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 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 it from scratch today?

This started a four year long adventure where I built a version control system in my free-time called Jam, quit my job, and ended up selling it to another company very early on so I could continue working on it full-time.

That company unfortunately ended up shutting down in a little over a year.

However, I did get to see how good version control could feel if we just started over. There’s so much freedom in building on a new foundation. I’ve been thinking about version control systems every day since then.

With AI, I can finally build what I've been dreaming about. Version control systems are really hard to make, and even harder to make well. I’ve done way more in the previous four months than I did in the past four years.

Oak is the version control system I've been working on designed for your agents. It dramatically improves the speed and context your agents need when working on serious projects. With virtual mounts, agents locally and in the cloud no longer need a full copy of a repo to get working. You can work on many tasks in parallel without needing to download everything or fight worktrees. Version control shouldn't waste you or your agents time.

It should be fast, creative and fun to make things with your agents.

Oak is still early in development. There's no Windows build and missing plenty of features. No CI, no issues, no comments. We still use GitHub Actions for building Oak now, but we've been fully bootstrapped on Oak with no Git backup for several months.

It's currently made by Zach Geier (me), with Adam Morse shaping the product and visual system. It’s built on an open-source core and CLI. You can self host with `oak serve` and export your repo to a git repo with `oak export` at any time.

And you can try it out now! For the first 100 users that subscribe to a paid plan I will send you a personalized e-ink display with a unique Oak species (I don’t know how this will look yet).

I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts. Please, join the Discord if you're interested in following along or want to reach out.

— Zach

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