Nit

Nit is a native replacement for git, written in Zig, that is tuned for the way AI coding agents consume output. Its author describes it in a blog post: agents call git constantly for status, diff, log and show, and git's output was designed for humans, with verbose headers, instructional text and decorative formatting that cost tokens and add latency. Nit talks directly to the git object database through libgit2, using Zig's C interop with no subprocess overhead. Its default compact mode prints only the data, while a human mode, enabled with the H flag, gives colored and grouped output for people. Commands that nit has not implemented natively fall through to git by replacing the nit process, so aliasing git to nit does not remove any functionality. The author reports token savings against git defaults of about 71 percent for status, 87 percent for a 20 entry log, 35 percent for diff and 55 percent for show with stat, and speedups of roughly 1.4x to 1.6x on a real repository across 100 benchmark runs. Diff context is reduced from three lines to one, which the author tested against Claude on 27 trials without a loss in comprehension. A suite of 78 conformance tests covers git edge cases such as detached HEAD, merge commits, renames, binary diffs and submodules. It is aimed at developers who run coding agents and want to cut token use. The post lists no pricing.