Yes to all that. And GitLab the company was only founded in 2014 (OSS project started in 2011) and ran through YC in 2015, seven years after GitHub launched.
I'd bet that less people had their source code on git in 2008 than the number of developers using the various coding agents today. And the open-source project that we published today hooks into the existing workflow for those developers, in Claude Code and in Gemini CLI. Time will tell the rest. We will publish regular updates and you can judge us on those results.
At least for me, I have felt like the chat history in an agent is often times just as important and potentially even more important than the source code it generates. The code is merely the compiled result of my explanations of intent and goals. That is, the business logic and domain expertise is trapped in my brain, which isn't very scalable.
Versioning and tracking the true source code, my thoughts, or even the thoughts of other agents and their findings, seems like a logical next step. A hosted central place for it and the infrastructure required to store the immense data created by constantly churning agents that arrive at a certain result seems like the challenge many seem to be missing here.
I'm building an "improvement agent" that kinda embraces that. It starts out by running exploration across a codebase or set of documents and extract possible goals, and a vision from that. It then starts producing improvement plans (tickets, effectively). If it gets things wrong, I nudge it in the right direction, and it gets incorporated into revisions of the documents via a review stage. It's an experiment for now, but it is both doing semi-self-directed implementation and helping me identify where my thoughts haven't been crystallised enough by seeing where it fails to understand what I want.
I'm not just running it on code, but on my daily journal, and it produces actionable plans for building infrastructure to help me plan and execute better as a result.
Natural language is in fact a terrible way to express goals, it is imprecise, contradictory, subjective, full of redundancies and constantly changing. So possibly the worst format to record business rules and logic.
This lesson has been learned over and over (see AppleScript) but it seems people need to keep learning it.
We use simple programming languages composed of logic and maths not just to talk to the machine but to codify our thoughts within a strict internally consistent and deterministic system.
So in no sense are the vague imprecise instructions fed to LLMs the true source code.
Before LLMs (and still now) a human will often write a doc explaining the desired UX and user journeys that a product needs to support. That doc gets provided to engineers to build.
I agree - at least with the thesis - that the more we "encode" the fuzzy ideas (as translated by an engineer) into the codebase the better. This isn't the same thing as an "English compiler". It'd be closer to the git commit messages, understanding why a change was happening, and what product decisions and compromises were being designed against.
I think I’d rather have the why in English and the how in code, i.e. keep both, keeping just the English instructions is nowhere near enough to fully specify what was done and why. These things evolve as they are produced and English is too fuzzy.
Chris was also CEO from 2008 to 2012. Tom had 2012 to 2014.
Nat's company Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft in 2016.
HockeyApp wasn't A/B testing, but a platform for iPhone, Mac, Android, and Windows Phone developers to distribute their beta version (like what TestFlight is today to the App Store), collect crash reports (like what Sentry is today), user feedback, and basic analytics for developers.
The Ximian thing I wrote from obviously faulty memory (I now wonder if it was influenced by early 2000s Miguel's bonobo obsession), the rest from various google searches. Should have gone deeper.
Ximian, Inc. (previously called Helix Code and originally named International Gnome Support) was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman in 1999 and was bought by Novell in 2003
...
Novell was in turn acquired by The Attachmate Group on 27 April 2011. In May 2011 The Attachmate Group laid off all its US staff working on Mono, which included De Icaza. He and Friedman then founded Xamarin on 16 May 2011, a new company to continue the development of Mono. On 24 February 2016, Microsoft announced that they had signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin.
Didn't say you were wrong. It was just missing the Xamarin step in the sequence of companies, and arguably Xamarin was the bigger milestone than Ximian.
Founder here. I built commercial insurance software for Windows 95 in the 1990s, driver assistant systems at Mercedes and at Bosch in the early 2000s, dozens of iPhone apps as contractor, a startup called HockeyApp (acquired by Microsoft), and various smaller projects, mostly in Ruby on Rails. And of course, when I left Microsoft & GitHub, 10 years of green boxes were removed from my GitHub profile.
Glad to see you commenting here despite the, er, unsubstantive disposition of some of the commenters! (I'm a mod here btw.) We really don't like it when the audience responds to new things with snark and dismissiveness, and there are rules in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to make that clear.
In this case I think the root problem is that the OP (https://entire.io/blog/hello-entire-world/) is the wrong genre for HN. It's a fine fundraising announcement, but that sort of enthusiastic general announcement rubs the HN audience the wrong way because what they really want is technical details. Spectacular non technical details like high valuations, etc., tend to accentuate this gap.
I mention this because if you or someone on your team wants to write a technical post about what you're building, with satisfying details and all that, then we could do a take 2 (whenever would be a good time for this).
Makes sense, and we definitely will have more technical posts coming soon and on a regular basis. And I am German, I am used to snark. :P Joking aside, thanks for the response and appreciate your work as a mod!
You’ve described a technology, not a solution to a clearly articulated problem that customers actually have. The problem that you have described is vague, and it’s unclear that it’s actually a problem at all. Finally, you don’t provide a persuasive and concrete argument about how your eventual solution—whatever that may be—will solve it.
I don’t mean to be so presumptuous as to teach Grampa how to suck eggs, but I think Amazon’s working backwards process is instructive.
Hey, is JJ compatibility in the cards? Considering the blog article hints at a goal of a developerless agent-to-agent automation platform I'm guessing developer conveniences are a side quest rn?
Did you have to choose an adjective to name your product. Now it’s going to be very confusing for search engines and LLms.
“Tell me more about entire.”
“Entire what?”
“You know, that entire thing.”
Another of your competitors here. It makes me giggle that we're going after the entire developer experience while Entire is only looking at a small corner of it.
Certainly! But just to confirm, you aren't making an IDE or building a version control system to replace Git, are you? While money means you need not fear me, the scale of my vision means that I don't fear you either.
