[straydusk]

> Checkpoints are a new primitive that automatically captures agent context as first-class, versioned data in Git. When you commit code generated by an agent, Checkpoints capture the full session alongside the commit: the transcript, prompts, files touched, token usage, tool calls and more.

This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you.

[toraway]

What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here?

It's somewhat strange to regularly read HN threads confidently asserting that the cost of software is trending towards zero and software engineering as a profession is dead, but also that an AI dev tool that basically hooks onto Git/Claude Code/terminal session history is worth multiples of $60+ million dollars.

[everforward]

There’s a difference between “this concept has value” and “a company can capture that value”.

I do see value in this, but like you I think it’s too trivial to implement to capture the value unless they can get some kind of lead on a model that can consume these artifacts more effectively. It feels like something Anthropic will have in Claude Code in a month.

[raincole]

GitHub doesn't have a "moat" either besides network effect. Just like most SaaS.

And it was sold to Microsoft at $7B.

[psandor]

If they had wanted a moat for this part of their offering, they wouldn’t have open-sourced it.

This is not their offering, this is a tool to raise interest.

[cush]

There's no way this company is just a few git and claude hooks with a CLI. They're definitely working on a SASS - something else that isn't open source that this primitive is the basis of. Like a GitHub for agent code

[jameslk]

> What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here?

You are correct, that isn't the moat. Writing the software is the easy part

[elif]

The same moat that git had on svn, a better mental paradigm over the same fundamental system, more suited to how SWE changed over a decade.

[YetAnotherNick]

> HN threads confidently asserting

I have never seen any thread that unanimously asserts this. Even if they do, having HN/reddit asserting something as evidence is wrong way to look at things.

[ryanjshaw]

This comment feels word-for-word the legendary DropBox critique on HN.

[pipes]

I sort of agree with you. But the sentiment reminds me of the hacker news dropbox launch response. Which was pretty much

"pfft! I could set all this up myself with a NAS xyz".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[bambax]

I currently develop small utilities with the help of AI, but am far from vibe coding or using agents. I review every single suggestion and do some refactoring at each step, before any commit (sometimes heavy refactoring; sometimes reorganizing everything).

In my experience LLMs tend to touch everything all of the time and don't naturally think about simplification, centralization and separation of concerns. They don't care about structure, they're all over the place. One needs to breathe on their shoulders to produce anything organized.

Maybe there's a way to give them more autonomy by writing the whole program in pseudo-code with just function signatures and let them flesh it out. I haven't tried that yet but it may be interesting.

[frumiousirc]

Yours matches my own experience and work habits.

My mental model is that LLMs are obedient but lazy. The laziness shows in the output matching the letter of the prompt but with as high "code entropy" as possible.

What I mean by "code entropy" is, for example, copy-paste-tweak (high entropy) is always easier (on the short term) for LLMs (and humans) to output than defining a function to hold concepts common across the pastes with the "tweak" represented by function arguments.

LLMs will produce high entropy output unless constrained to produce lower entropy ("better") code.

Until/unless LLMs are trained to actually apply craft learned by experienced humans, we must be explicit in our prompts.

For example, I get good results from say Claude Sonnnet when my instruction include:

- Statements of specific file, class, function names to use.

- Explicit design patterns to apply. ("loop over the outer product of lists of choices for each category")

- Implementation hints ("use itertools.product() to iterate over the combinations")

- And, "ask questions if you are uncertain" helps trigger an iteration to quickly clarify something instead of fixing the resulting code.

This specificity makes prompting a lot more work but it pays off. I only go this far when I care about the resulting code. And, I still often "retouch" as you also describe.

OTOH, when I'm vibing I'll just give end goals and let the slop flow.

[nialv7]

Sure... you `git add` the context text generated by AI and `git commit` it, could be useful. Is that worth 60 million?

[Klonoar]

It’s good to know that a few decades later the same generic Dropbox-weekend take can be made.

[guiambros]

It's funny how HN'ers frequently judge ideas based on complexity of implementation, not value.

I still remember the reaction when Dropbox was created: "It's just file sharing; I can build my own with FTP. What value could it possibly create".

[androiddrew]

They raised 60 million. The investors think it’s worth 600M+

[Aperocky]

Discord is not prized because you can send a message to a chatroom, or any of the hooks and functions.

It's because of everybody there.

Currently no one is on Entire - the investor are betting they will be.

[anonzzzies]

We have had this for ages now.... I just don't have access to the sort of people willing to pass me 60m for that. I never thought it to be worth anything really ; it was a trivial to implement afterthought.

[sellmesoap]

Well a famous name is attached, could be the start of the product that replaces github, building github2 would give oppertunity to fix mistakes that are too entrenched to change at github, and who better to try? I'm uncharacteristically optimistic on this one, I'd give it a try!

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

I love this one so much! The arbitrary decision to cherry-pick critique a particular product to this degree, when it’s something that could be said about 99% of the stuff SV churns out, including in all likelihood anything you’ve ever worked on.

[paulddraper]

That is their first feature.

If it were also their last, I would be inclined to agree.

[buildbuildbuild]

The unannounced web collaboration platform in-progress might be.

[surfinganalyst]

Couldn't we capture this value with a git hook?

[sailfast]

300 million, apparently.

[JPKab]

The most active HNers are just extremely negative on AI. I understand the impulse (you spend years honing your craft, and then something comes along and automates major portions of it) but it's driven by emotion and ego-defense and those engaged in it simply don't recognize what's motivating them. Their ego-defense is actually self-fulfilling, because they don't even try to properly learn how to leverage LLMs for coding so they give it a huge task they want it to fail on, don't properly break it into tasks, and then say "i told you it sucks" when it fails to one shot it.

[BoorishBears]

Even this response shows why the most active ones are outwardly negative on AI.

I use AI a ton, but there are just way too many grifters right now, and their favorite refrain is to dismiss any amount of negativity with "oh you're just mad/scared/jealous/etc. it replaces you".

But people who actually build things don't talk like that, grifters do. You ask them what they've built before and after the current LLM takeoff and it's crickets or slop. Like the Inglourious Basterds fingers meme.

There's no way that someone complaining about coding agents not being there yet, can't simultaneously be someone who'd look forward to a day they could just will things into existence because it's not actually about what AI might build for them: it's about "line will go up and I've attached myself to the line like a barnacle, so I must proselytize everyone into joining me in pushing the line ever higher up"

These people have no understanding of what's happening, but they invent one completely divorced from any reality other than the reality them and their ilk have projected into thin air via clout.

It looks like mental illness and hoarding Mac Minis and it's distasteful to people who know better, especially since their nonsense is so overwhelmingly loud and noisy and starts to drown out any actual signal.

[lgrapenthin]

The negativity is driven by outrageous claims how AIs will replace programmers, or how english is the PL of the future. T

[matsemann]

> if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you.

You could perhaps start by telling what value you see in this? And what this company does that someone can't easily do themselves while committing to GH?

[dpweb]

I know about "the entire developer world has been refactored" and all, but what exactly does this thing do?

Runs git checkpoint every time an agent makes changes?

[vardalab]

For the last three or four months, what I've been doing is anytime I have Claude write a comment on an issue, it just adds a session ID, file path and the VM it is on. That way, whenever we have some stuff that comes up, we just search through issues and then we can also retrace the session that produced the work and it's all traceable. In general, I just work through gitea issues and sometimes beads. I couldn't stand having all these MD files in my repo because I was just drowning in documentation, so having it in issues has been working really nicely and agents know how to work with issues. I did have it write a gitea utility and they are pretty happy using/abusing it. Anytime I see that they call it in some way that generates errors, I just have them improve the utility. And by this point, it pretty much always works. It's been really nice.

[konaraddi]

100% agree because there’s a lot of value in understanding how and why past code was written. It can be used to make better decisions faster around code to write in the future.

E.g., if you’ve ever wondered why code was written in a particular way X instead of Y then you’ll have the context to understand whether X is still relevant or if Y can be adopted.

E.g., easier to prompt AI to write the next commit when it knows all the context behind the current/previous commit’s development process.

[buster]

But that's not what is in the whole context. The whole context contains a lot of noise and false "thoughts". What the AI needs to do is to document the software project in an efficient manner without duplication. That's not what this tool is doing. I question the value in storing all the crap in git.

[majormajor]

I wonder. How often will that context actually be that valuable vs just more bloat to fill up future API calls with to burn tokens.

[bergheim]

A year ago I added memory to my Emacs helper [0]. It was just lines in org-mode. I thought it was so stupid. It worked though. Sort of.

That's how a trillion dollar company also does it, turns out.

0: https://github.com/karthink/gptel

[tflinton]

How does this differ from what Github Copilot does when writing its .github/copilot-instructions.md? That doesn't keep the transcript or prompts, but it does keep quite a bit of the context and a declarative state of the decisions/design considerations made so another AI bot can pickup and have enough context to understand the rationale. I'm also not really convinced that any AI agent wouldn't still parse the code to understand more about the context vs. just using the checkpoint.

[lubujackson]

Wow, read through the comments and you weren't joking. I attribute this to crossroads of "this release is v0.1 of what we are building" and the HN crowd who have been scrolling past 120 AI frameworks and hot takes daily and have no patience for anything that isn't immediately 100% useful to them in the moment.

I find the framing of the problem to be very accurate, which is very encouraging. People saying "I can roll my own in a weekend" might be right, but they don't have $60M in the bank, which makes all the difference.

My take is this product is getting released right now because they need the data to build on. The raw data is the thing, then they can crunch numbers and build some analysis to produce dynamic context, possibly using shared patterns across repos.

Despite what HN thinks, $60M doesn't just fall in your lap without a clear plan. The moat is the trust people will have to upload their data, not the code that runs it. I expect to see some interesting things from this in the coming months.

[vasachi]

Didn’t Juicero get more than a $100M? Do you think they had a clear plan? How much did Rome get? Did they have a clear plan?

[bmurphy1976]

I haven't read the article yet but this conversation reminds me of Docker. Lots of people "didn't get it." I told them at the time: if you don't get it you aren't ready for it yet so don't worry about it. When you do need it, you'll get it and then you'll use it and never look back. Look at where we are with containers now.

[darkwater]

And look where Docker Inc is now (which is one of the points some critics are making)

[whh]

I'm trying it out now. If it works, I think it'd be great for my agentic workflows where I need to figure out why something was done a specific way.

I have a lot of concurrent agents working on things at the same time, so I'm not always sure why a piece of code is the way it is months later.

[whh]

I've used it for a couple of hours. A few observations:

- It's nice to see conversation context alongside the change itself. - I wasn't able to see Claude Code utilise past commit context in understanding code. - It's a tad unclear (and possible unreliable) in what is called 'checkpointing'. - It mucked up my commit messages by replacing the first line with a sort of AI request title or similar.

Sadly, because of the last point (we use semantic release and git-cz) I've had to uninstall it.

[abustamam]

I think this is neat; in fact, I orchestrated my AI agents to do something similar (keep a log of files touched and why). And I have agents refer to the work log as well when they are unclear on why something exists.

It's not 1:1 with checkpoints, but I find such things to be useful.

[mikodin]

I've found immense value in this, am already doing it with Pi(https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono) and it's very easy to replicate

[soerxpso]

Do you mean the value in this specific tool, or in the concept? You don't need a dedicated tool to store agent session transcripts and link them to commits. This can be accomplished by a 10-line bash script.

[soulofmischief]

I built out the same thing in my own custom software forge. Every single part of the collaborative development process is memoized.

[stitched2gethr]

And how are you using it now? Have you seen real value weeks or months on?

[hansmayer]

> This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you.

This sounds a lot like that line from Microsoft's AI CEO "not understanding the negativity towards AI". And Satya instructing us to not use the term "slop" any more. Yes we don't see value in taking a git primitive like "commit" and renaming it to "checkpoint". I wonder whether the branches going to be renamed to something like "parallel history" :)

[Aeolun]

This is literally what claude code already does minus the commit attachment. It’s just very fancy marketing speak for the exact same thing.

I’m happy to believe maybe they’ll make something useful with 60M (quite a lot for a seed round though), but Maybe not get all lyrical about what they have now.

[sothatsit]

Claude Code captures this locally, not in version control alongside commits.

[benterix]

>. This thread is extremely negative - if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you.

It's almost a meme: whenever a commercial product is criticized on HN, a prominent thread is started with a classic tone-policing "why are you guys so negative".

(Well, we explained why: their moat is trivial to replicate.)

[vrosas]

ehhhh is it really that useful though? Sounds way more noisy than anything, and a great way to burn through tokens. It's like founding a startup to solve the problem of people squashing their commits. Also, it sounds like something Claude Code/Codex/etc could quickly add an extension for.

[weird-eye-issue]

How would this use any extra tokens? Just seems like it's serializing the existing context

[hoten]

I see the utility in this as an extension to git / source control. But how do VCs make money of it?

[rafaelmn]

Is that sarcasm ? Dump a bunch of JSON from llm proxy and commit it ? Sounds like billion dollar secret sauce to me.

[throw10920]

Maybe use critical thinking instead of a mindless dismissal?

The fact that you aren't haven't offered a single counterargument to any other posters' points and have to resort to pearl-clutching is pretty good proof that you can't actually respond to any points and are just emotionally lashing out.

[tbrownaw]

[flagged]

[dang]

Please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. That's an internet snark trope and we're trying to avoid those on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[MrDarcy]

Look it’s obvious at this point to anyone who is actually using the tools.

We can articulate it but why should we bother when it’s so obvious.

We are at an inflection point where discussion about this, even on HN, is useless until the people in the conversation are on a similar level again. Until then we have a very large gap in a bimodal distribution, and it’s fruitless to talk to the other population.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

I think if you add some more emotional vitriolic language to your reply you’ll finally, finally get your point across. /s

[grimgrin]

I will never use this platform. i didn't even click into it. pathetically, i did click to view comments

But I think commenting on someone's bio is the kinda harshness you only do in the moment. the kinda thing I'd approach differently in hindsight (one that isn't an attempt to be cruel)