The Philosophy of Complete Code Preservation

Code’s gas bottles up

Butler watches silently

Process preserved whole

The haiku above evokes the core idea of observability-driven Fartler integrated development environment: traditional version control only captures snapshots, like single frames from a movie and even disciplined ConventionalCommit msgs will tend to carry a biased view of what really happened. How much richness of the vibe is lost between those frames?

1. Introduction: Beyond the Snapshot

The point of this blog post is to introduce GitFartler: More than just an IDE that doesn’t take itself or its topic so seriously. It’s an attempt to position a light-hearted IDE as a killer, next-generation AI-assisted coding system with observability engineered into the IDE, in order a make it possible to truly capture the entire creative process including the ethereal which is unnoticed or forgotten, the “ambient gas” of the moment of creation.
We will try to emphasize the Core Philosophy: Beyond just articulating the central tenet – that the journey of creation is as valuable, if not more so, than the final product OR even the final product with perfectly disciplined Conventional Commit messages.
The Problem with Snapshots: It comes down to GitFartler’s comprehensively observed approach [of the fly on the wall Butler] versus traditional Version Control Systems (VCS) like Git, which are primarily not about branch coding, social coding, peer coding or any such meeting of the minds. Thus, Git excels over and about all traditional DVCS at tracking changes between discrete states (commits) by individual developers … there is never anything social or interactive or argumentative or immediate back-and-forth-punches-throwing about Git. There’s no VIBE to it; there’s no music, no dance. GitFartler AMBITIOUSLY sets out to capture and distil that LIVE vibe … not for perpetuating arguments, but for UNDERSTANDING the tenor of the vibe at the time of code creation. While essential for tracking history and enabling rollbacks, this snapshot model misses the crucial layers of context of how those states were reached. Of course, that amount of context produces what, at the time of Git’s creation, would have been far too much data. But NOW … we can pre-compile that data with various fold mechanisms, akin to how compilers fold logic, that distill data mountains of context into hash-like specks of shorthand semiotics … or Fartmojis.

The world of software development runs on distributed version control. Systems like Git [and even Jujutsu which interoperates with the Git data model] are the bedrock of modern collaboration, providing a crucial safety net and a history of changes. They allow teams to manage complexity, track modifications, and merge contributions. Yet, these powerful tools primarily focus on the artifact – the code itself at specific points in time. They capture the destinations, the finished commits, the polished snapshots deemed worthy of preservation … we are not just interested in nice postcard photos of the destinations. What we REALLY care about is the journey!

What about the hesitations, the experiments run in a scratchpad, the documentation consulted just before a breakthrough, the deleted lines that represented a discarded path but informed the final direction?

Traditional VCS, by its nature, lets this rich, contextual “gas” dissipate. GitFartler emerges from a different philosophy: a belief that the entire process of creation, the “vibe”, holds immense value and deserves to be preserved in its multi-dimensional entirety. It’s a shift from photographing the mountain peaks to filming the entire expedition, understanding that the climb itself holds the most profound lessons … even if it is likely that devs will only just scan the picture, thus rely on compact fartmojis to trigger memories, it’s STILL important to capture as much information as we can … because the CREATIVE MOMENT of conception in the journey is something that will prove valuable to remember.

2. The Limitations of Conventional Version Control

“What,” Not “Why” or “How”: Even perfectly executed, Conventional Commit messages will prove to be inadequate or inconsistent attempts to capture the ‘why’, while the ‘how’ (the actual process) is entirely lost … WHY this matters NOW [and was out of reach in 2005, for the birth of Git] is that NOW we can use AI to pre-compile data into tighter packages AND we can also use AI systems to digest oceans of data to find needles in haystacks with the vibe we’re looking for … it’s about observing the creation of code AS IF there was a trainable AI to handle the observation of the process of creating code … it doesn’t demand HUMAN attention, which is scarce – GitFartler uses AI to parse the gas.
The Sanitized Narrative: Standard workflows encourage EXTRA “clean” or cleaned-up extra NICE or self-sensored, opinion-free, politically-correct commits, often squashing intermediate steps and presenting a polished, linear history that obscures the messy reality of exploration and problem-solving. It’s easier FOR HUMANS, since egos are involved, to just skip the details and move right to the sanitized narrative in the commit msg.
Loss of Implicit Knowledge: Detail the valuable context (e.g., brain farts, mixed topics, hallucinations, dead ends explored, specific documentation consulted, moments of insight or confusion) tend to vanish between commits.
Impact on Learning and Debugging: How does this loss hinder onboarding, knowledge transfer, and understanding the rationale behind past decisions when debugging, refactoring or extending code?

3. “Gas Collection”: Preserving the Creative Atmosphere

The Metaphor: We could elaborate on the “gaseous process” metaphor for creative coding, but it’s obvious if we stop and really THINK about code moves forward. It’s not that PRETTY. Creativity isn’t just discrete steps; it’s an atmosphere of thought, trial, error, misdirection, whatifs, dead ends and insight.
What Constitutes the “Gas”? The specific elements GitFartler aims to capture are every last thing we can: keystrokes, mouse movements, window focus shifts, application usage, reference material access, timing, rhythm, maybe even inferred emotional context. This includes the “digital exhaust” usually discarded.
Multi-Dimensional Capture: It cannot be emphasized enough that this isn’t just linear recording, or something like a professional photographer taking photos at a concert – this is about getting lots of data that might, at first, seem unnecessary OR like a bad shot – but the patterns emerge from the multimodal data, from capturing multiple dimensions simultaneously (temporal, spatial, contextual, cognitive, social) and seeing after the fact what was important.
Why Bottle It? The value proposition has radically changed with AI technologies; we can capture and process far more … this opens up levels of knowledge transfer that we couldn’t have imagined before, deeper understanding will come with AI maturation … if the tools is available, it will get used … for better debugging, more efficient refactoring and simplification … process archaeology will tell us things about ourselves that we could not have know … preserving the authentic human experience of creation is about improving the efficiency, speed, and experience of that creation process.

GitFartler conceives of the creative process not as a series of steps, distinct commits, but as an atmosphere – a “gas” composed of fleeting thoughts, interactions, environmental influences, and cognitive shifts.

Traditional VCS captures only solid precipitates from this gas. GitFartler, however, aims to “bottle the warmth of the vibe”, preserving this entire atmosphere.
This “gas collection” involves capturing a multi-dimensional stream of data: every keystroke and deletion tells a story of thought and revision; mouse movements reveal hesitation or confidence; window focus changes track attention shifts and context switching; browser history shows the research and references consulted; even the timing and rhythm of interactions can offer clues to cognitive load or flow states.

Capturing the digital exhaust is about the interactions and by-products that were dismissed or ignored, because they weren’t the MOST important thing … but they were second-most important and the richness of implicit knowledge was lost.

By preserving this complete context, we move beyond documenting what was made to understanding how and why it came to be, enabling deeper learning, more effective AI assistance, and a richer historical record of human ingenuity.

**4. The Value Proposition: Why the Process Matters**

Beyond the Artifact: We argue against the purely product-focused view of software development … but we don’t deny that the product matters. The process holds intrinsic value, because it’s about extending, upgrading, continually improving the product.
True Knowledge Transfer: Experiencing the process (whether recorded, or with the help of context sensitive AI servant or Butler) is far richer than reading documentation. Imagine onboarding by “inhabiting” or “reliving” a senior developer’s session and being allowed to ask the AI-assisted code Butler, “Why did he think THAT or WHERE did THAT come from?”
Enhanced Debugging & Maintenance: Understanding the why behind code or even the more fundamental WHY behind curiosity, by seeing the exploration that led to it.
Foundation for AI: This rich process data is the ideal training ground for AI that understands development and can explain this understanding to mere mortals, moving beyond surface patterns.
Scientific & Creative Insight: This is NOT just about code for computers; this is about UNDERSTANDING the gas of creative process in arts and sciences or anywhere that creativity matters. The stages of creativity (preparation, incubation, etc … and indigestion, contemplation, pondering, being stumped, various failure) are better captured by observing the flow of the EASY ANSWER.

5. The “Butler Vibe”: Achieving Invisible Observation

The Metaphor: The “butler vibe” is not quite sufficient; it’s almost as if there’s superhero fly on the wall, listening and ready to assist – present when needed, anticipatory, but fundamentally invisible and unobtrusive until required.
Contrast with Monitoring: The servant nature of the code butler makes this fundamentally different from typical “employee monitoring” software, which often breeds stress, mistrust, and focuses on accountability metrics over value. GitFartler aims for the opposite: enhancing creativity by removing burden.
The Heisenberg Challenge: It’s necessary to acknowledge the difficulty of achieving this: HOW will we observe without altering the observed?. This requires extreme technical optimization (performance, kernel integration, mem safety/security) and psychological consideration.
Trust Architecture: We have to emphasize the need for transparency, user control, and robust privacy guarantees to build the trust necessary for creators to forget the system is there.

In summary, THE core principle of GitFartler is really the “butler vibe” IN ADDITION TO artificial intelligence that actually adds value and is not just some sort of cool generator of AI-arrhea. The butler vibe is like an expert PROFESSIONAL valet. The system must be omnipresent in its observation yet utterly invisible in its operation. It has to anticipate needs [and steadily improve its ability to anticipate] based on observed patterns but never intrudes unnecessarily.

This stands in stark contrast to many developer monitoring tools critiqued for creating stress, fostering mistrust, and incentivizing metric-chasing over genuine value creation. GitFartler’s goal is preservation without interruption. Achieving this “invisible observation” is the Heisenberg challenge of creative capture: the act of observing must not alter the creative flow. This demands extreme technical optimization – minimizing resource footprint through approaches like kernel-level integration and attention-aware throttling – alongside a deep understanding of creative psychology. Crucially, it requires a robust trust architecture, giving creators absolute transparency and granular control over what is captured and shared, allowing them to work naturally, forgetting the butler is even there until assistance is genuinely needed.

6. Influences and Foundations

GitButler Inspiration: GitButler’s virtual branches are, of course, a key influence, reducing context-switching friction and aligning with the goal of smoother, more natural workflows.
Beat Generation Sensibility: We also should discuss the cultural influence of not taking ourselves or our work so seriously – valuing HONEST, raw, spontaneous, authentic, unfiltered process over sanitized narratives. This is driven by the cultural influence of people like Lenny Bruce’s irreverence or Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” and the idea of capturing “first thought, best thought” in coding.
Technology Stack: It might not be possible to briefly mention how Tauri/Rust/Svelte supports the performance and unobtrusiveness goals. This technology stack ENABLES observability engineering and a butler vibe that is truly a matter of a machine SERVING the humans.

7. Divergent Perspectives and Challenges

Critiques of Monitoring: There ARE extremely valid concerns about comprehensive activity tracking; there really is potential for misuse, privacy violations, impact on morale. Will GitFartler’s philosophy and trust architecture aim to mitigate these? The PROOF is in the pudding.
Is It Necessary? We have to acknowledge the perspective that standard Git workflows (stash, branch, commit) WERE past tense entirely sufficient for code that was developed before now, and the added complexity of virtual branches or full process capture might not be needed for all teams or projects. We don’t expect adoption to be immediate and we know that the necessariness or UTILITY of the tool will be proven only through use, improvement and delivery of the goods, ie not because we say it’s necessary.
The Capture Fidelity Problem: Capturing everything will be inherently difficult — if this were easy, somebody would have already done it – there are TOUGH problems to consider: the internal mental state, the offline conversation, the serendipitous insight. We have to acknowledge limitations.
The Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Extracting meaningful insights from the vast amount of captured “gas” without drowning in data will be difficult; the only answer is to dogfood the tool … develop it, use it, get disgusted with it, refactor it, improve it, simplify it and FOCUS ON THE SIGNAL.

8. The Paradigm Shift: Valuing the Creative Act

Process Over Product (Revisited): Frame GitFartler not just as a tool but as part of a philosophical shift in software development and potentially other creative fields.
It Will Redefine “Documentation”: Comprehensive process capture is a richer, more authentic form of documentation than traditional written artifacts.
Future Implications: We could speculate on how this approach could change education, collaboration, AI development, and even our understanding of creativity itself … but first, we need to dogfood into Reality…

9. Conclusion

The Vision: Complete code preservation (“fartling the vibe”).
Key Concepts: The value of the full process, the butler vibe, and the cultural humor of not taking ourselves so seriously underpinning the atmosphere of being relaxed, comfortable and without fear.
Challenge acknowledged: Yes, there are technical and ethical hurdles … we will dogfood the tool into reality in order work at overcoming them.
Final Thought: We could end with a forward-looking statement about the potential of this paradigm shift to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the creative journey … but we just need to get going dogfooding this thing … and if/when somebody develops a better open source tool, we’ll work on that project instead.

10. References

(TBD)

We will list all cited sources from the provided files (using the bracketed numbers) … especially in terms of the technology stack.