Code Storage by the Pierre Computer Company

[fat]

Hey everyone,

Wow, you scooped us! we weren’t really expecting to launch here just yet, but happy to answer any questions y’all have :)

First, Pierre is building code storage for machines -- think GitHub’s infrastructure layer, but API-first and tuned for LLMs.

What does that actually mean? We’ve spent the last 18+ months speed running GitHubs infrastructure (with a lot of help from early GitHub folks)… this is Github’s spoke architecture with a few modern twists + object store for cold storage.

Up until this point, GitHub is the only team that’s built a truly scalable git cluster (gitlab, bitbucket, etc. are all enterprise plays, with different tradeoffs).

Code.Storage is meant to be massively scalable… and we’ll be doing a larger post on what that means, and the scale we’re already doing soon hopefully :)

On top of this, we’ve invested a TON of time into our API layer – we have all the things you’d expect, list files, create branch, commit, etc. – with some new api’s that agents have found helpful: grep, glob based archive, ephemeral branches (git namespaces), etc.

Right now we’re in private beta – but happy to do my best to answer any questions in the short term (and if you’re working on anything that might benefit from code storage or storing code like artifacts – please reach out to [e-mail]

[spankalee]

Wow, this looks potentially amazing!

I've been look for a way to use Git for smaller, high volume document storage - think something like Google docs where every doc is a repo and every change is a commit - but also, where the vast majority of docs age out and are effectively archived and not used, but still need to be available.

This looks like it technically, I just wonder how well the pricing scales for that case of docs that might never be read again...

[a11r]

It would be nice to see a side-by-side comparison with Github on pricing and features. We are using github and creating hundreds of repos everyday without any issues (except for the occassional API outages that Github has). Curious to see your take on where Pierre is better.

[nusl]

It's basically hosted Git infrastructure as an API service, aimed at AI coding platforms rather than human developers.

Took me a really long time to understand this. The blob thing is cool but otherwise it's a really confusing website. The audio playing without me wanting it was not cool though.

[fat]

thanks for the feedback – we definitely have work to do on communicating what we're up to.

Sorry about the audio - will get that patched

[leohonexus]

I have a suspicion most of these types of agent-targeted SaaS will die out once the human equivalents implement their agent layers / MCPs.

Agents having no way to pay for their use is one thing; lack of deep integration within the business domain is another (e.g. if you're a Git provider, you'd probably want to offer CI/CD, PR workflows, release management, publicly discoverable repos etc., and boom - you just copied GitHub)

[fat]

We're actually meant to be less of a consumer product than i think you mean by this (but i may have misunderstood).

We're more targeting enterprise as storage infrastructure provider – selling directly to platforms who generate a bunch of code and need a place to put it.

end users wont really know we exist.

[thomasjb]

There's probably still going to be a box of hard drives in a datacenter somewhere, it does make sense to have a layer to manage the agent interface, rather than letting agents completely loose on all your storage.

[hollow-moe]

"git init --bare" as a service what a time to be alive

[pphysch]

And it only costs $30K per year for a single terabyte of usable (NVMe?) storage. The value!

$1 GiB/month x 3 minimum replicas x 1024 GiB x 12 months

And according to the status page they only have CDNs in us-east and eu-central.

[adithyassekhar]

Intersting concept. I just can't get my mind off one of the blurbs from the page

>Code Storage is designed for modern workloads: Vibe Coding platforms generating 1m+ new repos a day, AI copilots writing thousands of commits per session, teams branching and merging in real time, and apps syncing code across devices.

This is sort of a rant, skip if you must

Those 1m+ repos all have code no human has ever seen or will see. I'm afraid of being a luddite. But I can't believe we're taking vibe coding seriously, especially with these enterprise SaaS startups aimed at it. Abstractions have always come up but this is knowledge handover, this is knowledge reduction or destruction.

What happens to all of humanities greatest inventions when the current generation of developers die out? Who's going to maintain the basement? Where things haven't been abstracted? Who's learning at that level, who's keeping the knowledge alive when everyone's being told you just need to vibe instead of thinking logically?

I know why the push, people who never wanted to be developers, people who never wanted to code got into this for a paycheck or something else, they're welcoming this with both hands. I've seen people slowly lose their abilities they tried so hard to make.

I'm being fricking dramatic here all because of that blurb.

[blackqueeriroh]

Uhhhhh question: who’s teaching byte code or assembly in college these days? Are we still learning how to use punch cards?

If not, then it seems like we’re managing the transition just fine, my man.

[brandonmenc]

It's hard for me to trust a site that looks like a cryptic design portfolio from the early 2000s.

[jackfischer]

Why is that? Personally I appreciated the throwback look and it probably accomplished its goal of being memorable. Turbopuffer is another notable one seemingly leaning into this flavor of marketing

[ares623]

tbh I find it a 100x better than the current Tailwind monoculture where every site looks like it's shilling a crypto coin

[abluecloud]

maybe i'm too stupid but i dont have a clue what this is

[wahnfrieden]

low friction github repos for massively parallelized agentic use. which may also be ephemeral.

[pksunkara]

I am still curious why they stopped offering their original service. What was the feedback from users? Why did developers not want to use it?

[fat]

Ahh good question…

Here's the timeline if you're interested.

3 years ago we started building a direct competitor to GitHub with the theory that you need to build code storage, code review and CI to truly compete.

We spent about a year prototyping this all out, raised some money, and then started building this for real [tm].

Code storage felt like a HUGE moat for GitHub. Most of our competitors in the code review space:

- graphite - linear - (now cognition) - etc

All built directly on GitHub's apis – but we wanted to go down to the metal (something wrong with us).

A year and half into doing this, a few folks reached out and asked how we were scaling git… i waved my hands around a bunch and explained how hard of a distributed systems problem scaling git was… explained git three-phase commits, etc.

Fast forward a few more months, and we started standing up single tenant clusters of our infra for a few different codegen companies that also needed storage solutions.

And now here we are :)

[wahnfrieden]

probably ai became the bigger opportunity

[bluerooibos]

So what benefit does the API layer give over just being able to use git directly?

And agreed with other commenters about better explaining what this is - some examples and use cases side by side with the alternatives would work.

[neom]

Keep trying to sign up and get "Whoops, this email isn't allowed access. Try again." :( working for anyone else?

[fat]

not open access yet, sorry :(

[up2isomorphism]

Why does code need a different storage?

[Bnjoroge]

iirc like they pivoted from being a github replacement with their own vcs

[nfRfqX5n]

the design is so sick

[throawayonthe]

tldr: automated git repos. yknow, like normal git but for AI, bro