Why the Rust Rewrite of pre-commit (prek) Sparks Community Controversy

While browsing online I discovered a repository named prek described as “⚡ Better pre-commit, re‑engineered in Rust”. Since pre-commit is a widely used pre‑commit tool, any performance improvements are noteworthy.

The most intriguing part is that the original pre-commit author posted in the project's issue, initially offering cooperation, then claiming the project violated copyright (later fixed), and finally labeling it malicious, unethical, and plagiarized.

Below is a Google‑translated walkthrough of that discussion.

After an Airflow maintainer left a comment, the author gave the issue a heart and locked it, which seemed appropriate.

Link: https://github.com/j178/prek/issues/73

The situation resembles the uv‑vs‑pip story, but unlike pip—maintained by many volunteers— pre-commit feels like a personal project of Anthony Sottile, who, despite its open‑source license, retains full control. pre-commit.ci offers free service for open‑source projects but charges private repositories ( month ), startups (20 USD/month), and large organizations (100 USD/month), so a competitive alternative could affect its revenue.

Anthony Sottile is the author of pre-commit and a core developer of pytest‑dev, tox‑dev, and flake8, a PyCQA member, GitHub Star, and even a programming livestream YouTuber. My first encounter with him was through pre-commit.

My View

Unless the original author, Anthony Sottile, becomes more proactive and open‑hearted in advancing pre-commit‑rs, the threat from prek will keep growing. Currently, prek shows strong momentum.

I believe it can go far for several reasons:

Author Influence: The prek author is an active, influential open‑source contributor involved in projects such as encode/httpx, astral‑sh/uv, and astral‑sh/rye, earning long‑term community trust.

Heavyweight Endorsement: prek has received strong backing from notable contributors like Jarek Potiuk, an Apache Airflow PMC member, who is advocating a switch to prek in Airflow.

Community Image Difference: Compared with the original author’s “cold” style, prek ’s more receptive approach—evident in renaming from prefligit to prek —makes it more appealing.

Community Need: The community desires a Rust‑rewritten, actively driven alternative to break the current pre-commit status quo.

Unless Anthony Sottile makes a 180° shift, inviting external contributors to accelerate pre-commit‑rs and changing his community interaction style, this trend is unlikely to reverse in the short term. Overall, I remain optimistic about prek ’s future.

At the time of writing, the author also posted the discussion on V2EX and Twitter, drawing further attention.

v2ex

twitter

This part I won’t comment much—open‑source communities are naturally arenas for exchange, competition, and collaboration.