# Pijul 32 Hacker News commenters recommended Pijul and 14 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 6 years (4 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Distributed version control whose patches commute, so changes merge in any order with fewer conflicts. Caveat: immature, with crashes and few basic features. ## Why people recommend it - Works well with parallel AI agents (5 comments): "I've been using it to build giant things using hundreds of Claude instances in parallel, almost without any conflict, ever." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50093005)) "For concurrency reasons Pijul is an excellent git replacement for agents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48634290)) "I've been using it with a massive farm of agents to build large things" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50101880)) - Patches commute, fewer merge conflicts (6 comments): "Once you resolve the conflict of A+B, no future merges or rebases would cause the same conflict again." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484151)) "eliminates an entire class of merge conflicts which make working in a distributed manner more feasible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106297)) "which Darcs/Pijul don’t require so long as the patches apply since they commute" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47960611)) - Principled patch theory, algebraically sound (4 comments): "Pijul is a brilliant experiment in Category Theory applied to VCS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738752)) "some even more algebraically sound like Darcs and Pijul" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716509)) "its approach seems fundamentally more right than Git's" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47741535)) - Darcs successor, capable and performant (3 comments): "It's darcs' spiritual successor, and quite performant and capable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174699)) "I like darcs, so I am rooting for pijul." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726521)) "You might like pijul if you like darcs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944433)) ## What people warn about - Immature and unfinished implementation (2 comments): "the whole system implementation is so complex my guy is still toiling away on it, unfinished, after half a decade" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47948912)) "it's still not at a maturity level that I would like" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952450)) - Crashes and network sync bugs (4 comments): "I tried it a few weeks ago and found it completely unusable. I do not get how they claim to be using it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47734747)) "major, seemingly unresolvable crashes for the simplest of operations on Mac and Linux" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47734326)) "it crashed on me a few times on my first day, so I just uninstalled it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713418)) - Barebones, missing basic features (2 comments): "Pijul is barebones by design, ready to be scripted, there’s just not much out there." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47949170)) "Some basic quality of life features were missing, and are still missing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736225)) - Weak git compatibility and adoption (2 comments): "I was kind of hoping Jujitsu or Pijul would take a stab at these major Git deficiencies but unfortunately it seems like they are content to do them as badly as Git does." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48574336)) "Just stop using rebase is much easier to socialize than let's all move to Pijul." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736358)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Git](https://hackerapproved.com/p/git.md): 814 recommend - [Jujutsu (jj)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jujutsu.md): 335 recommend - [Mercurial](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mercurial.md): 121 recommend - [jj (Jujutsu)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jj.md): 115 recommend - [Fossil](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fossil.md): 106 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Pijul", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pijul/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).