GoKawiilVersion control second coming
The very same week we signed our first ever angel investor for Plastic SCM, in early summer of 2005, Linus Torvalds announced Git. I had spent more than a year pitching investors to build a new version control, and suddenly the creator of Linux was building one himself. That week I understood the road ahead was going to be much harder than I had anticipated.
I hadn’t felt that same electricity again in twenty years. Until a few months ago.
While we all stopped coding manually around December 2025, something else was cooking: the biggest revolution in version control since 2005.
Two big pushes happening simultaneously: the need to handle a much higher commit pace due to agents, and a sudden urge to replace GitHub.
I’m going to reflect about these two forces plus what we can probably expect in the near future from version control as it both adapts and supports new ways of developing software.
Fair warning: I’m anything but neutral. I spent twenty years competing against Git with Plastic SCM, I spent about two years advising Activision on their gigantic monorepo, I advise Diversion, and I now work at Origin making Git faster than anyone thought possible — so I’ve seen this fight from every corner of the ring.
The fall of the giants
If only 2 years ago somebody said GitHub would be no longer relevant soon, nobody would believe them. GitHub was the undisputed leader in repository hosting, and it also shaped the way developers thought about version control. Having spent too much time as a competitor (more about that later) I suffered that: if something was different than what people understood it was ‘the way GitHub does things’ it was probably wrong.
GitHub is still gigantic in both repos and minds, and its impact in the world of software development and collaboration in general has been enormous, and most likely it will continue to be.
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