# Version Control's Second Explosion > AI coding agents and giant monorepos are triggering the biggest shift in version control since Git launched in 2005. - Title: Version Control's Second Explosion · Pablo Santos Luaces - Summary: AI coding agents and giant monorepos are triggering the biggest shift in version control since Git launched in 2005. Version control is moving beyond local… - Keywords: git, software engineering, ai agents, version control, monorepos, technology, startups, Version, Control's, Second, Explosion, Pablo Santos Luaces - Source: Pablo Santos Luaces — https://psantosl.github.io/posts/version-control-second-coming - Published: 2026-09-01T00:00:00+00:00 - Read time: 3 min - Topics: git, software engineering, ai agents, version control, monorepos, technology, startups ## A long quiet period ends In 2005, Linus Torvalds created Git, launching two decades of platform stability. Now, a fresh wave of innovation is disrupting code management once again. > I hadn’t felt that same electricity again in twenty years. Until a few months ago. ## AI agents drive the shift Automated tools write code and issue commits at super human speeds. Systems built for manual developer workflows struggle under this massive commit traffic. > Two big pushes happening simultaneously: the need to handle a much higher commit pace due to agents, and a sudden urge to replace GitHub. ## Market leaders face disruption GitHub shaped software collaboration for over fifteen years. Yet platforms like SourceForge once seemed unassailable before fast shifts rendered them obsolete. > GitHub is still gigantic in both repos and minds, and its impact in the world of software development and collaboration in general has been enormous ## Lessons from past tool wars Legacy tools like ClearCase offered virtual file systems and powerful branching, but steep costs killed them. Git filled the void with affordable, fast local branches. > Clearcase was extremely expensive, my memory tells me something around 5k/year per user for an enterprise setup. The version control bug bit me hard. ## The 2005 explosion set standards Replacing Bitkeeper sparked a race between Git, Mercurial, and commercial tools. GitHub eventually won the market by wrapping Git in a social web platform. > It was a revolution, and a little bit later, around 2008, GitHub brought it to the masses and the rest is history. ## Entire tracks agent provenance Founded by GitHub's former CEO, Entire records which AI agent and prompt created every line of code while speeding up worldwide repository cloning. > They have released provenance tracking to basically know what code which agent created and which prompt ## Pierre scales repository storage Pierre built code.storage to keep up with intense traffic from AI code generators, targeting the bottlenecks GitHub hits under high commit volume. > GitHub hit a wall in terms of performance when dealing with an incredibly high increase of commits, PRs, and traffic in general ## Origin speeds up Git hosting Built by the team behind Cursor, Origin redesigns Git hosting architecture around write-ahead logs and cloud storage to push speed to absolute limits. > This time, instead of racing against Git, I’m trying to make it as fast as I can. ## GitButler updates the desktop UI GitButler reimagines the client interface with virtual branches and stacked commits, tailoring the local workspace for AI assisted workflows. > Stacked branches (we all need them in my opinion), better rebasing and as I mentioned, innovative ideas ## Jujutsu standardizes tracked conflicts Google created Jujutsu as a successor to Git. It introduces native stacked branches and tracks unresolved merge conflicts directly inside the repository. > It brings innovative ideas like stacked branches, and goes beyond that versioning even unsolved conflicts in the repo ## Diversion drops local clones Diversion skips local cloning entirely in favor of cloud-first workspaces, serving multi-terabyte game repositories with instant server sync. > At that size, having local clones is simply a no go. Even more, the fact of ‘commit then push’ was a drag in many professional environments ## Oxen manages dataset versions Oxen focuses on versioning massive AI datasets and raw media. It relies on low level optimizations to transfer large files without friction. > Oxen is not in the same forge race as the others, but they are a good example of the fact that the market is evolving more than it did ## Epic Games releases Lore Epic Games created Lore, an open source system built without Git internals. It streams game monorepos and patches only changed binary data. > It is a complete full stack, not based on Git, which makes it very different and exciting. ## Distributed models hit scale limits Cloning full history locally breaks down when monorepos grow beyond hundreds of gigabytes. Large codebases force teams back toward server-centric sync. > My bet is that distributed with push/pull instead of simply commit will be limited by repo sizes ## Main branches need parallel writes Modern Git hosts serialize incoming commits, creating severe bottlenecks. Next generation engines are revisiting parallel write models for high volume repos. > Right now committing to main on Git forges requires some serialization, so there is a limit in the speed of those commits. ## Virtual file systems return Hydrating files on demand lets engineers navigate giant codebases using minimal disk space, though operating system limits still pose technical hurdles. > There are some barriers for this to happen, though: first is macOS, which makes it virtually impossible to develop fast virtual file systems ## The era of coping ends For twenty years, developers simply adapted to Git constraints. High volume AI commits and massive monorepos are finally opening up new possibilities. > For twenty years the interesting question in version control was “how do we cope with Git?” Now it is “what comes after?” ## Key takeaway Version control is moving beyond local Git clones toward cloud-first, agentic tools built for high-frequency commits and giant monorepos.