June 9, 2026
Git ready for this drama?
Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with Agents
AI-built Git reboot stuns fans, but the comments are yelling “why bother?”
TLDR: A GitHub cofounder says AI agents helped build a new Git-like tool that passes almost all of Git’s official checks, but even he warns it could still break things. Commenters are split between impressed, confused, and openly hostile, with the biggest fight being whether this is useful progress or just flashy rewrite theater.
A veteran software dream just got the AI swarm treatment: GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner says he used armies of automated coding agents to help build Grit, a brand-new version of Git in Rust, a newer language popular for safety and fewer memory bugs. On paper, it sounds like a blockbuster—this thing reportedly passes more than 99% of Git’s gigantic test suite. In reality? The community immediately turned into a live studio audience of skeptics, hecklers, and popcorn-eating lawyers.
The loudest reaction was basically: cool demo, but why should anyone care? One commenter flat-out asked what normal people are supposed to gain—faster speed, easier use, better handling of huge projects, anything? Another delivered the icier take: they’d rather Git stay in C, the older programming language it already uses, for another 15 years. Ouch. Others zeroed in on the suspiciously shiny “99%” figure with the classic internet response: “Why not 100%?” Once readers saw some tests were skipped on purpose, the side-eye got even stronger.
But the thread wasn’t all doom. Some people loved the sheer chaos of the experiment and started pitching joke rewrites of famous software in bizarre languages—think Quake in Python or Kubernetes in Perl—because if AI makes wild rewrites cheap, why not get weird? Then came the legal-drama subplot: one commenter raised eyebrows over the project being released under MIT instead of the stricter GPL, hinting that the licensing debate may become its own sequel. So yes, Grit may be a serious software project—but in the comments, it’s already a reboot, roast, and courtroom teaser all at once.
Key Points
- •The article describes Grit as a from-scratch, library-based Rust reimplementation of Git built using an agent-assisted development approach inspired by Anthropic.
- •Git’s existing test suite, with more than 42,000 tests across over 1,400 scripts, was used as the main specification for the new implementation.
- •The author says Grit passes over 99% of the Git test suite, with some categories of tests intentionally skipped.
- •Grit is designed as a reentrant, linkable, modular Rust core library with a separate CLI crate rather than as a direct port of C Git.
- •The article warns that Grit is still experimental, may behave incorrectly or corrupt data, and currently has limitations including performance issues and no Windows build.