
Entire is a Go CLI that hooks into Git to capture AI coding agent sessions. That description is accurate, but it undersells the mechanism, which is a genuinely clever piece of git engineering worth understanding on its own terms. Entire also talks about a three-part architecture: a git-compatible database, a semantic reasoning layer, and an AI-native SDLC.
Sessions and checkpoints
Entire has two units. A session is one full run with an agent, start to finish. It gets an ID like 2026-01-08-abc123de. A checkpoint is a restorable snapshot inside that session. It gets created every time you or the agent makes a commit.
That's the key design choice: checkpoints are tied to commits, not to a timer or a file save. This means the checkpoint history inherits your commit history for free. Commit often, and you get fine-grained rewind points. Squash everything into one commit, and you get one checkpoint for the whole session. The tool doesn't fight your commit habits. It just mirrors them.
The real trick: a separate branch
Here's the part worth understanding at the git level.
Entire never writes to your active branch. All session data, transcripts, prompts, files touched, tool calls, gets committed to a second branch: entire/checkpoints/v1. Each entry links back to your real commit by SHA.
Why does this matter? Because the obvious alternative, storing transcripts as commit trailers or files in your working tree, has a cost. It bloats every diff a reviewer sees. It clutters git log with metadata nobody wants there.
Entire avoids that by exiling the data to a second branch. You get versioned, git-native storage. No external database needed. And your actual commit history stays clean.
entire checkpoint rewind and entire session resume are basically checkouts against that second branch's tree. They restore your files without touching your commit history.
It's a smart use of git as storage. It's also why Entire doesn't need a server to work locally. The "database" is just another branch.
Two details that show real usage, not just design docs
Two things in the CLI's docs stood out as signs this was tested against real workflows, not just sketched on a whiteboard.
Worktrees work independently. Run two agents in two worktrees of the same repo, and their checkpoint tracking doesn't cross-contaminate.
Concurrent sessions are handled. Start a second agent session while another has uncommitted work, and Entire notices, warns you, and tracks both checkpoint histories separately. Either can be rewound on its own.
That's the kind of edge case you only hit once teams actually run multiple agents in parallel. It suggests real dogfooding, not just a spec.
Blame, but for prompts
entire blame and entire why are real, shipped CLI commands, sitting under entire labs as explicitly experimental features. entire blame <file> shows which checkpoint produced each line in a file, agent, model, and session included with --long. entire why <file>:<line> jumps straight from a line of code to the prompt that produced it.
That's the most direct payoff of the whole branch-separation design: git blame tells you which commit touched a line, this tells you which conversation did. It's still labeled experimental, so treat it as early, but it's real code, not roadmap language.
The redaction gap
Entire runs best-effort secret redaction, stripping API keys and tokens before writing to the checkpoint branch. The CLI's own docs say this plainly: it's best-effort, not guaranteed.
There's a specific hole called out too. Before a session's final commit, work sits on temporary "shadow branches." Those shadow branches can carry unredacted secrets. The docs say they shouldn't be pushed.
This isn't a bug. It's a consequence of the design. Redaction has to run against whatever an agent pastes into a transcript, with no fixed schema to check against. Pattern matching on arbitrary text is never going to be airtight.
So if you're weighing Entire for a repo with any compliance requirement, don't read "redacts secrets" as a guarantee. Read it as: one branch gets a best-effort scrub, and the branches in between don't. That's a different risk than the "traceability for audit and compliance" pitch implies.
git-sync: the quieter, more interesting repo
Checkpoints is the flashier product, but git-sync, a smaller repo with 432 stars, is the more interesting piece of engineering.
Its own description: it mirrors git refs from one remote to another, without a local checkout, streaming packfiles over Smart HTTP into an in-memory object store.
Translated: a normal git mirror needs a full copy of the repo on disk. That's slow if you're mirroring a lot of repos, continuously. Smart HTTP is the protocol git uses to negotiate what to send over HTTP. Streaming that straight into memory, instead of writing it to a working tree first, is what lets git-sync move data between remotes without ever touching a filesystem checkout.
This is the plumbing behind Entire's July preview of a distributed git network. The idea: mirror a GitHub repo onto Entire's infrastructure so agents clone from a closer copy, instead of hammering GitHub directly and hitting rate limits.
Is that actually the bottleneck teams hit first? Maybe. It's a specific enough claim to check later. Either fleets of agents really do exhaust GitHub's rate limits before anything else breaks, or teams hit token costs or context limits first, and the mirror solves a problem that wasn't the tightest constraint.
What's actually open source, and what isn't
This is worth separating cleanly, because the two halves of the product don't have the same license, and "open source" is doing a lot of unearned work in how Entire gets described.
Genuinely open, MIT licensed, checkable in the repo:
cli, the Entire CLI itself (4.3k stars)git-sync, the packfile-mirroring library underneath the distributed networkforgemark, a benchmarking tool Entire released to measure git-push throughput against Smart HTTP forgespgr, the experimental MCP search server- Packaging repos:
homebrew-tap,scoop-bucket,roger-roger(a demo agent plugin)
Not in the public org at all:
The actual platform. The entire.io web dashboard where you browse checkpoints and diffs. The distributed git network's backend, what Entire's own blog calls a "global control plane for identity, access, and placement" plus "regional data planes for content-addressed Git storage." The auth service. None of this has a repo in entireio, as far as the 17 public repos there show. The CLI's own contributor docs even reference testing against a separate local checkout of "the app repo" for device-auth work, which isn't itself public.
Unclear, sitting in the public org with no documentation I could verify:entire-sem, summer-of-ai, and cli-checkpoints are all public repos in the org, but none of them have a description or README content I could confirm independently. entire-sem is the tempting one to read as "the semantic reasoning layer," given the name, but I don't have a schema, a spec, or even a one-line description to back that up. There's also an unrelated third-party project literally called sem (Ataraxy Labs' semantic version control tool) that has nothing to do with Entire, so anyone searching casually could conflate the two. I'm flagging the gap rather than guessing what entire-sem does.
The benchmark numbers, and who's measuring them
Entire's July network launch came with real throughput figures: 570K clones per hour, 1.7M mixed operations per hour, 2.1M pushes per hour. These are produced by ForgeMark, which is a real, open-source tool now, so the methodology is at least inspectable. But two things are worth holding onto before repeating those numbers as fact.
First, the load is explicitly simulated: "200 simulated clients," "32 simulated agents," "128 simulated agents," per Entire's own blog post. That's a synthetic benchmark against their own infrastructure, not observed production traffic, and not independently reproduced by anyone outside the company.
Second, the highest number, 2.1M pushes per hour, is specifically for branches prefixed entire/unmirrored/, a write path that Entire's own post says "stays local to the region it's pushed to instead of syncing out to the mirror." That's the fast path precisely because it skips the sync-back-to-GitHub step most users would actually depend on. Quoting the peak number without that caveat overstates what a typical GitHub-backed repo would see in practice.
Where the architecture stops being architecture
Entire's stated long-term design has three parts: a git-compatible database unifying code and intent, a semantic reasoning layer for multi-agent coordination, and an AI-native interface. Of the three, only the first has any shipped, verifiable code, and what's shipped is a checkpoint branch convention, not a database in any general sense.
The semantic layer has no published schema or protocol spec that I could find. The nearest thing with an actual description is pgr, honestly labeled by Entire itself as "an experimental, stateless MCP code-search server for studying how ranking, latency, and output shaping affect agentic search." That's a research probe into search ranking. It answers a narrower question, how do you rank code search results for an agent, than the one Entire says it's solving: how do agents share reasoning across a fleet without colliding.
The honest read
What's verifiably shipped: a git hook and checkpoint branch convention (open source), a distributed mirror built on packfile streaming (open source client, closed backend), and a benchmarking tool used to produce simulated-load numbers for that backend. That's real, useful engineering for a specific problem: agent sessions disappearing when a terminal closes.
What isn't verifiable from the public repos, is the semantic coordination layer. That's the piece that would separate Entire from "a well-built CLI hook plus a hosted mirror." No schema for it exists in public yet, no running code, no protocol. Once one does, it'll be possible to check whether agents actually hand off context without collision.
Sources
- entireio/cli — CLI README: session/checkpoint model, commands, agent hook configuration, redaction and security notes, Labs commands
- entireio GitHub org — full repo listing, licenses, star counts
- entireio/git-sync — packfile mirroring description
- Entire blog: "An Entirely New Git Hosting Network" — distributed network architecture, ForgeMark benchmark methodology, roadmap items
- Entire newsroom: seed round announcement — funding, investors, founding team, three-part vision
