Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents

Oak

This repository is the open-source heart of Oak: version control at the speed of agents. It's developed as a Cargo workspace: a reusable VCS library plus the oak

command-line client that agents drive.

Bring your own agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, …); Oak is the foundation it reads, writes, branches, and collaborates through. The substrate is shaped around how agents actually work — branch-per-session as the unit of work, branch descriptions in place of per-commit messages, and content-addressed lazy mounts that get an agent editing any repo in seconds. Because it's content-addressed and hydrates on demand, it's also far faster than git for agent workloads — but the speed is a consequence of the design, not the pitch.

| Crate | Path | crates.io | What it is | |---|---|---|---| oakvcs-core | core/ | oakvcs-core | The VCS foundation: BLAKE3 content hashing, content-defined chunking, diff/merge, the Blob/Manifest/Commit/Tree data model, and an optional client-side local repository (SQLite + git backends). | oakvcs-cli | cli/ | oakvcs-cli | The oak binary that builds on oakvcs-core . |

Using the library in your own project

oakvcs-core

is usable on its own — e.g. to build an Oak integration into another tool or engine. Pull in just the content-addressed data model and hashing (no SQLite/git) with default features off:

[dependencies]
oakvcs-core = { version = "0.99.0", default-features = false }

The crate is published as oakvcs-core

but imported as oak_core

.

Add the default local-repo

feature when you also want the on-disk Repository

(SQLite + read-only git) backends.

Installing the CLI

Oak is in public beta (v0.99.0). The quickest way in is the prebuilt oak

binary:

curl -fsSL oak.space/install | sh

The installer supports macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux (x86_64). After install, oak upgrade

updates the binary in place.

Windows (x86_64)

The curl … | sh

installer is Unix-only. On Windows, grab the prebuilt oak-windows-x86_64.exe

from the latest GitHub release (rename it to oak.exe

and put it on your PATH

), or build from crates.io with cargo install oakvcs-cli

. oak upgrade

then updates it in place.

oak mount

on Windows uses the Projected File System (ProjFS), an optional Windows feature. Enable it once per machine from an elevated PowerShell:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Client-ProjFS -NoRestart

(or Settings → Apps → Optional features → "Windows Projected File System"). Everything else — clone, push, pull, commit — works without it.

Prefer to build from crates.io? Install with Cargo instead (works on macOS, Linux, and Windows — the TLS stack uses rustls + ring

, so no C/NASM build toolchain is required):

cargo install oakvcs-cli # builds and installs the `oak` binary

Building from source

cargo build --workspace # builds oak-core + the oak binary
cargo test -p oakvcs-cli # CLI tests (incl. wiremock HTTP tests)
make build # release build + the CLI release tooling
make release-proof # non-mutating launch/release readiness proof

The CLI depends on oak-core

via an in-workspace path, so a plain cargo build

works against the local core/

checkout with no extra setup. See docs/release-readiness.md

for the release proof and crates.io publish-order checks.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.

AI

This repo was written almost entirely using AI with human oversight. If you see anything that needs fixed or would like to contribute, please email [email protected] or reach out on Discord.