OpenAI unveils Pando, a Git-compatible backend built for Codex-scale coding
OpenAI says its internal monorepo now runs on a custom system designed to handle the concurrent development Codex enables.
What to know
- OpenAI built Pando, a Git-compatible backend, to handle the higher concurrency across branches driven by Codex-based coding at scale.
- The system uses atomic compare-and-swap-like ref updates and background compaction of packfiles (up to cover level L4) modeled on log-structured merge-trees.
- Performance and reliability benefits described are OpenAI's own claims, not independently benchmarked.
- Coverage so far is mostly technical-press pickup and early sharing on Hacker News, Twitter and Reddit, with little public debate yet.
OpenAI Creator of PandoOpenAI Devs OpenAI's developer-facing social media account
How it unfolded 4 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Reddit discussion picks up the Pando announcement
The story was shared to Reddit, extending discussion of OpenAI's decision to build its own Git backend beyond Hacker News and Twitter.
“OpenAI also rebuild their own Git backend…”
— Logical_Welder3467 -
By my count, this OpenAI post is the fifth major article on the topic of scaling, with the previous four being:- Cursor: https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale- GitHub: https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...- Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/research/redesigning-source-contro...- GitHub…
2 more of the top 3 · 25 posts in this stretch
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OpenAI has a blog post about writing a new Git backend. There’s a lot of technical bits in it, some I glossed over. Anthropic chose to build something completely new to replace Git. A lifetime ago, I was using CVS, and then Subversion, and don’t really want to switch again. GitHub is pervasive too.
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While technically impressive, the number of git commits without looking at the content is either a loose proxy for the speed of change of the codebase or a finer time resolution of the changesets. But this says little or nothing about whether this is useful for anything related to their products. So what is this for? They are not employing the…
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OpenAI Devs frames Pando as a Git alternative
OpenAI's developer-facing account posted about Pando on social media, describing it as an alternative source-control system to Git rather than simply a backend layered on top of it.
“Pando - OpenAI's alternative to Git for source control…”
— @OpenAIDevs -
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Hacker News picks up OpenAI's Pando announcement
The OpenAI engineering post was submitted to Hacker News under the title "Scaling Git at OpenAI," beginning wider tech-community circulation of the announcement.
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OpenAI details Pando, its new Git-compatible backend
OpenAI published an engineering article describing Pando, a system built to support concurrent development and faster repository operations in its monorepo, designed around horizontally scalable writes and high-throughput reads, with background compaction of packfiles up to cover level L4.
“How OpenAI built Pando, a Git-compatible backend designed for the scale of development that Codex makes possible.”
— OpenAI -
3 outlets Scaling Git at OpenAI
first by HN Best, 8d ago · also HN Frontpage, OpenAI News
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1 outlet first by Blockchain.News, 8d ago · read ↗
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What people are saying 21 voices from 2 sites · best of 25 · verbatim
- Nov 6
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Scaling Git at OpenAI # devopsish https:// openai.com/index/scaling-git-a t-openai/
- Nov 3
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Not to start a flame war, but this sounds like a problem of monorepos and not git.If they switched to private packages in separate repos, would that scale better? Would they be hitting the same problems? Would they be hitting different problems?
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> Pando now powers all development in OpenAI’s monorepo.Monorepo. I keep hearing from various folks across the more frontier tech companies, that they have switched to a monorepo to improve agent-scale dev performance. Anyone have similar findings?
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Ideas are getting cheaper with the day, so convergence is less likely every day too.
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Scaling Git at OpenAI: https:// openai.com/index/scaling-git-a t-openai/ Discussion: http:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0345924
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> under-appreciated feature of the Git protocol, `packfile-uri`, allows a server to return links to download additional packs separately ... Pando uses this exclusively ... To support this feature, OpenAI contributed a number of improvements to `packfile-uri`Yes! Great adaptation of an existing system, showing why open source is special.Neat hack…
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> fifth major articleSeventh, at least, all the major code forges are on it: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/scaling-git-for-the-agentic-so...Entire also seems focused on this:
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Interesting that they used both Lean and TLA+. I wish they'd speak more about that. I woulda thought they'd use one or the other. Generally speaking they both do the same thing (prove specs), but in very different ways.
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> On handling a push, Pando validates the incoming packfile while streaming it to blob storage, without unpacking it into a local repositoryWasn't this flagged as a big risk, as it seems to place complete trust in the client?Especially with all the rogue agents and containment/monitoring failures we have seen in 2026?Would love to hear how the…
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Why not use a completely different VCS topology if you are a gigantic trillion dollar behemoth? Why are we still using the "distributed" git concept as the basis for everything?Centralization is exactly what you want at this kind of scale. The most marginal participation from the server would make a huge difference.There is a reason game studios…
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The blog post paints a vivid picture of a slop volcano. We speak of code its authors never read, never share, and never accept patches. So the entire point of git is moot.On the other hand, some lower-level tools have to be simple, reliable and efficient. Here, sharing is critical. Even the authors of the post shared some incremental improvements…
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Is the increase in commits graph in percentages because it’s fewer than Anthropic’s rate? A case of commit envy?In all seriousness though I have enjoyed reading these posts. I will never work at this scale, but I like to read how different teams approach problems like this and I do wonder if some of these approaches will trickle down (or up?) into…
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The key thing I realized is now I understand why github's infra struggled so much lately.
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Aren’t the concepts mostly already in place for a decade or two at Meta and Google?Which would support your argument, but I don’t think this is particularly new.
- Nov 2
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growing out of Git seems like a graduation for becoming top tech companies. Google and Facebook have done this in the past. now Anthropic and openAI.
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Scaling Git at OpenAI Link: https:// openai.com/index/scaling-git-a t-openai/ Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0345924
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> We built Pando with Codex, moving from kick-off to production, in just 10 weeks. The core of Pando was designed by a single engineer, implemented by teams of agents, and deployed by a handful of engineers. Pando began serving production traffic in April of this year, and is one part of a larger system of source control management tools used at…
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I don't see benchmarks anywhere in here. For example, how many pushes per second does this handle? And how many concurrent pushers? etc..Disclaimer: I am building a code forge at
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Can anyone explain to me what this massive volume of code could actually be doing? They obviously have variations of model architectures, training infrastructure, serving infrastructure, and the source for their apps.Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially? And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model…
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While I don't have any particular interest in the topic this is a great blog post. No AI in every second line, no needless marketing or hype. Just a bunch of engineers talking in their own voice about a topic in great detail with numbers, charts, visualizations.
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Scaling Git at OpenAI L: https:// openai.com/index/scaling-git-a t-openai/ C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5 0345924 posted on 2026.11.02 at 18:47:56 (c=0, p=23)