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Comment by rkarthik1993 | Hacker News Reader

rkarthik1993

Field CTO at Entire, so obviously biased.

Rather than write an essay about why we built this, I’d rather just answer whatever you’re skeptical about. Happy to get into the actual mechanics: how sessions get attached to commits (it’s git refs, not a side db), what the 89x push number does and doesn’t mean, where the context/token savings fall apart, who can read whose session transcripts, how you’d migrate off if you hated it, whatever.

The one thing I’ll say up front: The bet is that once agents write most of the code, the PR stops being the right unit of review, because the diff is cheap and the “why” vanishes when the session ends. Everything else follows from that.

Ask away, I’ll be in the thread for a while.

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> Join the rebellion

This feels insincere coming from a venture-backed software startup. Do you have a unique ownership structure, or a particular emphasis on open-source or self-hosting?

The Rebel Alliance was bankrolled by the Royal House of Alderaan. Just saying.

Concretely, our CLI is OS (MIT), and we're working toward open-sourcing the storage backend EntireDB so you can self-host it on your own infra or run a variant of it. That your sessions, prompts, and review history live in your repo, not locked in our platform, means you can always walk.

Would there have been value, pre-LLMs, in attaching a screen recording of what a developer did in the three hours before posting their diff (be it Google, stack overflow, reading a book, or trying a sandbox experiment) to their PR? The PR is a synthesis of their efforts, and it would actually be more effort to review and understand their screen recordings, wouldn't it? In my experience striving for fewer artifacts is the right move, so long as they are sufficient to describe the outcome. What exactly is lost between sessions and code that would help you debug something?

Also, if your business has agents writing most of the code, why would your business care about human reviews at all? In for a penny, in for a pound, after all. Wouldn't you be better off looping your agents into your support tickets and autofixing bugs? In that scenario, isn't it more confusing for an agent to deal with sessions + code rather than start fresh with the code?

Not GP, but pre-LLM, who's gonna go watch that footage? Unless you're Jia Tan and there's a forensic reason to scrutinize every last little thing, who's gonna watch that video?

If there was value to be had there, you would. It's an indictment of the cited value, if you wouldn't. So are you asking me to argue my own point again? I don't think your position is adversarial to mine?

If you are arguing effort versus value, let me escalate: I don't think even the call leader of an Amazon sev one would be interested in seeing such screen recordings, when all of Amazon.com is down, and when workable solutions would be worth putting Herculean effort behind.

I want to know where the value comes from, then, just because it got easier to query such data doesn't in itself make it valuable. You would be better served by having Opus look over your code after Sonnet made mistakes, rather than having Opus first digest whatever (potentially poisonous slop) Sonnet cooked up before looking at the code.

Karthik's comments have been getting blocked. I don't agree with the screen recording because an agent session isn't just a reply of keystrokes. A session contains not just what happened, but why: the intent and reasoning from the prompts, the dead-ends, what was attempted but not shipped, and "why did we do it this way." That shouldn't disappear when a session ends.

Similarly, human review doesn't matter because humans type the code, it matters because someone still ahs to decide if something is right and if not, own the consequences.

And starting fresh with agents is pricey. Continuous memory is helpful so you can see why the last change was made, burning fewer tokens and not repeating mistakes so you don't need to relearn the codebase from scratch each time

Thanks for the reply. It would be great if you could introduce yourself somewhere in this comment section or in your HN profile, I cannot tell whether you intend to speak on Karthik's behalf.

"We founded Entire on a single belief, human developers no longer write most of the code."

This isn't a belief. What do you actually believe about the future of software?

Let me put it this way. The premise of agents is that some combination of programming languages and programming tools suck so incredibly much that humans don't want to use them.

You're effectively betting that this problem can never be fixed. AI is a layer of kludges on top of the problem of bad programming tools. Haven't you ultimately made a rather cynical bet?

Agents are such an amazing building tool, similar to how compilers and high-level languages were. It superchargers builders and that's why so much code is now being written (not always by humans.) The bottleneck was never typing, but to me, it's deciding what to build, verifying it's right, and keeping it all coherent, which is what we're rebuilding the forge around.

Spoken like a true AI zombie. 10/10 at reciting the official propaganda. But do you have any actual hard-won knowledge? Are you unique? Individual? Again I put this question: have you ANY idea what you BELIEVE???

Most code was never the interesting part, and we’ve been handing it off for 60 years. compilers took asm, gc took memory, ides took the grep. agents are the next hand-off, not a kludge over the last one.

I dont think it’s a bet that tools cant get better either. better languages and tools make agents better too, they’re not competing. if rust-level types and a great lsp make the agent 3x more reliable, great, we still need somewhere to put the result.

The problem that never got fixed isnt the language, its that the reasoning gets thrown away between the person and the artifact. commit messages were always bad, docs always rotted, “why is this here” was always answered by whoever remembered.

Agents just made that acute, because now theres no one who remembers. thats the bit we’re trying to fix. if a better language fixes it too, honestly id take that.

Sure seems like a kludge to me.

But it's not like I've ever heard an AI user talk about why.

You would have to care about human user experience to care that it is fundamentally broken.

> because the diff is cheap and the “why” vanishes when the session ends.

But why should I use a tool like Entire, if the "why" is usually tracked somewhere else, in a ticket under the form of user or business requirements?

Once the specs are clear, and the intent is fixed or validated, the resulting code is just an implementation detail, and it can follow a continous merge approach as long as it doesn't drift away.

> Let your agents loop until evals are green

Exactly what I'm saying: if you think about it, it's just the job of a CI.

If for the "why" you mean why an engineer choose that approach, I'm not interested into digging in their own prompt with the agent: to rebuild a mental model, I can just ask another agent.

Another one: I'm also very skeptical on the "Join the rebellion" punchline. Rebellion against who, exactly? Nothing in the AI narrative has the flavour of something built from the bottom, against an established power; I would say it's the opposite.

I'll suggest something more streamlined, and banal: "Try it now!", or "Join the alternative"

i guess the main thing is "why would give you my proprietary agent-facing information when i can store context literally anywhere?"

is the carrot JUST the time savings for large dev orgs?

You don’t. Everything stays with you right beside your code!

You can read more about session storage on our docs here: https://docs.entire.com/guides/checkpoints/checkpoint-storag...

You don’t have to give it to us. The CLI writes the session into your repo, as refs versioned alongside your commits. If you want to push that to GitHub or anywhere else, nothing stops you. The capture format is the open part on purpose.

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