About

Why this exists

The way people work is shifting. As tools get smarter, more of us direct the work and decide what matters instead of doing every keystroke by hand. But the moment there is more than one version, or more than one person, you need a way to keep every version, work in parallel, and put things back when they break.

That tool already exists. It is called Git, and developers have trusted it for decades. The catch is that Git is brutal for anyone who is not one. It assumes a terminal, a mental model, and a tolerance for cryptic errors that most people were never taught.

The real cost is not the learning curve. It is the first afternoon you lose to a command you only half understood, when nobody tells you it was almost certainly recoverable. They tell you that you should have committed more often. After that happens once, you quietly stop trying things.

Chintu is that same Git, made the simplest it has ever been to use. Click Save and it saves a version and tells you what happened. Someone edits the same project and their work merges in cleanly. Something breaks and it tells you exactly how to undo it.

All of which is really one idea: make mistakes cheap. Every version you save stays, and nothing here deletes work you have not saved yet. Try the bad idea. Break the thing. People are happier making mistakes when they can see the way back, and being able to see the way back is what version control was for in the first place.

Trust, apparently a radical concept

No subscriptions. No lock-in. No tracking. No free tier that quietly expires. Chintu is free, and it is staying that way.

Your code never leaves your machine unless you push it somewhere yourself. I would not know what to do with it if it did.

Chintu is git. It is just git, run carefully.

Underneath every button is a git command a careful person would have typed, with the guardrails a careful person would have used. --force-with-lease instead of --force. -d instead of -D. A flat refusal to rewind over work you have not saved yet.

Nothing here is invented and nothing here is proprietary. Delete Chintu tomorrow and your repo is a normal git repo, because it always was one.

What the terminal still does better, for now

Automation. A build pipeline, a server you have ssh’d into, a script that runs at 3am. That is the command line today. A terminal inside Chintu is written up and waiting its turn.

Chintu talks to GitHub. Only GitHub. GitLab, Bitbucket, a server in someone’s basement: command line.

And the honest one. What you learn in the terminal works on every machine, in every tutorial, in every answer you will ever find online. What you learn in Chintu is Chintu. That is the trade. Chintu is the on-ramp, not the last stop. If you outgrow it, that was the point.

Who it is for

Anyone who makes things and should not have to learn Git to keep them safe. Especially the people Git was never built for.

• Developers who want Git’s full power without the friction
• Music producers backing up plugin source
• Indie devs and modders shipping patches between bug reports
• Writers who lost a chapter once and never got over it
• Researchers tracking experiment code, drafts, and datasets
• Designers committing exports next to a README
• Hardware folks versioning firmware alongside CAD files

None of them set out to learn Git. They set out to make something, usually with other people, and Git was in the way.

Where I stand on AI

None of this is new and I would never pretend otherwise. Git, open source, the tools underneath all of it: the powerful parts were built by people smarter than me, over decades. I did not invent the technology. I made it better to live with.

Change is inevitable. The work was never to stop it. It is to guide it.

So here is where I actually stand. I do not like software that bolts AI on for the sake of it. A chatbot shoved into the corner of every app, a feature nobody asked for, “AI-powered” slapped on the box to look modern. If it does not genuinely help the person using it, it has no reason to be there.

And it should stay far away from creative work and generation. Art is not a problem to automate.

What is Earth without art? Just a rock.

Every machine that makes art was raised on ours. Fed our songs, our stories, our paintings, the work of countless human hands. For it to turn and take the place of those hands is to bite the one that fed it. I will not build that. It is not progress, it is subtraction.

Everywhere else it is a different story. In computer science, medicine and business, AI is genuinely changing how the world works. Faster diagnoses, problems solved at a scale no person could reach, ideas tested in hours instead of years. There it is not subtraction. It is leverage, and it is good.

And no, I do not think that makes computer scientists obsolete. The opposite. Computer science is becoming a requirement rather than a specialty. With AI as the baseline, everyone becomes a scientist of sorts. The question stops being whether you can build. It becomes what you build.

Because what you build is what defines you.

If you already know Git

Chintu is tuned for the people Git frustrates most. That is a design priority, not a ceiling. The real git commands are still underneath, your repo stays a normal repo, and most workflows take fewer clicks than the equivalent in a shell. The CLI is still great. It just should not be the only door.

Built by one person

The desktop app, this website, and the backend are a one-person project. Electron, React, C++, Next.js. Sign in with the GitHub account you already have and every repo, branch, commit and collaborator is already there. No migration, no import wizard.

That one person is github.com/TheAaravSikriwal. Chintu is the loudest thing there, but it is not the only thing.