Oak: Git was built for humans, this is built for agents

Here's a Show HN worth stopping on. Oak is a version control system built from scratch for AI coding agents, and the premise is one of those obvious-in-hindsight ideas: Git was designed in 2005 for humans typing commit messages, and agents don't work that way. They spin up dozens of parallel branches, churn through huge files, and don't care about a tidy commit history. So Oak throws out the parts that slow that down.

What you get: lazy mounts so an agent can touch a giant repo without cloning the whole thing, a branch-per-task model where one description replaces the pile of commit messages, snapshots up to 95% faster than Git, and native large-file support using content-defined chunking and dedup. Critically, it exports cleanly back to a standard Git repo, so you're not locked in, and it's privacy-first: Oak trains no models on your code and makes zero AI calls on your behalf. You bring your own agent, and Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor all work.

Built by Zach Geier with Adam Morse on product and design. This is part of a pattern worth naming out loud: the plumbing is being rebuilt for agents as the primary user, not the human. Cloudflare just shipped deploy-before-signup for agents, BuilderIO made UI actions agent-first, and now version control gets the same treatment. The bet is that within a year or two most commits won't be typed by a person, and the tool that assumes that from the start wins. oak.space