Mat Duggan has a billionaire fantasy, and it's not rockets or submarines. He wants to build a new code forge. In a post sparked by the Ghostty terminal project leaving GitHub, Duggan lays out why platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and Gitea have become bloated tools that fight against how developers actually work. His critique hits hard because it's accurate: these forges were designed to add things git doesn't do, but they've become the tail wagging the dog.
The feedback loop is backwards. You commit, push, and only then find out your code fails linting or tests. With LLMs everywhere, tools like git-why are exploring how to preserve the reasoning traces behind commits to improve code context. "You don't want the feedback loop after the commit, you want it before," Duggan writes. PR approvals are too binary, missing the grey areas of real review where "sure, fine, we'll deal with it later" is a legitimate response. With LLMs everywhere, requiring human eyes on every trivial change is a waste. "The global GDP lost annually to senior engineers staring at a four-line PR waiting for someone to type 'LGTM' could fund a moon mission. A nice one. With legroom."
Duggan's proposed fixes include enforced pre-commit hooks that run on the forge before you push, multi-state approvals that capture the nuance of real review, and LLM-assisted risk analysis that auto-approves low-risk changes from trusted maintainers. Stacked PRs should be first-class citizens, not bolted on through external tools. And forges should be modular enough to run on a cluster of Raspberry Pis. Some of this exists in fragments. Graphite supports stacked diffs with AI-managed review workflows. Tangled, a newer platform, natively supports Jujutsu and stacked PRs. CodeRabbit provides granular AI review on top of existing forges. But nobody has stitched it all together, while competitors like GitButler raise funding to build version control infrastructure designed for AI agent collaboration.
Duggan's vision is specific: Jujutsu as the VCS, a lightweight forge designed around object storage and shallow clones, built for a world where LLM bots constantly hammer the system. He's not holding his breath. "The people with the money are busy with the rockets. The people with the taste are busy with their day jobs." But the monolithic forge is breaking down, and the replacement hasn't been built yet.