Git wasn’t the first version control software. I remember using sccs back in 1991 and apparently it was written all the way back in 1972 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System
Don’t trust anyone who can’t spell ‘oops’.
Maybe he was cursing the god of dev ops
Just a heads up, it you don’t know how to use cli git in 2025 you’re probably a shit developer. There are undoubtedly exceptions, but I would argue not knowing version control intimately makes you a bad developer.
Why learn an archaic and honestly horrifying command line interface, possibly the worst CLI ever made in the history of computing…when nice normal graphical interfaces work better, have discoverability, have troubleshooting tools, and don’t require memorizing scripture?
Mate… Theres maybe like 5 “git + singleword” commands that cover 99.999% of all of your uses of git. Its really not hard.
Most cli stuff is a lot easier than programming. If you can’t use cli then by definition you’re a shit programmer.
Of course if you simply don’t want to use cli that’s a different matter.
Because they are universally incapable of coming anywhere close to the full power of git.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had GUI-only people ask me to unfuck their repo (fortunately not at my current job, because everyone uses the CLI and actually knows what they’re doing). It’s an impedance to actually learning the tool.
Ultimately any GUI is a poor, leaky abstraction over git that restricts many of the things you can do for little actual benefit.
As someone using git for the last 10 years by now: you’re wrong. No UI has managed to give me access to all the fuckery I often do very quickly on the command line. I was honestly surprised to see IntelliJ nowadays supports an interactive rebase, but reflog, which should be a basic git feature, is still not widely supported in most IDEs in 2025. Or adding, resetting or checking out files with regex. Setting up and modifying lfs. And these are all basic features, good luck doing something like using branch~n syntax for some of the operations etc.
Git UI is shit and will be for a long time.
The fact that you don’t already know why and are dependent on GUI tools that you don’t fully understand is the reason that you’re probably not a very good developer.
Git is incredibly powerful. Knowing why and how is infinitely valuable. Nothing about git cli is archaic or even particularly difficult to understand. Also the man page is very excellent.
Ah, the no true Scotsman fallacy. Neat.
Your lack of rational thought backed up by facts rather than feelings is why you’re a bad developer.
See I can do it too.
But honestly even saying “nothing about the git cli is archaic” is…well, it’s either disqualifying or Stockholm syndrome, and Stockholm syndrome isn’t real.
I need to put a SaaS together called vibe VCS
Fake developer doesn’t use version control. Big surprise.
Acts like SVN and CVS didn’t exist
Also like Reddit did
Don’t worry, I’m sure Cursor will be able to clobber your git history and force push to master any day now
we just need a little more AI
You know, none of the “AI is dangerous” movies thought of the fact that AI would be violently shoved into all products by humans. Usually it’s like a secret military or corporate thing that gets access to the internet and goes rogue.
In reality, it’s fancy text prediction that has been exclusively shoved into as much of the internet as possible.
I just want to pause a moment to wish a “fuck you” to the guy who named an AI model “Cursor” as if that’s a useful name. It’s like they’re expecting accidental google searches to be a major source of recruitment.
It’s not an AI model, it’s an IDE
My comment stands
I remember SVN
I want to forget SVN
I want SVN little explorer icons back! I want to forget Jazz RTC.
That’s tortoise, and have I got news for you: tortoisegit exists.
It’s a scary amount of projects these days managed by a bunch of ZIP files:
- Program-2.4.zip
- Program-2.4-FIXED.zip
- Program-2.4-FIXED2.zip
- Program-2.4-FIXED-final.zip
- Program-2.4-FIXED-final-REAL.zip
- Program-2.4-FIXED-FINAL-no-seriously.zip
- Program-2.4-FINAL-use-this.zip
- Program-2.4-FINAL-use-this-2.zip
- Program-2.4-working-maybe.zip
- Program-2.4-FINAL-BUGFIX-LAST-ONE.zip
- Program-2.4-FINAL-BUGFIX-LAST-ONE-v2.zip
- Program-1.5-DeleteThis.zip
- Program-1.6-ScuffedDontUse.zip
- CanWeDeleteThesePlease.txt (last edit 8 months ago)
Inspired by a small collaboration project from a few years ago.
If we’re talking actual builds then zip files are perfectly fine as long as the revs make chronological sense.
I did that with documents in my Uni years.
By the end, I was using ISO timestamps.
Why did the porn star become a network admin after retiring?
She was already an expert in load balancing
Just save your prompts and vibes in a Google doc dude
Good thing it’s deterministic, oh wait 😃
You could literally just save a copy to your desktop before you’re going to do something sensitive.
That’s why I take a screenshot of my desktop before something stupid just in case.
Or use VCS like a normal dev
svn was invented in 2000
CVS was invented in 1986
SCCS is from 1972, you young whippersnappers
SUN is from 4.6 billion years ago, you mortal beings
I’m a software developer so I’ve never seen that thing you’re talking about, but check your sources, I believe it’s actually from 1982: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems
Now Target owns them, I think.
I landed in the middle. SCCS was too old, CVS was too new.
https://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/
But, back then, I had also been forced to use CMVC.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Configuration_Management_Version_Control
When
bzr, and thengit, turned up and I started using them, I was told “this is DVC, which is a whole new model that takes getting used to”, so I was surprised it seemed normal and straightforward to me.Then I found out that Sun’s Teamware, that I had been using for many years, was a DVC, hence it wasn’t some new model. I’d had a few intervening years on other abominable systems and it was a relief to get back to DVC.
Regarding the original post, are there really people around now who think that before
gitthere was no version control? I’ve never worked without using version control, and I started in the 80s.
The first version control system I ever used was CVS and it was first released in 1986 so it was already old and well established when I first came to use it.
Anyone in these past forty years not using a version control system to keep track of their source code have only themselves to blame.
CVS was, for the longest time, the only player in the FLOSS world. It was bad, but so were commercial offerings, and it was better than RCS.
It’s been completely supplanted by SVN, specifically written to be CVS but not broken, which is about exactly as old as git. If you find yourself using git lfs, you might want to have a look at SVN.
Somewhat ironically RCS is still maintained, last patch a mere 19 months ago to this… CVS repo. Dammit I did say “completely supplanted” already didn’t I. Didn’t consider the sheer pig-headedness of the openbsd devs.
“We’ve always done things this way, we ain’t changing!” - some folks in the Foss community, like those RCS maintainers
We still use RCS at work. For config files for our network monitoring. Works fine still.
Pretty sure GTA V use(d) SVN or something like that. I remember reading the source code and being surprised that they didn’t use GIT.
Game developers often use Perforce instead of Git. Maybe it was that?
You definitely need something else than git for large assets, yes, its storage layer is just not built for that and they way art pipelines generally work you don’t get merge conflicts anyway because there’s no sane way to merge things so artists take care to not have multiple people work on the same thing at the same time, so a lock+server model is natural. Also, a way to nuke old revisions to keep the size of everything under control.
That’s very possible.
which is about exactly as old as git.
Wdym by that?
And Claude, off course.
My first one was Visual Source Safe.
I will never go back to it for any amount of money.
You know, CVS wasn’t really that bad, just primitive and outdated.
Before that, it was RCS, released in '82.
Or gnu arch
Luckily I’m young enough that I never had to use RCS.
At least they were humble and didn’t blame it entirely on Cursor… they also blamed Claude.
