The Git ceiling
Git is brilliant software. It solved distributed collaboration for a generation of developers. But the workflows we run today, monorepos with thousands of contributors, fine-grained access controls, real-time collaboration, are pushing against design decisions made twenty years ago.
Where it breaks down
Access control is an afterthought
Git has no concept of per-path permissions. If you can clone the repo, you can read every file. Every enterprise bolts on a wrapper. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket all implement their own permission layers on top because the protocol doesn't support it.
Monorepos strain the model
Large monorepos routinely hit performance cliffs: slow clones, expensive git status, merge conflicts that span thousands of files. Partial clone and sparse checkout are patches, not solutions.
What W0rktree does differently
W0rktree was designed with these problems as first-class constraints. Access controls are built into the protocol. The storage model is optimized for monorepo-scale trees. And it is written in Rust, so the CLI is fast by default, not fast after tuning.
This isn't about replacing Git overnight. It's about building the version control system that matches how teams actually work in 2026.