We Run Our Own Git Now — and Shipped a Plugin on It the Same Day

We keep our security work and our everyday building in separate houses on purpose, and our code hosting had been an exception — scattered, borrowed, not really ours. So we fixed it: a git host for the lab's own tools, standing on its own, under our own name. Nothing exotic. The exotic part is what we put on it first.

The first repo earns its keep

The inaugural project wasn't a toy commit to prove the server worked. It was a tool we'd actually wanted for a while.

Here's the itch it scratches. When you read a draft — a spec, a doc, a piece of writing — the natural thing to do is mark it up. Highlight a sentence, scribble "this is wrong," "tighten this," "say more here." That's how humans review each other's work. But when the writer is an AI, that fluid back-and-forth tends to collapse into copy-pasting paragraphs into a chat box and explaining where they came from.

So the plugin lets you do the human thing to the machine. Open a document, highlight a span, leave a comment — and send that comment, anchored to the exact words, straight to the AI. One quick fix, fire it off immediately. A pile of notes from a full read-through, batch them and send the whole review at once. The AI gets your markup in place, knowing precisely what each note refers to, and either makes the edits or works the list with you.

It's a small thing. It's also the difference between reviewing with an AI and reviewing at one.

Why own the substrate

You could ask why bother hosting your own git when there are perfectly good places to put code for free. Same reason we built our own video verbs, same reason we made our blog callable by agents: a capability you own is a capability you can shape.

When the git host is yours, the plugin that installs from it is yours, the way it installs is yours, and the next ten tools you hang off it inherit all of that. Borrowed substrate is fine until the day you want it to do something it wasn't built to do — and with the kind of AI-native tooling we keep inventing, that day is most days. Owning the floor means you can move the walls.

The honest loop

There's a through-line in how we work that this little project makes literal: we try to shorten the distance between noticing something and acting on it. A note in your head is worthless until it's a note the system can use. A review is friction until the friction is gone.

So we built a host to keep our tools, and the first tool we kept there exists to make handing your thoughts to the machine feel like marking up a friend's paper — quick, specific, in context. We even reviewed the documentation for it using it, which is either good engineering or showing off. Probably both.

Two things in an afternoon, but really one idea wearing two hats: own what you build on, and keep collapsing the gap between human judgment and machine execution until there's almost nothing left in between.