In response to the question of how this is different than Lifty, giter8 creator Nathan Hamblen writes:

Lifty is an sbt processor, meaning it runs inside of sbt itself. You can't run sbt or any processor until you have a project to run it in. Giter8 addresses step 1 of sbt project creation. You could use giter8 create a Lift project, then run Lifty inside it for fine tuning. You can also use giter8 to produce things that are not sbt projects at all.