This is an attempt to make google3 style repo clones work with Git. In a HN thread a few days ago the idea sparked for me.

It can be super useful for very large repos that need to be cloned for AI coding sessions that might only need a subset of files to accomplish something.

Similar to google3, files appear to be there and can be read and edited but they are only fetched when they are needed.

It works with normal Git commands so there is no need for a new CLI.

On huge catch is, running grep will force fetch all files that grep glob matches. AI coding sessions run the Grep tool quite often. To mitigate this, git-lazy-mount comes with sgrep that offloads grepping to a remote code search engine like SourceGraph.

With this, microVMs that run AI sessions can stay lean and start up much faster.

I am guessing this is probably faster than baking in the git repo in the image but I have not measured performance of it yet. It is definitely useful if the microVM is spun up with unknown repositories (something like Claude on web).

Curious to hear your thoughts and criticism

Thanks!