OpenAI replaces its Git backend with Pando, saying monorepo push latency fell nearly fivefold
OpenAI engineers say the system now serves close to a petabyte of Git data a day, as agent-driven growth puts quarterly monorepo commits on course to be up more than 2,400% on early 2024 by year end; reliability had fallen below 90%.
Why it matters
Coding agents generate far more commits, branches and fetches than human teams, and OpenAI says its existing Git hosting could not keep up with that load on its main monorepo. Pando, described in an engineering post by Aaron Friel, Taylor Blau and Ted Nyman, handles each branch independently and stops building custom packfiles for every client, which the team credits for the speed-up. The post is a rare look at infrastructure strain created by AI agents inside a frontier lab. Watch whether OpenAI open-sources Pando or other large engineering teams follow.
Key facts
- Push latency cut nearly fivefold (about 80%, per @OpenAIDevs)
- Serves close to a petabyte of Git data per day
- Quarterly monorepo commits set to be up more than 2,400% on Q1 2024 by year end
- Reliability had fallen below 90% before Pando
- Handles each branch independently; no per-client custom packfiles