Cooper: GitHub's original sin is that cloning creates broken pointers
Jake Cooper · The Agent-Native Cloud: 3M Users, 100K Signups/Wk, Data Centers, & Death PRs — Jake Cooper, Railway · May 20, 2026 · at 5:58
Railway founder Jake Cooper discusses the limitations of traditional Git architecture and version control when applied to modular agentic workflows.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think the, it's funny, because, like, I think GitHub's original sin is that it's like almost a series of broken pointers. It's like you have essentially this thing, and then you clone it, and then, okay, great, like, I've just lost That whole upstream, right?”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jake Cooper
Cooper: Developers writing code by hand instead of reviewing AI are wrong
“If you're writing code by hand, you are doing this wrong, right? Like, they're code, the tools are good enough at this point, like, that you move extremely, extremely quickly, and like, yes, there are issues and pain points and all these other things but, You …”
Cooper: Natural language agents will dominate software development within ten years
“That will be kind of the dominant species over the next like 10 years is, is we've moved from assembly to C to C++ to JavaScript to now like words.”
Cooper: Three-month payback buying bare-metal versus renting cloud
“Our payback period when we go to metal if we rent it in the cloud, our payback period is about three months.”
Cooper: AI coding agents prefer complex CLIs with hundreds of flags
“Things that were prohibitively annoying to humans are not actually prohibitively annoying to agents. They're really, really nice, right? And so, if I wanted to hand you a CLI and I said, hey, guess what? The CLI has 40 arguments and. Right. 600 flags. You'd be…”
Cooper: The traditional push-pull-rebuild deployment loop will disappear
“Like push, pull, whatever kind of like loop, I just fundamentally believe it's going to go away, right? Like it's, we're going to get to a point where you make a small change in production that changes version across your entire kind of infrastructure. You're …”
Cooper: AI SREs without safe primitives will destroy production databases
“If you just unleash an AI SRE on your production infrastructure and you don't have like safe primitives for like copying volumes, making sure that this is fine, it's gonna nuke your production database. Like it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when it's …”