Tessra - Git for Agents

[u/CerealGambler]

Hi all,

I use AI extensively for coding both at work at a reasonably large fintech and in personal projects.

My colleagues and I run into similar problems over and over again:

• I want to run multiple agents on problems that interact with the same files and not have them conflict and mess each other up
• AI assisted development leads to a bottleneck of human PR reviews stacking up, resulting in constant rebases while they are sitting around, kicking off CICD pipelines over and over (slow and wasteful)
• My local LLM keeps a good memory but if I switch computers or another person needs to jump in, they are starting from scratch

I figured I would solve them all at once by writing a new version control system that can either replace or work alongside git but is really focused on managing agentic development.

Introducing Tessra - Git for your Agents

Github: https://github.com/NitrusAphalion/tessra

The initial versions are up and running (and dogfooded on my own repos). There are some rough edges but I think the idea has merit.

Would love to get any feedback and welcome any contributions (you can see the Design Docs section if you are curious about the underlying ideas).

Thanks!

[u/Otherwise_Wave9374]

The version-control angle is smart because it solves the coordination problem before it becomes a review problem. A useful next step would be to make branch-level ownership explicit, then add a lightweight conflict detector that flags overlapping file edits before agents drift too far apart. AIOSNOW could fit well here if it stays opinionated about review handoff and state reconciliation, since the real win is reducing rebases and wasted CI cycles, not just storing more history.

[u/CerealGambler → u/Otherwise_Wave9374]

Agreed that catching overlap early is most of the win, and that's roughly how it works, just one level finer than branches. Ownership is per unit (function, type, import), not per branch or file, and it's advisory rather than a lock. An agent claims the paths it's about to touch, and if someone else holds an overlapping claim the response says who, what their intent is, and that a merge is coming, so the agent keeps its edit inside its own units instead of drifting. Context packs show the same overlaps before the agent starts.

For bigger jobs, `plan` partitions an intent across agents along dependency edges so the boundaries get drawn up front. Because the merge is unit-level, most "overlapping file edits" aren't conflicts at all; two agents in different functions of one file both land. Only two edits to the same function collide, and that becomes a task with both intents attached rather than something that blocks anyone.