Show HN: Nit – I rebuilt Git in Zig to save AI agents 71% on tokens

6 comments

• antileet 2 hours ago
  Maybe I'm missing something. If I use `git status --short` or `git log --oneline`, I see output similar to your tool's.
• stingraycharles 2 hours ago
  Why a complete rewrite rather than a wrapper around the cli commands?

  Also, aren’t LLMs RLHFd a lot with using tools like git and as such have a better time interacting with it than custom tools?

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  • Brian_K_White 2 hours ago
    TFA says there is no difference since it falls through and does act as just a wrapper for anything that it doesn't implement itself.
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    • stingraycharles 1 hour ago
      But that’s my problem, I don’t want it to implement anything itself, I just want it to transform git output.
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      • Brian_K_White 1 hour ago
        It's using libgit. IE it is basically still just a wrapper for official reference git implementation. I think you are worried anbout nothing.
  • yodon 2 hours ago
    It defaults to being a wrapper around git when it's not custom implemented, and it's recommended that you alias nit as git so the agent can work the way it normally would, just faster and cheaper.
• mpalmer 2 hours ago
  You should expect to be gently ridiculed if you submit this as a serious project. Do not use LLMs to claim knowledge or abilities you don't actually have.

  It's not impressive, and it's obvious to anyone with more than a year or two of actual programming experience.
• spullara 2 hours ago
  check out rtk that does this for a bunch of commands
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  • aeonfox 1 hour ago
    Do the larger LLM platforms just do this for you? Or perhaps they do this behinds the scenes, and charge you for the same amount of tokens?
• warwickmcintosh 2 hours ago
  The 71% reduction is interesting but I'd want to see where those tokens are actually going in a typical agent session. In my experience running multi-step coding agents, the git output itself is rarely the bottleneck...
• slopinthebag 2 hours ago
  Was this entirely created by an LLM? The article clearly was.
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  • tempest_ 1 hour ago
    Every "I created <xyz>" or "I rewrote x (y lang) into z lang" should really read "I prompted Claude Code to <insert thing>"

    "I" create stuff all the time with AI Agents but am real uncomfortable claiming ownership over them. Others don't seem to have this problem though so /shrug

    p.s. - in this case the commits are claude commits, even if they tell it not attribute itself you can tell because good commit messages were incredibly rare (even my own) until the last year or so when they started to look like entire pull requests

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    • slopinthebag 1 hour ago
      Yeah, like whatever I prompt I'm fine sharing it, but I'm not gonna claim I made something. It's like claiming I'm an artist because I paid a guy to paint someone.
  • heavyset_go 1 hour ago
    Yes: https://github.com/fielding/nit

    edit: lol https://github.com/fielding/nit/commit/d83f7cbf4dc540def2708...