GoKawiilEast River Source Control has been around for over a year now, but we haven’t been talking much publicly about what we’ve been working on. We aren’t announcing anything just yet, and we will soon, but we wanted to share some of our thinking around version control and where things are going.
Making software is different now
Building software is fundamentally a collaborative task. Projects start with humble beginnings, and end up growing into incredibly large and complex systems. But what cargo new generates is the same thing as what a multi-billion line monorepo contains: source code. Storing this code safely and securely, managing how it changes over time, and ensuring its availability to developers are some of the most critical functions of any technology organization.
In the old days, you might have had a shared server where your code lived. Academia and then industry developed what are now called Source Control Management (SCM) and Version Control Systems (VCS). And even within the VCS space, we have seen many, many tools over the years: CVS, SVN, and Git are the tools that have dominated the open source space, but there have been others as well: Perforce, ClearCase, Fossil, Mercurial, SCSS, Monotone, BitKeeper, and many more. These tools became the standard way to store your code and have your team collaborate on changes to it.
The rise of agentic development has changed many things about how we develop software, but it places particular strain on your version control system. Teams are producing more code more quickly than ever before, ballooning repository sizes, increasing the number of active branches, and producing significant contention on merging in new work. Agents work well with monorepos, because they can get more access to more context more easily, exacerbating these issues as well. They’re moving development environments to the cloud, with isolated environments, which means that they need fast clone times. All of these problems used to be the domain of larger organizations, but agents are bringing big company problems to the rest of us.
We believe that as organizations continue to scale up their ambitions, they will need a next generation VCS tool. But they are rightfully a bit conservative with adopting new tooling in this space. As I said above, source code is one of the most precious commodities an organization has, and change has risks as well as rewards. We deeply appreciate these concerns, and so are building a bridge from the present to the future.
Storage is the foundation
Lots of Git servers exist though. What makes us special?
At a high level, the way most places that host Git repositories for you looks something like this:
Server Git protocol Git client Git serving layer Git repository storage How most Git hosts are built
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