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.
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.
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.
This would've been great but given what they came out with on a greenfield project, I strongly suspect an in-Gmail approach would have ended up qualitatively worse from UX & design perspective, likely driving users away from Gmail as a whole, & not just Wave. It would've resulted in a backlash from the mainstream, rather than Wave which was simply a damp squib the mainstream mainly ignored.
In an ideal world you're right, but I still think it was an engineering failure as, theoretically, it should be easier to make something usable on a greenfield project, & it was a horrific mess.
Wave's failure and that of Google+ might have been the turning point for Google, never really to return to its former glory.
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.
When you have nothing, risk is cheap. Once you make it, the strategy tends to shift from growth to protection.
You can’t be serious? AWS blows kindle out of the water in complexity and impact. Basic AWS started in 2006, Kindle in 2007.
The number of products under the AWS that are more impactful to society and more profitable to Amazon is vast.
If Google released Wave today, no one would care, because we all know it would probably be abandoned in two years, and definitely dead in five.
When I tried out Delta by zed in Private alpha my first feedback was "wow this reminds me of Google Wave"
Whats crazy ia that Wave i. its alpha/beta form whatever it wqs back then to me was marvel if engineering and atm I would be able to release it in a day or so thanks to AI.
We want to have less, not more, dependence on Cloudflare.
Single point of failure, for both technical and political failures.
Cloudflare wants all dependence on Cloudflare they can get.
I agree with both you and the person you’re responding to.
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.
Which is one reason to not want more dependencies on it.
$25k to build the next GitHub for $125B company? How generous.
And not even cold hard cash but “Cloudflare credits.”
What an offensive slap in the face.
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.
Tone deaf to the nth degree.
You get a dinner, but not even an all-inclusive travel package while you're there.
This is basically aimed at AI startups who are in SF anyways and need a platform for marketing. So no shortage of contestants.
I”m so sick of all these weird credits and points. Can’t pay food or bills with it.
Technically, you can pay your Cloudflare bill with it...
They don't want to own the next GitHub. They want people to build the next GitHub on Artifacts (and pay Cloudflare for storage and compute).
I don't have a strong opinion here, but giving away compute as a prize for hackathons isn't anything new.
Well, kinda, but usually the compute is given away as part of the hackaton. Even AWS hackaton did expect you to buy AWS credits..
The whole thing seems a bit uncouth. I get a real gross feeling from it.
That was my reaction. I was expecting, "The winner receives $500,000 in cash, $1M in Cloudflare credits, and an introduction to our venture team."
Or at least an employment offer!
On brand for Cloudflare which is typically a cheap company.
I agree that the compensation was a miss.
I really hope that was a purposeful understatement.
Author of GitSocial here. It is now possible to break most hosting dependencies by using such tools as Walgit or GitSocial to store all collaboration data in git itself and pushing it all to an S3-compatible bucket. https://gitsocial.org/ is hosted on an R2 bucket. Cross-forge, cross-bucket collaboration is built in to it, further decentralizing hosting. Happy to answer any questions!
What do you think about CloudFlare Artefacts?
If it’s for agents why don’t you make this a challenge towards them? What sort of human element is desired here?
> What sort of human element is desired here?
The human wallet
Yep. This is basically an ad for their "Artifacts" product. They are probably hoping to make more off of the spend of contestents than they pay in the prize to the winner.
Who said it’s for humans?
I’m tempted to ask an agent to submit an entry for me.
Why do they need others to ask their agents to do it? Why can't they ask their own agents?
Tokens be too expensive. Outsource to subs of all the devs over the world. OpenAI inverstors gonna take the inference L on subsidized tokens.
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.
You don't get infinite monkeys writing Hamlet with just a few monkeys
Once in a while you do. I see what you did though by specifying a particular play. Normally we settle for any Shakespeare :)
I build things.
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.
Agree, and also have a handprint that opens a data center door. But I've bought CF stock as a hedge...
Right, because I want a stupid Cloudflare captcha before every git operation.
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?
Hard disagree. They’re on a generational run atm. While the hyperscalers focused on big enterprise customers over the last 10 years, Cloudflare has built a product that lets a single developer run crazy projects for insanely cheap and with almost no maintenance. Now that basically everyone is writing and deploying software this is fast becoming the de facto deployment platform of vibe coders everywhere. Even ChatGPT sites runs on Workers.
Yeah, they seem well placed with their cheap-but-grear offerings.
I'm a cheapskate so am sometimes motivated by this cheapness, but each time I realise it's easier to just stick with what I know (Linux daemons) than cloud offerings.
Do you have any suggestions for something in the homelab/self-hosted space where CloudFlare has great offerings? (Other than the boring stuff like cache/DNS).
> Cloudfare gets so much action here
Cloudfare buys a lot of posts here*
The next platform for Agentic SCM is just… Fossil. Fossil is an SQLite database that can store anything an agent would ever need.
I use beads + git; you just need to put the bead id at the beginning of the commit msg. The agents do the rest.
What is beads?
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 looked into beads but I didn't see a way to make it work any better than fossil, and fossil does more stuff. My typical setup is to use the repo as a working directory, the tickets for todo, wiki/forum for conversation. There is also a chat interface, but I haven't tried that with agents yet.
But I love fossil for this. You can create users for all of the agents (or agent roles). The CLI for fossil is just a binary and it compiles nearly everywhere.
+1 over here for agentic fossil. With fossil the "work" is integrated in with the code. Beads separates this out, the beads are instances of work that agents can consume, and they aren't part of the work repo. I could see why you might want this, but I still think that fossil gives you more utility.
More info on beads if you are curious: https://github.com/gastownhall/beads
i feel like dropping the review and test phase -- especially in the agentic context - is incredibly spicy though.
So if I wanted to use fossil scm, i'd have to find a way to glue that on, and now ... we'Re basically in the same situation as with any other solution: it supports only a subset of the feature we want.
and especially CI pre "merge" is a hard requirement, and fossil doesnt have any concept for that i think?
But the last time i evaluated it was in the mid 2010s, so things may have progressed since? but couldn't find anything on cursory glance and AI confirmed that position, but we all know how often its wrong... so how did yall solve that issue?
People keep forgetting to ask if they”should” build something before building it. Yeah the tokens are cheap but even though it only takes 3 months instead of a year is still expensive.
3 months? if they gave 3 months then this would be at least plausible given the gigantic scope they set, but... youve got 10 days
> Deadline
> October 14, 2026.
: .｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:
but as others have said: $25k in credits as a reward for winning first place: this is not a real competition, this is just a minor marketing post so they get a few cheap clicks nwith no expectation of anything valuable from it
Lot of people in these threads talk about Cloudflare like they're forcing the centralization of the Internet. There was a DDoS problem and they got there early and don't charge much, if anything, to protect your endpoints. End of that story.
Anybody else remember when a less evil version of Google gave their engineers time to go make whatever they wanted to make? And everyone was like that's really cool — to trust your smart people to make useful things.
Every half-baked product coming out of Cloudflare feels like some version of that. Letting your engineering teams cook to see if the end result tastes good. Some stuff doesn't. Some stuff is amazing.
Now I have DNS, Workers, D1, R2, email, secret vault, MCP, CLI, tunnels, access, analytics, and on and on. I have like 8 Svelte apps running with decent traffic for free. And they're stable. And it feels like Cloudflare is loss-leading instead of conducting bait-and-switch enshittification. I've been using their shit for over a decade.
Looking around the rest of the industry landscape, I'm not sure how anyone lands on Cloudflare being bad for developers/engineers. My shit is centralized because nobody else does what they do and delivers the DX that they do. I truly feel gaslit sometimes on this site.
> Anybody else remember when a less evil version of Google gave their engineers time to go make whatever they wanted to make?
Yes, it was great. Until Google turned evil, and the goodwill that we had given to them on the basis of all of these cool products was turned back against us. The lesson I learned from this time was that you don't give a company leverage over you just because you like what they are doing today. You should also consider where they are headed in the future.
Why did Google turn evil? Do you think Cloudflare is immune from these same incentives? Is giving a bunch of free services away to everyone sustainable, or will they be forced to tighten the screws in the future, and if so, what will it look like when they do?
No, Cloudflare is definitely not immune. No corporation is immune and as the world leans harder into fascism, pay-to-play becomes a concrete requirement to operate a large business. I don't think Cloudflare is completely innocent or anything. They just don't make me feel 'the ick' yet. There are some signs, like the Omarchy donation, but I also can see the business angle of supporting a project from the guy created Rails. He's going through some midlife thing, and definitely has opinions that suck, but there's a talented engineer in there somewhere.
Businesses only care about money. That's why the Cloudflare hate feels strange to me I guess. They've been giving stuff away to devs for free that would normally be expensive, and supporting open source projects at the same time. They're not perfect but this is capitalism. Everyone sucks in some way or another. They're conducting business but at the same time, they're driving their business with loss-leading services that they're definitely losing money on. That's not a business practice I would typically attribute to an evil and soulless money machine. I'm not naive either, I've been waiting for them to begin enshittifying for at least 5 years. They just never seem to.
"They've been giving stuff away to devs for free"
It's not free, it moves the cost onto the users of those services. I have to pay with my time and my data.
Or, increasingly, I hit backspace as soon as I see the Cloudflare logo. Who's going to pay when the users don't?
Centralization is antithetical to the whole idea of the internet
We've gone fully offline with our code and artifact storage. No need for a social network with vestigial low-quality dev tooling. Our devs don't even need a web UI. Bare git repos on SSH are plenty for agent workflows.
Now that we don't have to worry about people and weak git skill getting in the way, agents can use git without needing all the emergent centralization.
"The first-place team will also receive $25,000 in Cloudflare credits, along with invitations to the VIP speaker dinner on Monday night at Connect."
Whoever in Cloudflare thought that this is an appropriate compensation for the work is delusional. This is insulting.
:D Please rewrite the current foundation for how programmers across the world cooperate. Should be easy.
> We want you to build
Strangest tech announcement ever.
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.
It could live in git commit comments, though.
it COULD but should it. I guess that's the contest. Fun.
$25,000 in Cloudflare credits for a revolutionary new Git platform by checks calendar a week and a half from now? I'm sure someone will go for this.
The funny things is, I'm actively working on a replacement for Github but it's not gonna be built on Cloudflare LMAO!
It's not gonna be ready by CLoudflare's deadline but I'm aiming to get the beta deployed by end of November. Plenty to do! It'll be available on eol.sh...
Cloudflare, lately, has been trying to have a finger in every pie around with such suspect enthusiasm.
I think if Cloudflare wants to have a fighting chance it should at least give its projects a different domain and a different brand. Nobody wants to pile in more failure modes into dash.cloudflare.com. This is probably the reason all their developer products are failing to take off.
Have to point this out because it annoys me every time:
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.
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
"We want you to dig for gold using our picks and shovels" is a fascinating angle for what I assume was intended as more of a showcase of the underlying versioned storage offering.
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.
Badass offer and even badder gmail address
I want you to stop donating to Omarchy.
> Earlier this year, we launched Artifacts, a versioned filesystem that speaks Git and can scale to millions of repositories.
> We want you to build your vision for the Git platform of the agentic era using Cloudflare Workers and Artifacts.
> A link to the source code, which must be provided under a permissive open source license (MIT, Apache, BSD)
> We’ll select the top three projects and fly up to two members from each team to San Francisco to attend Cloudflare Connect and show what they built.
The first-place team will also receive $25,000 in Cloudflare credits, along with invitations to the VIP speaker dinner on Monday night at Connect.
LOL. So basically they built some new product and it's not getting enough adoption. And they're looking to get (*almost) free labor to do the work for them.
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.
I wonder if they still use Bitbucket internally.
> 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.
That's my experience as well
Reinventing source control to accommodate bot sprawl for $25k in scrip, lol.
Lololol. This is probably the dumbest sounding competition I've ever heard. Git for bots? Uhhhh ok, whatever.
No thanks. No more US based infrastructure for me.
There remain fundamental patterns for the future of software development that are missing.
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...
I'm going to push back on this idea. Of course git is a pretty terrible revision control system for humans, hence it will be such for agents too. But why do we need a totally new kind of revision control system for agents? I don't think we do. Or, conversely if you think you do you're either confused or doing something wrong.
Me too, dont have enough tokens.
So they want to take someone’s idea for peanuts and then vibecode it later.. also, any word on training AI on the code there?
Fuck everything about this.
“We want you to use our product” said every SaaS company ever. “Our product is designed for AI” says every SaaS for the last two years.
None of this is very clever or very compelling.
> We want you to build the next Git platform on
the computer under your desk!
Roll your Own, don't depend on billionaire platforms to get your work done...
There is no computer under my desk
Put a computer under your desk then use it to host your git repos.
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
It is called a "desktop" computer and not a "deskunder" for a reason...
Can we please have it decentralised and without any single entity having control over the lifecycle of a product ? Lessons learnt.
Git is already decentralised, just stop using platforms and self host