Grit: Using AI agents to rewrite Git in Rust as a library-based, memory-safe implementation
By
Scott Chacon
Front-window bakery material. Catches the eye, delivers the goods.
Summary
The article describes an ambitious project to rewrite Git from scratch in Rust, making it library-based and memory-safe. The author, inspired by Anthropic's experiment using AI agents to build a C compiler, applied a similar multi-agent approach to tackle the long-standing dream of re-architecting Git. The project, called "Grit," successfully ported all of Git to Rust using AI agents, and it passes the entire C Git test suite. The article discusses the complexity of Git, the challenges of rewriting it, and the novel approach of using swarms of AI agents to accomplish this massive software engineering task.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledA few months ago I read about Anthropic's experiment of releasing a swarm of agents to write a functioning C compiler and it made me wonder about the feasibility of using that same approach to accomplish something I've been dreaming about for 15 years now
Git is of course a very complex piece of software. There are lots of 'plumbing' commands, lots of higher level commands - it was put together incrementally by thousands of people over the last 20 years
We used agents to port all of Git to library-first, memory-safe Rust and it passes the entire C Git test suite.
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