the generated code. It’s painful
- mickeyp
I find the value of someone steering an AI session to be practically nil for nearly everything. Nobody wonders out loud how a senior developer arrives at the result he does without an AI; they care that his deliverable is high quality and meets whatever standard/requirement exists.
So I'm not sure why people going "chop, chop" and "nah make it more red and bigger" is a useful signal of much of anything.
No, the future is a complex "gate" that checks, weighs and measures everything before it gets committed --- a local (or remote) "CI" but... more granular and far more specific and turned to the needs of the project you work on.
- xcskier56
When your AI consumes documents that are out of date it introduce bugs and incorrect behavior into the system. Code is the only source of truth that actually matters.
The only artifacts outside of code that I don't explicitly end-date are user-story style requirements documents that I periodically revisit with the AI to make sure they're up to date.
One of the most annoying things I've seen AI do is accidentally pull in old requirements and start building off of them.
- paulbjensen
> Our hypothesis is simple: session logs are now the most important artifact in software development, and should be stored alongside the code itself in the repository.
Pi.dev has a feature where you can export the session as a html file and look at it later. I foresee that potentially you could store this in the same Git repository and get the benefit of reviewing how a particular code change came about during a session with an agent.
I guess the next step would be having the coding agent save that session context automatically in a folder in the git repository rather than requiring a human to export it.
This startup also seems to be operating in a similar space to tangled.org - moving code repos into a decentralised hosting environment.
- oftenwrong
I am anticipating a move away from git-style version control entirely.
One possible shape is something like unison-lang's CAS AST model:
https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/
This model has some significant downsides for humans, but less so for automatons. It eliminates some major problems of software development like merge conflicts, dependency hell, etc.