Ancestry + Causality: Like Peanut Butter and Jelly.

Git has spent two decades teaching us to think about software change through ancestry. Commits point backward, histories form, and the repository tells us how one state descended from another.

Atomic starts from a different premise. Its causal graph represents change through patches and dependencies, allowing us to reason about what a change needs, what it affects, and how it can be composed independently of a single line of ancestry.

On paper, those models look like they belong on opposite sides of the source-control universe.

But peanut butter and jelly looked pretty different too.

In this workshop, we'll explore what happens when ancestral and causal models of change meet. We'll look at where their assumptions differ, where they unexpectedly complement each other, and what becomes possible when you stop treating them as mutually exclusive.

And then we'll show you what we've been building.