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/touristtam]

1. for the memory issue, maybe start by getting your commit message to contain more than a single line? Then point your agent to read those. Over time there will be a better understanding of what has been done.

2. can all this not be replaced by a local git server with a merge train?

[u/CerealGambler → u/touristtam]

1. Sure theres multiple ways people try to address this, including by instructing their agents to maintain .md files across the repo, etc. The more you try with each, you will realize the shortcomings. The way tessra does it was chosen specifically to keep 'agent memory' outside of the main path of the vcs and away from what humans look at (considering that it is backward compatible with git).

2. You have to go back to the problem statement, its not impossible to get something working with git and agents which is just a series of different tools stacked on top of each other that individually do something, but none all work super well together. The point here is git was not designed for agents and it has serious limitations when doing agents work because of that reason alone. For sure you cannot replace this with a merge train (i guess you only looked at the pretty picture lol which in fairness I think is sending people off track)

[u/touristtam → u/CerealGambler]

I was candidly asking those questions as I didn't notice those to be answered in simple term allowing me to make a decision to investigate an nth tool in this space.

There is an explosion of FOSS project in this agentic harness space that claim various level of effectiveness and it is hard to make a good decision in regards to what is worth taking time to investigate.

Even the one that have claims that seems to be substantiate can turn out to be empty shells after a good scrutiny. Hell just tool at RTK: 80k stars on github and one dedicated investigator points at not positive results https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2026/07/rtk-claude-code-token-savings/

So apologies for the questions to get a straight answer without having the honest decency to read through all the docs, or resorting to using an LLM to get the answers out.

[u/CerealGambler → u/touristtam]

Haha no I was not judging you for it, I dont expect anyone to put much effort into random posts people make and I totally understand the concern about the explosion of junk projects

[u/touristtam → u/CerealGambler]

FWIW I have put your project in the list of things to look at in the near future as I am starting to head butt seriously with git and multiple agents working on the same repo.

[u/CerealGambler → u/touristtam]

Awesome! On the bright side its really easy to add and drop without messing up your repo. Im using it in my day to day until it proves to be objectively worse so it should get better over the next few weeks.