ozan
f01036c646
Merged overlapping posts: - forking-gitea + fork-dont-build → one post about the fork philosophy - fal-image-generation + image-generation-fal → one post about AI art pipeline Rewrote all posts with external/public voice: - Stronger hooks, concrete examples, punchier language - agentic-workflow: restructured around soul files + skills + numbers - agent-harness: clearer framing of 'what an agent harness is' - cloud-harness: tighter narrative about overnight agents - godot-optimisation: same depth, sharper opening - pre-commit-agent: clearer architecture, cost breakdown - studio-cli: reframed around identity/cold-start problem - blog-visual-upgrade: tightened the restyle story 10 posts total (9 markdown + 1 hand-authored HTML)
99 lines
7.4 KiB
Markdown
99 lines
7.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Fork, Don't Build: How We Modified Gitea, Pi, and Godot Instead of Starting from Scratch"
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slug: fork-dont-build
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date: "2026-05-25"
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description: "Everyone is building new AI developer tools. We forked three battle-tested open-source projects — Gitea, Pi, and Godot — and modified them from the inside. Combined changes: less than 0.5% of upstream code."
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og_description: "Fork Gitea. Fork Pi. Fork Godot. Modify platforms, don't build toys."
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og_image: "https://www.tinqs.com/img/og-cover.jpg"
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excerpt: "Three forks, less than 0.5% code changed. Why modifying existing platforms beats building new ones — and how we turned Gitea into a game dev platform with 3D preview, AI agents, and LFS-first workflows."
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author: "Ozan Bozkurt"
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author_initials: "OB"
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author_role: "CTO & Developer, Tinqs"
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---
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The AI developer tools space is full of people building new things. New agents, new IDEs, new platforms, new wrappers. Meanwhile, the tools that actually run the world — git servers, game engines, CI runners — sit there unchanged, waiting for someone to open them up and let AI agents in.
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We forked three of them. Gitea for git hosting. Pi for coding agents. Godot for the game engine. Combined changes: less than 0.5% of upstream code. Here's why, how, and what we learned.
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## The 0.5% Rule
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We're four people. We can't build a git platform, a coding agent, or a game engine from scratch. Nobody can — not in a timeframe measured in months.
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But we can take something that already works — something with years of battle-testing and thousands of contributors — and change the last half-percent that makes it ours. The pattern:
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1. Find open-source tool that does 95% of what you need
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2. Fork it
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3. Add the 5% (really, 0.5%)
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4. Stay close to upstream so their fixes are your fixes
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Across three forks, we've never touched more than 0.5% of upstream code. If your fork hits 1%, you're doing too much — either the upstream tool is wrong for the job, or you're not trusting it enough.
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## Fork 1: Gitea → Tinqs Studio
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Gitea is a self-hosted git server. Single Go binary, MIT license, 45k GitHub stars. We used GitHub for two years. It was fine for docs. For the game repo — 12GB in LFS, growing weekly — it was untenable. LFS bandwidth limits, slow clones, $5/50GB pricing. And nobody on the team could **see** what changed. A PR modifying a `.glb` file showed a binary diff. No preview. The artist pushed, the developer approved blindly, and three days later someone noticed the normals were inverted.
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We forked Gitea and built [Tinqs Studio](https://tinqs.com). Our changes:
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**3D asset preview.** Click a `.glb`, `.gltf`, or `.fbx` file in a PR and rotate the model in your browser. 22 formats supported via O3DV. This alone transformed our review process — the artist pushes, the lead inspects, nobody downloads anything.
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**HTML file preview.** Sandboxed iframe rendering. Our internal docs and game design pages look like websites, not raw source.
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**Agent API.** Six REST endpoints that let AI agents submit tasks, push code, check CI status, and open PRs. Agents are first-class users of the git platform, not bolt-on tools.
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**LFS-first workflows.** Auto-tracking on repo creation. Game file extensions (`.fbx`, `.glb`, `.png`, `.wav`) tracked by default. Storage dashboard per repo. Clone times went from 45 minutes to 3 minutes.
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**OAuth2 SSO.** One login for git, the game tools, and the team dashboard.
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Total lines changed: about 2,000 out of Gitea's 500,000. We modify templates, add Go modules, tweak CSS. We **never** touch the database schema — upstream owns that, and we ride their migrations.
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The alternative was building a git platform from scratch. Multi-year project, multi-million dollar budget. Or using GitHub/GitLab and accepting their limitations. Neither gives you the ability to embed agents directly into the platform.
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## Fork 2: Pi → Agent Runtime with Game Tools
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[Pi](https://pi.dev) is an open-source coding agent by Mario Zechner. MIT license, TypeScript, minimal by design — four core tools (read, write, edit, bash) and an extension system. 51k stars.
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We forked it and added four extensions, each a single TypeScript file:
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- **tinqs-provider** — routes inference through our DeepSeek V4 proxy ($0.28/MTok vs Opus at $15/MTok)
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- **tinqs-tools** — Gitea REST API, fal.ai image generation, vision model access
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- **tinqs-ci** — reads CI pipeline status, fetches build logs, polls for completion
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- **tinqs-guardrail** — 29 safety patterns blocking dangerous commands
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The core Pi code is untouched — 900 lines of extensions added to a 15,000-line codebase. Agents get Gitea-native tools without a fork of the entire agent ecosystem.
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The alternative: building our own agent from scratch — tool-calling logic, context management, streaming, retry handling, conversation threading. Months of work to reinvent what Pi already does.
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## Fork 3: Godot → Agent-Aware Game Engine
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[Godot](https://godotengine.org) is the open-source game engine powering our survival colony sim. We forked 4.6.2 and added nine C++ modules that give agents direct access to the running game:
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- **agent_api** — HTTP server inside the engine so agents can query game state
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- **agent_vision** — screenshot capture for AI vision pipelines
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- **agent_console** — programmatic console access
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- **agent_replay** — record and replay game sessions for testing
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These compile into the engine binary. A vanilla Godot user never sees them. An agent connects over HTTP, takes a screenshot, reads the scene tree, executes a console command — all without touching the editor UI.
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2,000 lines added to a 2-million-line engine. The alternative: building our own engine, or worse, writing a renderer instead of making a game.
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## Why forking beats building
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**You inherit decades of work, for free.** Gitea has handled millions of git pushes. Godot renders millions of frames. Pi has processed millions of LLM tokens. That battle-testing is yours when you fork. When you build from scratch, year one is spent rediscovering bugs fixed upstream in 2019.
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**You get free maintenance.** Every upstream release brings security patches, performance improvements, and new features — written by hundreds of contributors you don't pay. Your job is to rebase, resolve conflicts, and test. An afternoon, not a quarter.
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**You stay focused.** Building a git server means worrying about pack-file format, SSH key management, webhook delivery. Forking means you only think about the 0.5% that matters to you. The other 99.5% is someone else's problem.
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**Agents work better on real platforms.** An agent pushing to a real Gitea instance — with real CI, real code review, real permissions — produces work humans can actually review and ship. An agent pushing to a toy demo platform produces demos.
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## What we're not building
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We're not building a new IDE (Cursor and Claude Code exist). Not a new LLM (DeepSeek and Claude exist). Not a new cloud platform (AWS exists).
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We're building the layer that connects them. The git server that speaks agent. The coding agent that speaks Gitea. The game engine that speaks HTTP. Each fork is a bridge between an existing tool and the agentic future — not a replacement for either.
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The age of agents doesn't need more agents. It needs better platforms. Platforms that already exist as open-source projects. They just need someone to fork them and add the wiring.
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---
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*[Tinqs Studio](https://tinqs.com) is our Gitea fork, open for game teams. [Ariki](https://arikigame.com) is the game we're building with every tool described here.*
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