The Git War of 2026

Issue #514.August 21, 2026.2 Minute read.
Bytes

Today’s issue: Developer trends from the 70s, TkDodo reclaims his lead, and the new React API that has us asking questions.

Welcome to #514.

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The Main Thing

The Black Knight kneels after losing his arms in Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"Tis but a scratch." - GitHub

The Git War of 2026

GitHub is having the kind of run I had during my senior year of college: I got mono, got dumped by my girlfriend, and caught swine flu in the same month (your loss, Lexy). It was bad when Actions went down a few weeks ago, but during its latest eight-hour outage, Cursor, Cloudflare, and The Pierre Computer Company all launched competing products, officially kicking off “The Git War of 2026.”

Why is this happening?

According to their postmortem, GitHub is now processing 3 billion commits and merging 130M PRs a month, which has led to their systems failing under the load. Basically what you’d expect from giving developers infinite slop cannons. Normally, “we can’t scale fast enough” is a great sign for your business, but when developers can’t get work done, they’re going to start looking elsewhere.

Let’s meet the new competitors:

  • Origin: After poaching one of GitHub’s architects, Cursor built a new architecture for Git hosting that is supposed to make their Git forge faster and more reliable than GitHub. Although it has a UI for reviewing code, it’s currently BYO CI/CD, so you still need a GitHub Actions alternative.

  • Code Storage: The Pierre Computer Co. (another team of former GitHubbers) took an API-only approach to building their Git storage solution that is already being used by Lovable and Bolt. It’s hipster code storage for companies with users who are generating code.

  • Artifacts: Cloudflare’s “versioned storage that speaks Git” is basically a “self-host your own GitHub on Cloudflare.” It provides all the building blocks, like versioned storage, pipelines, events, and CI, that you need to allow your agents to go wild.

Bottom Line: None of these, in their current form, are really replacements for GitHub. On the surface, it looks like the vultures are swarming, but I don’t think GitHub will mind a few more competitors to help share the load.

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Our Friends
(With Benefits)

A man shrugs while reporters hold microphones toward him

App developers when you ask them about security

Automated security review for every PR

CodeRabbit just launched a new product called Security that gives you continuous code security that’s powered by actual reasoning instead of brittle regex rules.

Their security agents are able to think like an AI-driven attacker and hunt for real vulnerabilities across your entire codebase. Then they:

  • Prioritize real risks based on exploitability and blast radius, instead of spamming you with false positives.

  • Explain the problems in plain English.

  • Secure your code with drafted fixes ranked by risk, right in the PR. All you have to do is merge.

It runs a security review on every PR before merge, plus you can schedule deep scans across your full codebase to run at set intervals.

Get 10 free code scans to try it out and see why Jensen Huang said, “We’re using CodeRabbit all over NVIDIA.”

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Cool Bits

  1. TkDodo saw his “most CoolBits” lead shrinking, so he decided to get back in the game and write about reliable query prefetching with TanStack Router.

  2. Boshen added support for the React Compiler to OXC, meaning your dreams of having a bare-metal Rust dev environment in Vite are finally a reality.

  3. If your React Native app feels slow, open Expo Observe, which monitors real-user metrics like cold starts and time-to-interactive, and will tell you exactly which build caused the regression. You get 100k events a month for free, so try it today. [sponsored]

  4. Vercel Labs created its own minimalist agent harness called fx.

  5. Rapha Amorim created oj, a bundler with Vite’s API and performance that uses way less memory.

  6. It only took 60 years, but System R developers are finally having their moment now that everyone is talking about WALs (write-ahead logs) and object storage, including Chroma, who wrote a very long post about how they built theirs.

  7. Agents are writing more of your code, and that’s fine — the trouble is your release process still moves at human speed. LaunchDarkly’s CodeControl enables teams to roll changes out gradually and helps automatically revert issues in production. [sponsored]

  8. Formisch, a framework-agnostic, type-safe, modular form library (try saying that 10 times fast), just released version 1.0.

  9. Bun 1.4 is out, featuring better Node.js compatibility, significantly less memory usage, and a bunch of new built-in APIs.

  10. React added a new API to detect whether your code is running in the browser: use(browser(reason?)). I’m Ron Burgundy?