We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare

We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare blog.cloudflare.com

Cloudflare is hosting a competition to see who will build the next Git platform for an era of AI agents. Artifacts is in open beta, with Workers bindings, data jurisdiction controls, and event subscriptions for…

91 points•geoffbp•about 4 hours ago•78 comments•

#git #platform #cloudflare #git platform #next git #next git platform #hosting #competition

78 comments

btownabout 3 hours ago

Sometimes I think back to Google Wave, that beautiful glimmer of real-time collaborative canvases, announced in 2009 when Angular and Backbone hadn't even been invented, and think it launched almost two decades too early.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave

https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=3850

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/slides/berli...

We're now in a world where we expect real-time interfaces to be developed and immediately deployed for our feedback by agents, in business-critical settings where classic SDLC timelines are far too slow, but code quality is becoming more difficult to manage at scale.

Git, at its core, is a fundamental notion that behavior is an auditable tree of immutable changes, where any participant can rearrange or rewind or remix this sequence on a local machine to show, and interact with, a provisional combination of those changes.

Google Wave, with its operational transformation (OT) and federation systems, was similar in many regards. We have CRDTs now, and far better techniques for auto-merging workstreams - including agentic systems that can resolve conflicts intelligently!

Wave fundamentally had a concept that people would come together and evolve a simple chat interface, into a customized real-time application for their use cases, and that that iteration could happen in real-time, with data and behavior both evolving in collaboration with bots. Wherever Git and the broader notion of SDLC goes, I hope it brings the best of this thinking.

lucideerabout 2 hours ago

The Wave release was the event that really kicked off my starting to rethink my own framing of what Google's engineering culture actually produces. I was so excited for its release, possibly moreso than any major innovation before then, & what was delivered was pure crap implementation wise. The idea was brilliant, & open, so theoretically someone could have done it well, but Google poisoned the well by releasing such a turd.

Throughout it's existence Google has been revered as a company for its engineering output, but if you interrogate that even a little bit, you end up with a very small minority of gems among a massive ocean of over engineered crap. Even the huge objective open successes like k8s are to this day sold with the massive caveat of "it's heavy & over engineered, but": nobody's calling k8s elegant. Pretty much all of their good products are acquisitions, many of which they've subsequently degraded.

One can certainly make this argument about almost any large corporation, but I do think there's very few with such a stark divide between how the quality of their engineering work is revered & the reality.

al_borland11 minutes ago

I think releasing Wave as its own product, via private beta, was a mistake. If they wanted to reinvent email, they should have done it with Gmail, similar to what Apple did with iMessage.

Gmail could operate as it always has, being an email client that integrates with every other email client. But when a Gmail user emails another Gmail user (or a group of them), have the thread automatically turn into a Wave, with everything that entails. This gets the new features where people already are, creates an incentive for people to move their email to Gmail, and doesn’t create yet another inbox for a person to manage.

I always saw Wave as a business failure, not an engineering one, for this reason.

switchbakabout 1 hour ago

Wave's failure and that of Google+ might have been the turning point for Google, never really to return to its former glory.

stackghost40 minutes ago

Most of the tech unicorns are like this. Zuckerberg caught lightning in a bottle one single time and everything they’ve tried since has sucked. Instagram was an acquisition. So were oculus and WhatsApp. By contrast their next in-house flagship was temu Wii avatars.

Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle.

Surely it’s a consequence of being publicly traded that these companies cease to be able to develop good novel products rather than acquire competitors or iterate on past successes.

arianvanpabout 2 hours ago

When I tried out Delta by zed in Private alpha my first feedback was "wow this reminds me of Google Wave"

Animatsabout 2 hours ago

We want to have less, not more, dependence on Cloudflare.

Single point of failure, for both technical and political failures.

ivanjermakovabout 2 hours ago

Cloudflare wants all dependence on Cloudflare they can get.

bartreadabout 1 hour ago

I agree with both you and the person you’re responding to.

camcilabout 3 hours ago

$25k to build the next GitHub for $125B company? How generous.

robot_jesusabout 2 hours ago

And not even cold hard cash but “Cloudflare credits.”

What an offensive slap in the face.

Topfiabout 2 hours ago

And only if you are a US or Canadian citizen/team and doubly so only if you use a permissive license like MIT, Apache-2.0 or BSD-2/3. Having even a moderate degree of control over your project is too much to ask for. But you do get a dinner, which might make it all worth it.

Tone deaf to the nth degree.

Rapzidabout 2 hours ago

It's SCRIP!!!

b3lvedereabout 2 hours ago

I”m so sick of all these weird credits and points. Can’t pay food or bills with it.

gkobergerabout 2 hours ago

They don't want to own the next GitHub. They want people to build the next GitHub on Artifacts (and pay Cloudflare for storage and compute).

I don't have a strong opinion here, but giving away compute as a prize for hackathons isn't anything new.

iugtmkbdfil834about 1 hour ago

Well, kinda, but usually the compute is given away as part of the hackaton. Even AWS hackaton did expect you to buy AWS credits..

Rapzidabout 2 hours ago

The whole thing seems a bit uncouth. I get a real gross feeling from it.

ttulabout 2 hours ago

That was my reaction. I was expecting, "The winner receives $500,000 in cash, $1M in Cloudflare credits, and an introduction to our venture team."

tchallaabout 2 hours ago

On brand for Cloudflare which is typically a cheap company.

timcobb25 minutes ago

Cloudflare gets so much action on here, and the product they've put out the last 6-12 months has been pretty underwhelming in my opinion. Sometimes, as in this case, obnoxious even. A lot of it (most of it?) feels vibe-coded and derivative, just take whatever is big now or last month and throw "edge" on top. Anyone care for a moltworker?

OrangeDelonge4 minutes ago

> Cloudfare gets so much action here

Cloudfare buys a lot of posts here*

hmokiguessabout 3 hours ago

If it’s for agents why don’t you make this a challenge towards them? What sort of human element is desired here?

bogwogabout 2 hours ago

> What sort of human element is desired here?

The human wallet

flamethrower123about 3 hours ago

The element of irony.

thih9about 2 hours ago

Who said it’s for humans?

I’m tempted to ask an agent to submit an entry for me.

bakugoabout 2 hours ago

Why do they need others to ask their agents to do it? Why can't they ask their own agents?

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

78 comments

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