June 22, 2026
Branching out or barking up the wrong tree?
Git is forever. I'm building Oak anyways
Git may be forever, but the comments are already rewriting the future
TLDR: Zach Geier is building Oak, a brand-new alternative to Git, saying today’s tools weren’t designed for the age of AI assistants. Commenters instantly split into camps: some love the fresh start, some demand fixes for old pain points, and one person came mainly to fight the word “anyways.”
A developer just walked into one of tech’s most sacred rooms, bowed to the king, and then basically said, “Cool crown, I’m building a new kingdom anyway.” Zach Geier says Git — the tool many programmers use to track changes in code over time — is still brilliant and probably unbeatable at its original job. But after years of obsessing over what a modern replacement could feel like, he’s now building Oak, a new system aimed at helping both humans and AI helpers work faster, without dragging around giant project folders. It’s early, rough, and missing plenty, but that didn’t stop the internet from immediately turning the launch into a comment-section food fight.
The strongest reactions? A mix of dreamers, skeptics, and nitpick snipers. One commenter begged for a system that tracks the story of work, not just file edits, so moving a chunk of writing or code doesn’t make history look fake. Another wanted a magical, always-on “undo tree” like in text editors, except shared with other people — basically, “why am I doing bookkeeping when the computer could just remember everything?” Meanwhile, the practical crowd cut straight to the pain: does it fix Git’s most hated headaches, like submodules and large files, or not? And in peak internet fashion, one of the spiciest replies wasn’t about software at all — it was a grammar drive-by correcting “anyways” to “anyway.” Classic. Oak may be new, but the real launch event was the community instantly debating whether this is the future, a fantasy, or just another ambitious rebellion against a tool nobody can truly escape.
Key Points
- •Zach Geier introduced Oak, a new version control system designed for AI agents.
- •Before Oak, Geier spent four years building Jam, then sold it to another company so he could continue working on it full-time.
- •The acquiring company for Jam shut down a little over a year later, but the experience informed Geier’s thinking about rebuilding version control from a new foundation.
- •Oak is intended to improve speed and context for agents by using virtual mounts so local and cloud agents do not need a full repository copy.
- •Oak is still early in development, lacks a Windows build and several features, but is open-source at the core, self-hostable, and able to export repositories to Git.