a16z Show
a16z Show

Rethinking Git for the Age of Coding Agents with GitHub Cofounder Scott Chacon

April 21, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub and now CEO of GitButler, has spent twenty years watching Git's interface remain essentially unchanged. The tool was never designed—it started as plumbing commands for the Linux kernel team, a set of Unix primitives meant to be wrapped in whatever scripts each developer preferred. A volunteer named Pasky wrote a unified interface in Perl, it got pulled into core, and for two decades almost nothing has changed. Now coding agents are the fastest growing users of command line tools, an entirely new persona that struggles with interactive rebasing and runs status after every command. The assumptions baked into Git's interface no longer hold for humans or machines.

The Unix philosophy problem

Git's original design followed the Unix philosophy: build small tools that pipe output into each other, and let users write their own interfaces. Linus Torvalds and the early team solved the genuinely hard problems—delta compression algorithms, wire transfer protocols, efficient tree storage—but never intended to make a user-friendly tool. "They had no intention of writing a user interface to it," Chacon says. "It was completely orthogonal to their goals."

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Listen to Audio Summary Open in App

What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:06) **The Core Problem with Code Review** - Most developers don't actually read full PRs, while agents are perfectly suited to do so.
  • 2 (00:18) **The Next Superpower for Developers** - Communication and writing skills will define the best software producers in the age of AI.
  • 3 (00:52) **Git Was Never Designed for Users** - Git started as plumbing for the Linux kernel team, with no unified interface until a volunteer wrote one that was pulled into core.
  • 4 (01:15) **Why Scott Chacon Returned to Version Control** - The tooling for Git hasn't changed since he left GitHub, and he saw an opportunity to rethink the user interface from scratch.
  • 5 (01:45) **The Tension Between Git Core and GitHub** - The Git core team saw GitHub as not very smart for not writing C code, and there was a grudging respect over time.
  • 6 (02:32) **The Unix Philosophy Problem** - Git's interface tries to serve both humans and machines with the same commands, making it suboptimal for both.
  • 7 (03:21) **Agents as a New Persona** - Agents are the fastest-growing users of command-line tools, with very different needs than humans or traditional scripts.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Matt Bornstein speaks with Scott Chacon, cofounder of GitHub and CEO of GitButler, about why Git's user interface has barely changed since 2005, how GitButler is rethinking version control for both humans and AI agents, and what the "next GitHub" might actually look like. They cover parallel branches, agent-optimized CLI design, the future of code review, and why the best engineers of the future will be the best writers.

Resources:

Follow Scott Chacon on X: https://twitter.com/chacon

Follow Matt Bornstein on X: https://twitter.com/BornsteinMatt

Stay Updated:

Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube

Find a16z on X

Find a16z on LinkedIn

Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify

Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts

Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg

 

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

a16z Show

More from this podcast

a16z Show →