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

https://justfielding.com/blog/nit-replacing-git-with-zig

20•fielding•1h ago

Comments

stingraycharles•1h 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?

yodon•1h 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.

Brian_K_White•1h 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.

stingraycharles•59m ago

But that’s my problem, I don’t want it to implement anything itself, I just want it to transform git output.

Brian_K_White•28m 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.

antileet•1h ago

Maybe I'm missing something. If I use `git status --short` or `git log --oneline`, I see output similar to your tool's.

spullara•1h ago

check out rtk that does this for a bunch of commands

aeonfox•1h 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?

slopinthebag•1h ago

Was this entirely created by an LLM? The article clearly was.

tempest_•1h 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

slopinthebag•42m 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•1h ago

Yes: https://github.com/fielding/nit

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

warwickmcintosh•1h 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...

mpalmer•1h 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.

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