Beats News: Following Cursor and Anthropic, OpenAI has unveiled its proprietary Git backend, Pando, which has now taken over the company’s entire main code repository. Over the past year, Codex enabled engineers to deploy large numbers of agents simultaneously to write code, resulting in a surge in code branches, pushes, merges, and pull requests. OpenAI’s original system frequently experienced slowdowns and merge failures, with reliability dropping below 90%.
An engineer led the core architecture design, with multiple Codex Agent teams contributing to implementation; Pando was deployed to production within 10 weeks. This backend enables parallel processing of code pushes across different branches, eliminating the need for them to queue behind one another. Instead of generating individual data packets for each client during pulls, it reuses existing Git packets and distributes them directly via caching. After the overhaul, the median latency for code pushes decreased by nearly 80%, with nearly 1 PB of data distributed daily and a cache hit rate exceeding 99%. However, different branches no longer guarantee a consistent state at the same point in time.
Cursor's Origin is still based on Git, primarily targeting code hosting services as alternatives to GitHub. Anthropic's Scion eliminates Git entirely, moving commits, merges, and history queries to the server side. OpenAI retains the Git client and protocol, rebuilding only the backend, so engineers and agents can continue using their existing development workflows with minimal changes.