I love the website; the design, the video, the NSFW toggle, the simplicity.
I love the idea; definitely something I ran into a few times before and wish I had.
Unfortunately, I am not installing a closed-source daemon with access to the filesystem from an unknown (to me) developer. I will bookmark this and revisit in a few weeks and hope you had published the source. :)
cyrusradfar 48 minutes ago [-]
Totally understandable.
I didn't open up the source for this as I have a mono-repo with several experiments (and websites).
Happy to open the source up and link it from the existing website.
Side note: It would be awesome if YC had a semi-automated security review you could submit your product to before releasing on show.
popalchemist 1 hours ago [-]
Agreed on all counts. It looks great! Just can't trust it unless it's transparent.
wazzaps 2 hours ago [-]
FYI all Jetbrains IDEs include this, as long as they are open on the codebase.
It's called "Local history".
its-kostya 2 hours ago [-]
I love to use the terminal, and I still do. But as much as I love to unfu*k my local nvim setup, I much rather pay a company to do it for me. Set up vim bindings inside jetbrains and everything comes with batteries included, along with a kick-ass debugger. While my colleagues are fighting opencode, I pointed my IDE at the correct MCP gateway and everything "just works" with more context.
Thought I'd share the data point to support jetbrains
gschrader 52 minutes ago [-]
I think it only keeps history for user edited files, agent edited files don't seem to end up in it for me (Claude code) but maybe it works with other agents with the proper plugins I'm not sure.
cyrusradfar 47 minutes ago [-]
+1 OP here, this is the problem I'm solving for. Agents use tools and may be in multiple places editing; therefore, you need to watch the file system.
heeen2 1 hours ago [-]
vscode and its forks as well (for files it saves)
ifh-hn 1 hours ago [-]
I have used fossil in a similar way, also local, and sqlite based. Admittedly you have to add files to it first but setting it running via cron was simple enough. Though it wasn't be ause I let an AI access all my stuff.
overcrowd8537 43 minutes ago [-]
love the idea of this, but echoing others... closed source daemon with access to all files is a 100% non-starter.
Yep, I’ve needed something like this a few times. Even when trying to be careful to commit every step to a feature branch, I’ve still found myself asking for code fixes or updates in a single iteration and kicking myself when I didn’t just commit the damn thing. This will be a nice safety net.
cyrusradfar 5 hours ago [-]
Thank you! That's great to hear.
I spent a bit of time being baffled nothing existed that does this. Then I realized that, until Agents, the velocity of changes wasn't as quick and errors were rare(er)
datawars 3 hours ago [-]
Thank you for pointing out a problem that I had (which I do!), solving with Time Machine and trying to make myself commit more requently - and for providing a solution! Looks very cool, too. If I close the terminal I started --watch in, will the watch continue?
Writing this, I wanted to ask if the desktop app includes the CLI, but there it says it on your website :-) Thanks for thinking ahead so far, but then picking us up here and now so we can easily follow along into an unf* future!
Looking forward to try it.
cyrusradfar 3 hours ago [-]
yes, it worked a lot so once you say watch it watches until you stop it, including through closing terminals, computer power off, etc. It should restart on reboot, but -- test it yourself and tell me if I'm wrong :)
> unf watch
# reboot
> unf list
it should say watching on your directory still, if it stays crashed or something else. ping me at support at v1.co
Just one human, two machines at my home can't replicate all configurations...
datawars 2 hours ago [-]
v1.co nice domain!
monster_truck 1 hours ago [-]
Where is the source? I'm not going to rely on or trust anything this important to code I can't read.
Ha, the only feedback I needed :) I spent far too much time on the Unicorn exploding properly...
mpalmer 3 hours ago [-]
This is so cool to have made yourself. How would you compare this to the functionality offered by jujutsu? I love the histogram, it was the first sort of thing I wanted out of jujutsu that its UI doesn't make very easy. But with jj the filesystem tracking is built in, which is a huge advantage.
cyrusradfar 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not a user, but I looked at the site and it looks like jj snapshots when you run a jj command. UNF snapshots continuously.
If an AI agent rewrites 30 files and you haven't touched jj yet, jj has the before-state but none of the intermediate states. UNF* captured every save as it happened, at filesystem level.
jj is a VCS. UNF is a safety net that sits below your VCS.
- UNF* works alongside git, jj, or no VCS at all
- No workflow change. You don't adopt a new tool, it just runs in the background
- Works on files outside any repo (configs, scratch dirs, notes) as it doesn't require git.
They're complementary, not competing.
W.r.t. to the histogram, this is my fav feature of the app as well. Session segmentation (still definitely not perfect) creates selectable regions to make it easier, too. The algo is in the CLI as well for the Agent recap (rebuilding context) features.
lexluthor38 1 hours ago [-]
To be fair, jujutsu has a watchman feature which uses inotify to create snapshots on file change as well. Your tool probably has a more tailored UX to handling these inter-commit changes though so there could still provide complementary value there.
alunchbox 29 minutes ago [-]
Just use Jujutsu
s0a 24 hours ago [-]
this seems insanely useful and well thought out. kinda surprised something like it doesn’t already exist. def useful in the age of agents
why did you make it so complicated? magit has a `magit-wip-mode` that just silently creates refs in git intermittently so you can just use the reflog to get things back.
cyrusradfar 3 hours ago [-]
This was designed for any file save.
From what I know (correct me) magit-wip-mode hooks into editor saves. UNF hooks into the filesystem.
magit-wip-mode is great if your only risk is your own edits in Emacs. UNF* exists because that's no longer the only risk; agents are rewriting codebases/docs and they don't use Emacs.
zack2722 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
1 days ago [-]
OutOfHere 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 2 hours ago [-]
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Edit: you did it more than once in this thread - the other case was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183957. Can you please stop posting like this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
OutOfHere 2 minutes ago [-]
Acknowledged.
OutOfHere 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cyrusradfar 3 hours ago [-]
Appreciate that perspective and assumed some folks would feel that way.
I am more interested in testing if folks have the problem and like the shape of the solution, before I try to decide on the model to sustain it. Open Source to me is saying -- "hey do you all want to help me build this?"
I'm not even at the point of knowing if it should exist, so why start asking people to help without that validation.
I work(ed) with OSS projects that have terrible times sustaining themselves and don't default to it bc of that trauma.
Thanks for stopping by.
realharo 2 hours ago [-]
"Local history" is a very popular feature in the JetBrains IDEs (just search HN comments), and I remember similar tools appearing on HN several times in the past (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784238), so clearly there is demand for such functionality (or at least was in the past, when almost all code edits were manual).
datawars 3 hours ago [-]
Well, some kind of transparency would be good indeed. Open source doesn't mean open contribution.
I love the idea; definitely something I ran into a few times before and wish I had.
Unfortunately, I am not installing a closed-source daemon with access to the filesystem from an unknown (to me) developer. I will bookmark this and revisit in a few weeks and hope you had published the source. :)
I didn't open up the source for this as I have a mono-repo with several experiments (and websites).
Happy to open the source up and link it from the existing website.
I've started to have an Agent migrate it out, and will review it before calling it done. Watch https://github.com/cyrusradfar/homebrew-unf
Side note: It would be awesome if YC had a semi-automated security review you could submit your product to before releasing on show.
Thought I'd share the data point to support jetbrains
I spent a bit of time being baffled nothing existed that does this. Then I realized that, until Agents, the velocity of changes wasn't as quick and errors were rare(er)
Writing this, I wanted to ask if the desktop app includes the CLI, but there it says it on your website :-) Thanks for thinking ahead so far, but then picking us up here and now so we can easily follow along into an unf* future!
Looking forward to try it.
Just one human, two machines at my home can't replicate all configurations...
If an AI agent rewrites 30 files and you haven't touched jj yet, jj has the before-state but none of the intermediate states. UNF* captured every save as it happened, at filesystem level.
jj is a VCS. UNF is a safety net that sits below your VCS.
They're complementary, not competing.W.r.t. to the histogram, this is my fav feature of the app as well. Session segmentation (still definitely not perfect) creates selectable regions to make it easier, too. The algo is in the CLI as well for the Agent recap (rebuilding context) features.
From what I know (correct me) magit-wip-mode hooks into editor saves. UNF hooks into the filesystem.
magit-wip-mode is great if your only risk is your own edits in Emacs. UNF* exists because that's no longer the only risk; agents are rewriting codebases/docs and they don't use Emacs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you did it more than once in this thread - the other case was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183957. Can you please stop posting like this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I am more interested in testing if folks have the problem and like the shape of the solution, before I try to decide on the model to sustain it. Open Source to me is saying -- "hey do you all want to help me build this?"
I'm not even at the point of knowing if it should exist, so why start asking people to help without that validation.
I work(ed) with OSS projects that have terrible times sustaining themselves and don't default to it bc of that trauma.
Thanks for stopping by.