I would guess that for at least 90% of the repos I clone, I just want to install something. Even for the rest, I might hack on the code but seldom look into the history. If I do then I could do a `git fetch` at that point and save the bandwidth and disk space the rest of the time.
dwattttt•Apr 28, 2026
A question: why is git involved at all in this? You don't want a repository.
skydhash•Apr 28, 2026
This! The default was to have a link to download a tarball of the source. And if the user wanted to contribute (or check the devel version), you would add a link to the vcs.
eddythompson80•Apr 28, 2026
I think gitignore solves a problem that is hard to solve with the traditional tarball approach.
Downloading a tarball and running ./configure or make, editing a config file here or there, etc then running `make install` is the most common flow. Now days I find myself frequently editing the Dockerfile to make it to my liking. With a git repo, the owners of the repo have excluded all the local files, build caches, etc and you can keep pulling to get updates stashing and reapplying your local changes. With tarballs, you have to figure it out all over again. Lose your build cache (language dependent maybe), lose a change you made here or there, etc.
kingstnap•Apr 28, 2026
Grabbing git repos instead of just tarballs is useful.
A) You can update them, because you can git pull to fetch changes.
B) If you want to apply patches on top, its better to have version control so you can keep track of what you changed, especially useful if you want to rebase.
skydhash•Apr 28, 2026
A) only valid if you want to stay with the devel version
B) See A
I use OpenBSD and before that, I was on alpine, debian, and arch. Of it was a software I want to try, I downloaded the tarball. if it’s something I wanted to keep for longer, I created a port or a custom packages.
Thanks. That's great! I especially like that it then lazy loads the blobs as you need them.
I was going to ask if there's a way to set that as the default but I guess I'll just set up an alias like I have for most of the subcommands I use daily.
jurakovic•Apr 28, 2026
What if that's only you? Git isn't made only for those who "just want to install something"
aa-jv•Apr 28, 2026
Its not the default because that'd be counter-productive to developers who use git with larger repositories, which is how git started life in the first place - your clone depth would be entirely useless for Linux kernel developers, for example, if it were default ..
normie3000•Apr 28, 2026
> LFS adds its own operational overhead.
Seemingly seconds on every remote-touching command, even on a very small repo.
Hendrikto•Apr 28, 2026
What is worse is that for about half a year or so, I now have to authenticate my ed25519-sk key with my Yubikey thrice (!) when using LFS. On every push.
fragmede•Apr 28, 2026
That they didn't go with git annex was such a fit of NIH of a mistake.
Hendrikto•Apr 28, 2026
Both have their advantages and disadvantages. git-annex is not strictly better, LFS just chose different tradeoffs.
anitil•Apr 28, 2026
I'm only on to chapter two and already it's explained some plumbing details that I somehow have missed all these years. This is great
ruuda•Apr 28, 2026
The text reads like an LLM was involved in this.
nananana9•Apr 28, 2026
Git is industry standard, because for what it give you it's a remarkably robust and simple program to use. We're all vaguely aware that the internals are complex, but the UX is clean and usable enough that the complexity usually doesn't leak out.
But the day this breaks down and I have to deal with bloom filters, packfiles, maintaining the git garbage collector or rerere cleanup, is the day I switch our codebase to a centralized VCS.
This stuff is cool to learn about; but it's 5 layers removed from anything I want to be thinking about in my day to day work.
thfuran•Apr 28, 2026
I'm pretty sure git is industry standard almost entirely entirely because GitHub exists. And I very much disagree that the UX is clean. The cli is more than a bit of a mess.
BerislavLopac•Apr 28, 2026
Anyone who has ever used Mercurial knows very well what a good versioning tool UX looks like...
miroljub•Apr 28, 2026
> Anyone who has ever used Mercurial knows very well what a good versioning tool UX looks like...
So true. I used Mercurial back in the day and also used Darcs before it, and it helped me realize that the best versioning tool UX that exists is still the one Git provides.
PS: Also CVS, SVN, Perforce, and Clear Case professionally, and gave a try to Fossil. None of them even close to Git usability-wise.
windward•Apr 28, 2026
No. When I left a job using Mercurial, I made a vow never to start a job that used it again. And that employer was seeking to move on from it.
liveoneggs•Apr 28, 2026
good because clones take forever so you get free time? Good because you need plugins/extension/special-config to support rebase?
stingraycharles•Apr 28, 2026
> I'm pretty sure git is industry standard almost entirely entirely because GitHub exists.
Nah, I remember that time vividly, Github became a thing about a year or two after it was already very much taking the lead.
GitHub became GitHub because git was the winner. There were alternative hubs that supported bazaar and mercurial and whatnot, but git won because for most people, Linus and the kernel team being behind it was reason enough to trust it.
(and I say this as someone who liked hg more than git)
embedding-shape•Apr 28, 2026
I mean, I don't think anyone can say for sure if "GitHub became GitHub because git was the winner" or "Git became mainstream because GitHub won the developer mindshare", pretty much everyone I knew used GitHub for everything besides the actual VCS protocol, although a lot of us early users were users of GitHub especially because of git.
Most people just wanted to collaborate on the platform other people were on, and where the popular projects were, that it used git was just an implementation detail at that point for most I think.
codesnik•Apr 28, 2026
i think it is the other way around. Git is pretty simple internally, and its ui is just knobs and levers to reach into that simple reliable internal structure. This is why for some people it seems like a mess - they want button "do what I want" (and all people and their needs are different), and for other people it's clean - open the throttle, engine will rev.
embedding-shape•Apr 28, 2026
Agree, the insides are fairly simple and cleanly designed, you could explain exactly how almost everything works in a 1 hour presentation, and most people will grok the main ideas fairly easily.
The tooling on top is inconsistent and kind of messy though, and harder to explain than the internals. I recall hearing somewhere that the tooling we see today as the user tooling was really supposed to just be the tooling for messing with git directly, with the expectation that something would sit above and make it actually user-friendly. I don't remember where I recall this from though, so could be just a post-justification from my own brain to explain the situation :)
skydhash•Apr 28, 2026
It’s more about using them to present a better interface for your workflow and the project.
bananapub•Apr 28, 2026
> Git is pretty simple internally, and its ui is just knobs and levers to reach into that simple reliable internal structure.
that's not true either. originally it was simple internally - it was mostly shell scripts! writing text files! - but now it has all sorts of complicated optimisations.
the "middle" is somewhat simple for CS people, though - a graph of commits, you can put labels on them, you can send and receive strict appends to the graph to another repository. both the stuff under and above that is quite complicated in practice, but the UI does continue to improve - e.g. editing a past commit message until the release last week was ... complicated.
skydhash•Apr 28, 2026
> editing a past commit message until the release last week was ... complicated
Was it? ‘git log —-oneline’ to figure the commit id if it’s not really recent. ‘git rebase -i <commit-id>^’ and then apply the reword action to your commit.
aa-jv•Apr 28, 2026
I've always wanted to see a book that describes git for the common man and gives them tons of examples for how to use it to do productive things.
Even for a small office, git can be immensely useful. Entire production line workflows can be implemented with git .. if only folks would learn to use it productively.
Its not just for development. Writers can use it productively. Accountants too.
It always kind of irks me that Git hasn't just been folded into the OS front-end UI by any of the OS vendors .. it'd be so revolutionary to give common folks an easy way to manage the timeline/history of their computer use using git.
awesan•Apr 28, 2026
The obvious reason is that most file formats used by writers, accountants, etc. are binary files which do not very much benefit from git.
fragmede•Apr 28, 2026
Microsoft Office files are zipped XML these days, there's a standard and everything.
aa-jv•Apr 28, 2026
So? Doesn't matter. Git in that case still provides valuable historical archiving and versioning that is still more useful than the option, without it.
Plus, its chicken and egg. If the OS had a great interface to Git as part of its responsibilities in the Explorer/Finder interface, folks would be more inclined to use text-based file format standards that are coherent with the Git methodology.
alxgsv•Apr 28, 2026
I never faced git performance issues when working with code. Guess my repos weren't bit. But when I tried to use git as a versioned database of changes in my pet project, I learned a lot about indexes, compacting, etc. Article covers a lot and is very helpful!
hmpc•Apr 28, 2026
Similarly, if not performance-focused, I can wholeheartedly recommend Building Git[0], which walks you through building your own git clone in Ruby (although the language is immaterial).
Surprise, surprise, another piece of LLM-generated slop on the front page of HN.
From chapter 1:
> When Git slows down, engineers adapt in bad ways. They stop asking questions the history could answer. They batch work to avoid sync cost. They keep messy branches alive longer, postpone cleanup, and treat the repository like something slightly dangerous.
> Once machines start producing code at machine cadence, the model from this book does not break. What changes is the pace: more branches, more commits, more automation, and more surrounding metadata. The traffic gets louder, and the features that keep Git legible under pressure move from "nice to have" to "essential."
> These stop looking like side optimizations. They are what keep machine-scale Git traffic usable.
redditor98654•Apr 28, 2026
I had the same thought. TBH there is nothing in those individual sentences that read like AI but when you read them all together I could see it too. I dunno what it is, only way I can describe it is that it does not sound like a normal human but rather a monologue from a character trying to sound impressive with each successive sentence.
ergl•Apr 28, 2026
The author works at OpenAI, so it's no surprise that they've stopped noticing how grating this kind of structure is to read.
alchemist1e9•Apr 28, 2026
I think it’s likely there will be methods to fix this soon, some de-slop algorithms, or is there a deep reason it will always be detectable? Perhaps there are some PhD linguists who have figured out how to quantify the “slop” effect and are writing their thesis on it. Once that is done it will be possible to smooth it away.
The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.
tnm•Apr 28, 2026
Thanks for the kind words, and checking out the book here.
I'd written this piecemeal over the last year or so (originally a series of blog posts), and was happy to release it all for free in a single edition, and under CC.
I'll release an Edition 1.1 soon with some errata, adjustments. There's already a free PDF for the on-the-go -> https://gitperf.com/pdf.html
Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free!
LLMs will continue to leave imprints in our work. Some words will, over time, be edited and whittled away; while other words, when the LLM writes well enough to convey a useful point, will be kept.
10 Comments
and also git
which makes more sense i guess
Why isn't
the default?I would guess that for at least 90% of the repos I clone, I just want to install something. Even for the rest, I might hack on the code but seldom look into the history. If I do then I could do a `git fetch` at that point and save the bandwidth and disk space the rest of the time.
Downloading a tarball and running ./configure or make, editing a config file here or there, etc then running `make install` is the most common flow. Now days I find myself frequently editing the Dockerfile to make it to my liking. With a git repo, the owners of the repo have excluded all the local files, build caches, etc and you can keep pulling to get updates stashing and reapplying your local changes. With tarballs, you have to figure it out all over again. Lose your build cache (language dependent maybe), lose a change you made here or there, etc.
A) You can update them, because you can git pull to fetch changes.
B) If you want to apply patches on top, its better to have version control so you can keep track of what you changed, especially useful if you want to rebase.
B) See A
I use OpenBSD and before that, I was on alpine, debian, and arch. Of it was a software I want to try, I downloaded the tarball. if it’s something I wanted to keep for longer, I created a port or a custom packages.
https://github.blog/open-source/git/get-up-to-speed-with-par...
https://gitperf.com/chapter-11.html
I was going to ask if there's a way to set that as the default but I guess I'll just set up an alias like I have for most of the subcommands I use daily.
Seemingly seconds on every remote-touching command, even on a very small repo.
But the day this breaks down and I have to deal with bloom filters, packfiles, maintaining the git garbage collector or rerere cleanup, is the day I switch our codebase to a centralized VCS.
This stuff is cool to learn about; but it's 5 layers removed from anything I want to be thinking about in my day to day work.
So true. I used Mercurial back in the day and also used Darcs before it, and it helped me realize that the best versioning tool UX that exists is still the one Git provides.
PS: Also CVS, SVN, Perforce, and Clear Case professionally, and gave a try to Fossil. None of them even close to Git usability-wise.
Nah, I remember that time vividly, Github became a thing about a year or two after it was already very much taking the lead.
GitHub became GitHub because git was the winner. There were alternative hubs that supported bazaar and mercurial and whatnot, but git won because for most people, Linus and the kernel team being behind it was reason enough to trust it.
(and I say this as someone who liked hg more than git)
Most people just wanted to collaborate on the platform other people were on, and where the popular projects were, that it used git was just an implementation detail at that point for most I think.
The tooling on top is inconsistent and kind of messy though, and harder to explain than the internals. I recall hearing somewhere that the tooling we see today as the user tooling was really supposed to just be the tooling for messing with git directly, with the expectation that something would sit above and make it actually user-friendly. I don't remember where I recall this from though, so could be just a post-justification from my own brain to explain the situation :)
that's not true either. originally it was simple internally - it was mostly shell scripts! writing text files! - but now it has all sorts of complicated optimisations.
the "middle" is somewhat simple for CS people, though - a graph of commits, you can put labels on them, you can send and receive strict appends to the graph to another repository. both the stuff under and above that is quite complicated in practice, but the UI does continue to improve - e.g. editing a past commit message until the release last week was ... complicated.
Was it? ‘git log —-oneline’ to figure the commit id if it’s not really recent. ‘git rebase -i <commit-id>^’ and then apply the reword action to your commit.
Even for a small office, git can be immensely useful. Entire production line workflows can be implemented with git .. if only folks would learn to use it productively.
Its not just for development. Writers can use it productively. Accountants too.
It always kind of irks me that Git hasn't just been folded into the OS front-end UI by any of the OS vendors .. it'd be so revolutionary to give common folks an easy way to manage the timeline/history of their computer use using git.
Plus, its chicken and egg. If the OS had a great interface to Git as part of its responsibilities in the Explorer/Finder interface, folks would be more inclined to use text-based file format standards that are coherent with the Git methodology.
[0]: https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/
From chapter 1:
> When Git slows down, engineers adapt in bad ways. They stop asking questions the history could answer. They batch work to avoid sync cost. They keep messy branches alive longer, postpone cleanup, and treat the repository like something slightly dangerous.
From https://gitperf.com/epilogue.html
> Once machines start producing code at machine cadence, the model from this book does not break. What changes is the pace: more branches, more commits, more automation, and more surrounding metadata. The traffic gets louder, and the features that keep Git legible under pressure move from "nice to have" to "essential."
> These stop looking like side optimizations. They are what keep machine-scale Git traffic usable.
The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.
I'd written this piecemeal over the last year or so (originally a series of blog posts), and was happy to release it all for free in a single edition, and under CC.
I'll release an Edition 1.1 soon with some errata, adjustments. There's already a free PDF for the on-the-go -> https://gitperf.com/pdf.html
Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free!
LLMs will continue to leave imprints in our work. Some words will, over time, be edited and whittled away; while other words, when the LLM writes well enough to convey a useful point, will be kept.