Part of Anthropic's Claude Evolution · 12 stories · since Sep 23 · newest 21m ago
Anthropic builds Scion, a git replacement, as Claude pushes merges to 30K per dayAnthropic publishes technical details of Scion architecture
1 Today 11:49 AM · 11h ago · 2 articles · 1 post · 14 comments · 2 sources · development 1 of 1
Anthropic released a blog post describing Scion's design and why git—which stores 100 GB of history and 25 GB of compressed code in their monorepo—became impractical. The post notes Claude rewrote the ingestion pipeline to be 20x more memory-efficient and 4x faster with no further instruction.
“Claude's ability to write code was both what put us in this situation in the first place and how we were able to quickly build a high-quality, scalable system to deal with it.”
AnthropicAnthropic AI companyClaude AI coding assistant
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Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 2 claims were published in its stretch
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5 outlets Redesigning source control at Anthropic (via) Interesting piece from Anthropic describing …
first by Simon Willison's Weblog, 8h ago · also The Register, Simon Willison, HN Best, HN Frontpage
2 more headlines
- Anthropic reinvents source control as Claude floods the world with code The Register · 4h ago
- Redesigning source control at Anthropic Simon Willison · 4h ago
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first by Anthropic, 8h ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 54 · verbatim
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Anthropic, of course, is not just riding down the vibe bobsled, they have rocket packs attached to the bobsled, careening at record speed https://www. anthropic.com/engineering/rede signing-source-control
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Many parts of the Git distributed version control are the results of good decision made. Anthropic source control team just think that their trade-offs needs are vastly different from other businesses. They said these too:1. they have no-cap token spend allowance internally2. their agent swarms are amongst the largest if not the largest, again…
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“In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day.” 12x growth in just 4 months. This explains why GitHub keeps breaking.
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At least they admit they're the reason Github is breaking. 30.000 LLM-sized commits to a single repo every day with agents hammering git blame as well, my god. I don't want to know what kind of useless onslaught the Github infrastructure has to withstand in total. https://www. anthropic.com/engineering/rede signing-source-control Of course they're…
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The Scion project seems like a great example of identifying and addressing scaling issues (just in time, it seems). Just 7 engineers! It makes me think I'd pay Anthropic $300K/year to work on such problems.But it's a sad example, for open-source and for small engineering companies. Instead of infrastructure being more easily shared with the…
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Anthropic now states that Claude can code better than its engineers but humans are still valuable primarily to tell Claude “no.” This was shared as part of their post about a small team building a replacement for git in five months. https://www. anthropic.com/engineering/rede signing-source-control
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> As our monorepo grows, it increasingly doesn’t fit that design space. The history of our main branch alone is almost 100 GBThe first thing that hits me is, did you consider not going all in on a monorepo? I know it has been the trend in general, but it seems a bit of a red flag when you go from "let's have a monorepo it will make merging easier"…
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Any startup that hires enough ex-Googlers ends up with an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Google infra https://www. anthropic.com/engineering/rede signing-source-control
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My favorite part about this is it's all about the bottlenecks.Anthropic says 12x daily merged changes, and its Git-based infrastructure started straining. I've seen that even locally git trying to keep up and having to shift how i commit in parallel.If agent workloads grow to 20x or 50x today's levels, I think we'll keep finding bottlenecks across…
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This is interesting from the perspective of scale (because Claude is pumping out massive volume of code). I am still lacking semantic re-invention of source control for agentic era. As others have pointed out - what is the point of human source control in the era where it's just agents building things. We may need to rethink this completely - in…
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I have a theory (loosely held, it's just an idea, not a belief) that this could lead to something I call Evolutionary Architecture. That instead of waiting for vulnerabilities to be discovered in code, that systems could end up with code being changed and re-implemented by agents so fast that attacks aren't able to probe for attacks because they…
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> Earlier in the year, we had largely handwritten the first version of the git-to-Scion ingestion pipeline as a prototype. We thought it was good—until we got our hands on an early internal snapshot of Claude Mythos Preview. We asked it to rewrite the whole thing, and with no further instructions, it produced a version that consumed 20x less…
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You’d expect that while the frontier of changes fans out and grows, some of them burn out and disappear and some of them survive and solidify into a relatively static code base.The big baddies of build have worked this way for a long time already. Git surfaces a single Merkle tree id for the whole repo on each commit, but build tools like…
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My first real job was at Oracle. At the time Oracle started to write their own source control system (and move off of clearcase, which was a very reasonable thing to do).The guy who ran that project called it his "$LASTNAME law" that every large company will at some point write their own source control system.I laughed.About a year later I went to…
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Agents use source control, too. It's a pretty important part of the development process to understand how code has changed.For example, you can imagine, at the extreme, that agents could get caught in code change loops: a code change seems appropriate, it is implemented, it turns out there's some external factor which makes it not appropriate, the…
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What is are the benefits of supporting extremely high churn rate in version control? What is the code doing? What problems are being solved? Are changing requirements the driving factor, and if so, why are requirement changes accelerating?> ..., the latent demand for merging code is practically infinite, and every bottleneck we remove immediately…
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Excuse me for throwing up this stupid idea, but if code changes per unit of time keep growing at this rate and are not slowing down with infinite merging demand, it seems that this repo will be in a constant state of continuous change and we constantly roll forward with automated code and obviously no direct human supervision, then why even have…
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Reading this post put me in a similar head space.I believe you're mostly thinking of version history though. There’s plenty of other reasons to have source control we still need, like guarding against racing writes or continuous integration to ensure correctness. Even some industries require version history for compliance reasons.I do love how AI…
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Every now and then I like to browse the claude code release notes just to get a sense of the number of changes in that product over time. There's little choice but to simply count bullet points if you want to try to quantify it, but it's interesting how that count over time compares with the charts in this article:
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This is interesting to me, as I was thinking of adding a Git server to my AI orchestrator when I eventually need to split agent containers off of the main machine (to make agent CPU horizontally scalable).Maybe I should just bite the bullet and use a different VCS system entirely once I get there, which has most of the Anthropic system's…
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I find their "What we learned building Scion" subsection even more fascinating than the technical details.>Very often, we found that the role of the engineers was to tell Claude “no.” Agents will sometimes violate core system constraints to satisfy a pattern that should never have been allowed in the first place.Glad to hear from Anthropic their…
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Is it normal that peoples' last names are abbreviated in the Acknowledgments?!?>Written by Nick G. and the source control team: S.G., R.K., Dan C., Garrett H., Ben L., Colin M., Joe P. We’re grateful to Vilas J. and Sergiu D. for supporting the source control team on this ambitious journey and Amir O. for early contributions to Antique.Are…
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This article doesn't do a very good job of convincing me that git is technically incapable of handling the described workload. There are a lot of steps between vanilla git and building your own VCS from zero.If I was an investor I would be on the phone with Dario asking why we are wasting engineering talent on reinventing source control and…
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Not to downplay Anthropic's engineering work here, but I suspect we'll see a lot more reinvention of the wheel, even at smaller startups, as AI makes writing code significantly cheaper.The tradeoff between building something custom and adapting an existing solution is changing. Whether maintaining all that custom software turns out to be equally…
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