alt.hn

5/8/2026 at 2:15:36 PM

Show HN: Git for AI Agents

 https://github.com/regent-vcs/re_gent

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 4:36:05 PM

People in this thread seem to be too focused on the agent creating a git log. This seems to be solving a different problem than that does.

When you're interacting with agents, multiple prompts may reasonable culminate in a single commit. It may be useful to track or undo things between commits - at the prompt level. I personally have a workflow when I use Jujutsu (jj) for git already, and this slotted in very nicely to solve this problem. The auto-committing in jj makes it very easy and natural to compare diffs between prompts, and undo specific chunks or restore previous states without making a new commit every prompt. I only finish a commit, giving it a message and advancing the branch, once I've iteratively dialed in the changes I want.

I probably won't use this tool since I already have a flow that works for me, but maybe this will help people see why such a tool can be helpful.

Edit: fixed typo

by Zambyte

5/8/2026 at 7:25:27 PM

That's actually the one feature of cursor that i really miss in claude, even though I need it a lot less often.

by empath75

5/9/2026 at 11:20:28 AM

Hit ESC-ESC in the Claude Code terminal.

by adastra22

5/9/2026 at 1:46:19 PM

- hopefully after a /compact. - what happens if want to undo, and then redo? i found the /rewind functionality in claude very lean in that matter.

by doshay

5/10/2026 at 2:33:20 AM

Oh it is shit. TFA's approach is much better. But it does exist. Not sure what the relationship is to /compact ? I never use /compact anyway.

by adastra22

5/9/2026 at 1:45:25 PM

tnx for the honest feedback! really, appreciate it! would you mine sharing more details about your workflow with jj?

by doshay

5/9/2026 at 2:13:03 PM

Sure. I was a bit loose with my vocab in my previous comment - I'm going to try to be more specific by using the terms as defined in the jj glossary[0] (particularly "change" vs "commit").

  - I start by using jj new to create a new change where I want to start working.
  - I open codex, and prompt it to do something.
  - Roughly every prompt, I will naturally check the cumulative diff using jj diff.
  - If I want to check the diff log of the working change, I'll use jj evolog.
  - If I want to check the diff from the previous prompt, I'll use jj diff -f xx/1, where xx is the short change ID for the working change, and 1 is how many prompts ago I want to look at the diff for (jj evolog can help with finding the change I'm interested in)
  - If I want to undo all or some of what a prompt did, I'll use jj restore -f xx/1, potentially with -i or a fileset.
  - When I've prompted / restored / made changes myself to the point where I am happy with a change, I'll usually ask codex to write a conventional commit message for <commit_id>. Codex will then use *git* to look at the diff in that commit (which has no commit message), and give it will usually give an appropriate commit message[1] (sometimes I'll tweak this if there are details I want to add or remove). I use jj ci (short for jj commit) to finish the change and add the commit message.
  - I'll then advance bookmarks as necessary with jj b m (short for jj bookmark move) and probably push.
[0] https://www.jj-vcs.dev/v0.41.0/glossary/

[1] https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/

by Zambyte

5/9/2026 at 3:44:45 PM

cool approach, i havent used jj actually in my workflow, ill try to adopt

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 4:00:11 PM

Just use git. If your agent (especially claude) doesnt seem to know how, there are skills and hooks and other options to make it work. My 2c.

by tfrancisl

5/8/2026 at 8:09:07 PM

Just read before posting. My 2c.

by cyclopeanutopia

5/8/2026 at 5:37:10 PM

I have found that git.exe outperforms any other codebase representation with GPT5.x once you figure out how to not mangle the arguments. Commands like grep and log can replace a lot of other tools if you can use them reliably.

by bob1029

5/8/2026 at 4:04:38 PM

Exactly like I didn’t do anything super important - but I just tell agent “commit after successful build.

I think it would work with “commit before you want to delete stuff” the same way.

by ozim

5/8/2026 at 6:55:44 PM

I think this is very interesting but you need a better slogan.

Many people here made comments such as “why do I need another SVC since agents are pretty good with git”, which means they barely read your blurb and did not understand your project.

by clutter55561

5/8/2026 at 8:48:40 PM

Agree. The slogan or header should what is in the first sentence. “Version Control for AI agent activity”

by infecto

5/8/2026 at 7:28:59 PM

maybe the intro sentence needs changed then. if your elevator pitch is losing the room, change the pitch.

by flowardnut

5/9/2026 at 1:46:59 PM

absolutely right, i got this feedback from many people actually ...

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 6:49:34 PM

This seems easily solved with a tool use hook that calls git add .; git commit a -m "<tool description>", specifying an alternate .git directory if desired

by lifis

5/9/2026 at 1:48:50 PM

but then you would have to commit each tool and action of the agents, which is polluting the git history and also huge overhead (at least imo)

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 6:47:27 PM

Everything but trivial changes should go through a prompt -> plan -> impl phase where you revise a concrete plan file until it's ready for impl.

Now impl is just a derivation of the plan, and the plan gets checked in with the same commit so that you can see the why, the intent, the objective, the research that informed the decisions.

Much simpler, and a much, much more effective process than prompt -> impl.

by hombre_fatal

5/12/2026 at 1:35:43 PM

Exactly right, and the next step is making it enforceable rather than aspirational. Restrict the plan phase to read-only tools so the agent literally can't edit during planning. Restrict the impl phase to the edit tools the plan identified. Even this basic formalization: same model, same task... yielded a dramatic capability improvement on sub-20B models in my testing.

by azurewraith

5/8/2026 at 9:33:15 PM

yep. i built recursive-mode for this. it offers full traceability with workflow run docs that are human-readable. as a bonus, you can also use this to train or finetune your model. https://recursive-mode.dev/introduction

by try-working

5/8/2026 at 4:12:23 PM

Very cool approach! We build something super similar, also going for content addressed storage and compare&swap as fundamental primitives.

Also commit dag based, but we also wrote this whole knowledge graph / triple-store CRDT data format on top.[1]

We also have p2p syncing of the history so you can use it to track your local work but also to have your agents coordinate within your team.

We had our agents build their own tools on top of that substrate, that way we're vendor independent, this stuff works everywhere from claude web, to self hosted openclaw, you only need to tell your agent to use the faculties.

Because the substrate takes care of everything, every new faculty you write on top of that inherits all of the same properties.

1: https://github.com/triblespace/triblespace-rs

2: https://github.com/triblespace/faculties

by j-pb

5/9/2026 at 1:50:02 PM

super nice, indeed similar approach

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 6:33:37 PM

I found LLMs to be really smart with command-line git.

This week I told DeepSeek v4 Flash (max variant) to scavenge for all changes and additions of a specific feature of the project and build a report of the feature timeline with example code and rationale behind the changes.

It fired a ton of read-only git commands (isolated inside Docker) and came up with a neat markdown report of the feature from inception to current state.

If DS4 Flash can do it, for SOTA LLMs like GPT 5.5 and Opus it should be a walk in the park.

That said I don't let LLMs commit. I like to take a close look at every change before committing. Early changes are cheaper.

by bel8

5/9/2026 at 1:51:49 PM

exactly, imo - the llm should touch git only after explicit approval or after specific set of guardrails. this one of the reasons i built it actually, i think the agent workflow should be decoupled from git, until saving the code

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 3:47:10 PM

Cool idea. Time will tell how it matures. It doesn't look trivial. Definitely should beat my current "scan the history" approach. Couple questions arose while reading the README:

- Would it integrate with rtk? Rtk is a token saver that shortens native output of got (and other) commands. - Does it track feature branches? - Is there garbage collection when history is rewriting (rebase before PR or removal of credential files.. ) or "simplification" of data as it gets older (Claude session logs lost...)?

Wishing you all the best with the project.

by _blk

5/8/2026 at 3:51:15 PM

None of these X-for-agents seem to motivate why they don’t use X.

by keybored

5/8/2026 at 3:58:56 PM

Git is a particularly egregious one, imo. It has a simple cli and solves all of the problems presented here! Worktrees for "exploratory" work that you might throwaway, and otherwise atomic commits just make tracking changes and reasoning for changes easy.

by tfrancisl

5/8/2026 at 4:10:19 PM

I think the idea of tracking intent in git commits is a great idea but it feels to me like this might be reducible to some prompts/extending git/pre-commit hooks?

by sudb

5/8/2026 at 3:51:31 PM

Agents can use git FWIW, and you can tell them to search old sessions by saying "Search through sessions in ~/.codex/sessions" and it'll find the most appropriate tools for doing so that is installed already. You can even add this to your system prompt or AGENTS.md and now you don't even have to prompt for it, it'll just look up the session history by itself.

Why this isn't built-in, I dunno, but been possible and easy for a very long time already, and works for any agent harness out there (as long as they persist sessions that is).

Personally I make the agent justify and explain things in the git commits, where is where that info went before agents anyways too, then have some sentences in my AGENTS.md about reading recent commits before doing changes, and using it whenever I prompt for history that isn't part of the current session. Seems to work perfectly fine.

by embedding-shape

5/8/2026 at 5:51:35 PM

I think codex has done something along the line: https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/6041

But it is trying to use git as a backend to save file states, and at the same time NOT showing it in the user's git history.

by cosimo-dw

5/8/2026 at 3:57:55 PM

I haven't tried it, but conceptually I can imagine that it is good to have a separate VCS for the agent. This way I can keep git clean and easy to understand for humans and still keep all the verbosity the agent needs.

by _ink_

5/8/2026 at 4:03:46 PM

It's really not. Anything the LLM can benefit from people can too. Keeping minimal explicit information in git history is a cultural norm not proven best practice. The best codebases I've worked on have very large commit messages and searching them is very useful. We should have been doing it that way all along.

by giraffe_lady

5/8/2026 at 4:14:47 PM

> This way I can keep git clean and easy to understand for humans

Personally I like it best when both humans and agents find it clean and easy to understand, but we all like different things :)

by embedding-shape

5/8/2026 at 4:02:20 PM

Branches and worktrees exist and can effectively act as a "separate" history. At the end of the day you would still merge the changes in, possibly with a squash if you don't care about the little commits.

by tfrancisl

5/11/2026 at 3:02:43 PM

This would cost Claude Code context, I has many skills during developing, if there anyway to avoid?

by timzaak

5/8/2026 at 6:09:17 PM

Hey, that's cool. Does this support conversation lookups? Like, "find this conversation we talked about yesterday"? I built a similar tool to this, although Regent seems much more elegant: https://github.com/divmgl/clancey/

by dimgl

5/9/2026 at 1:53:44 PM

cool!

actually not at the moment - would be nice to add it. i think the core of re_gent allows it very naturally, feel free to push it if want :)

by doshay

5/11/2026 at 3:25:33 AM

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by rahilpirani

5/9/2026 at 1:33:30 AM

I'm really pleased how wildly all the other commenters are misunderstanding this.

I was counting on this concept as competitive advantage.

But since the algorithm isn't going to surface me anyhow, for giggles I'll say I'm leaning more toward darcs than git.

by User23

5/9/2026 at 3:07:04 AM

Great idea! I was really baffled when I found out that that's not how agents, or also Chat-based IDEs like Cursor, work by default (guess how).

by c7b

5/8/2026 at 6:36:32 PM

quite interested in this but I'm working pi/omp only at the moment.

Inspired by entire.io I've vibed a super small extension that seems similar to this: https://github.com/janmechtel/pintire

I expect this feature to eventually end up in the harness

by Cilvic

5/8/2026 at 3:44:33 PM

This is brilliant. Does it only work with Claude right now? Will it work with any agent built on the Claude Agent SDK?

by radial_symmetry

5/9/2026 at 1:55:23 PM

at the moment only Claude Code, i'm planning to add support for the other big 3, but at the moment it's just me ... hopefully in the near future :)

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 4:14:34 PM

just curious since it reminds me a bit. Have you / someone tried https://entire.io/ (I'm not affiliated at all, so it is not a plug).

by shcheklein

5/9/2026 at 2:05:28 PM

sure, fair question i think the main difference is that entire are built on top of git == you would have to commit in order to track something...

by doshay

5/11/2026 at 6:38:20 AM

I'll give it a try

by horanglabs

5/8/2026 at 4:06:03 PM

I am all for extremely granular control of agents. Good work.

by alansaber

5/8/2026 at 6:41:39 PM

What's git for AI agents? git. What's a browser for AI agents? a browser. What's a Flux Capacitor for AI agents? a Flux Capacitor. You get the point.

by grim_io

5/8/2026 at 6:05:43 PM

unfortunately, agents have decades of examples for how to use git, bearish on any tool that deviates from git

by llmslave

5/9/2026 at 1:58:18 PM

i think you misunderstood the concept, actually . it's not built to replace git, rather to sit on top of it.

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 4:51:12 PM

can’t you just make agent hooks that do this with plain git?

by throwatdem12311

5/9/2026 at 1:57:12 PM

that's exactly what i tried in the first place, but i think it would be misuse of git protocol, git is built for files - the blobs/ tree calc & mechanism , for large contexts and linear thinking flow it's differnt, but honestly - i think you can get to a very good solution with pure git..

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 5:02:01 PM

my agent rebased and forcepushed with conflicts...

by boombapoom

5/8/2026 at 6:05:53 PM

Fun idea! There's frankly a lot to learn from reviewing agent sessions.

by wxw

5/10/2026 at 4:52:15 PM

interesting!

by smy_smy

5/8/2026 at 5:02:44 PM

I think of git more like a defense and quality control against AI slop than something that should be automated

by boombapoom

5/9/2026 at 8:02:56 PM

impressive

by kage18

5/8/2026 at 4:25:44 PM

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by dominotw

5/8/2026 at 6:40:22 PM

it's more like:

This is a great idea! / Cool approach / This looks amazing ... We / I did something similar ... <steal attention>

Bonus points if it looks like an AI generated response for an AI coded project.

by skeeter2020

5/11/2026 at 8:42:54 AM

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by BrightGirl

5/9/2026 at 3:50:41 PM

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5/8/2026 at 5:15:06 PM

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5/8/2026 at 10:28:37 PM

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5/9/2026 at 8:08:55 AM

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5/9/2026 at 12:58:12 AM

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5/8/2026 at 2:26:16 PM

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5/8/2026 at 3:06:16 PM

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by aayushkumar121

5/8/2026 at 5:00:34 PM

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by deferredgrant

5/9/2026 at 1:54:38 PM

thanks! will do

by doshay

5/8/2026 at 7:49:11 PM

Nice project. The interface feels clean and fast.

by Abhijeet620380

5/9/2026 at 6:18:37 AM

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5/9/2026 at 8:36:18 AM

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5/8/2026 at 8:59:12 PM

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by VinamraYadav

5/8/2026 at 3:51:53 PM

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by transkey