| ▲ | BryantD 2 hours ago |
| From the Anthropic announcement: “Source control for huge monorepos has prior art, notably Google’s Piper and Meta’s Sapling, so we were able to build Scion with their hard-won lessons in mind.” Mononoke is a component of Sapling, as I understand it. In fact, the repo link provided in this article links to a subdirectory of the Sapling repo. I’m not totally sure I understand the complaint. |
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| ▲ | WhitneyLand an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| If I credit my newly introduced car as inspired by Corvette, then sure, it might be ok not to mention the engine (Mononoke is the server part of Sapling) However if my new car's engine is a near copy of the one in the Corvette, and my announcement gushes about the engine using the same terms the Corvette design team invented... Then can you see how a mention might be nice? |
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| ▲ | sunshowers 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The level of inspiration goes well beyond "hard-won lessons". Something like Lore (slop design document aside) can claim that level of inspiration. Here the data model is a direct copy, down to the terminology. To be uncharitable, this is marketing for Anthropic's impending IPO. |
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| ▲ | whiplash451 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I see correlation instead. You IPO when you grow like crazy. You build something like scion when you grow like crazy. | | |
| ▲ | muglug 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And I think Not Invented Here has turned into Not Invented By Our Agents at many places. | | |
| ▲ | taneq 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Devil’s advocate: This could turn out to be a good thing for software security. If each company’s stack is home grown, there will still be vulnerabilities (probably even more of them) but they’ll be less portable compared to today’s monoculture where an exploit for a common component will work almost anywhere. |
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| ▲ | devin an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I remain unconvinced that they even need a new VCS to achieve what they want to. One has to wonder what the level of churn is at this number of PRs. | | |
| ▲ | tmp10423288442 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Who cares about your opinions about what number of PRs is right? They want to make more PRs (particularly to a monorepo), they need a new VCS. Even if they weren't making a lot of PRs, Github has been melting down enough this year that they've probably encouraged customers like Anthropic to move off. | | |
| ▲ | devin 33 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I was casting doubt on whether or not they need a new VCS to achieve their goal in the first place, not providing an opinion about the "right" number of PRs. Like most things coming out of these labs it's hard not to look at it as marketing. Their "changes merged per day" is absolutely meaningless unless you know the nature of those changes. I could make a graph like this by making tons of agent-based empty commits. That's not a problem that actually needs a solution, though. Furthermore, they _didn't even build a new VCS_, they copied one that existed and made a bunch of noise about it. | | |
| ▲ | Analemma_ 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | fwiw I've heard accounts that Google's source control is also creaking under the weight of AI code changes, and that there's already a new frontend to it with backend revisions on the way too. When GitHub and Google and Anthropic all simultaneously start buckling I think it's safe to say it's a real phenomenon and not marketing. | |
| ▲ | solenoid0937 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Did they make a bunch of noise about it, or did HN? This place loses its mind every time OpenAI or Anthropic posts a blog. | | |
| ▲ | SaucyWrong 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There is no distinction at this point. If you know your blogs always get picked up by HN, and they do know this, then you know your blog is a de facto and gratis marketing channel and will use it as such. |
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| ▲ | andai 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | more = better |
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| ▲ | dpe82 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Effectively nobody considering buying into the IPO cares about Anthropic's source control system. They could be passing around floppy disks and so long as they were still shipping nobody would care. | | |
| ▲ | henrymerrilees 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | That would arguably make it look worse. | |
| ▲ | cyphar an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not about the details but the marketing story is all about how "agents" are building so fast they need to design new infrastructure for the new world, etc. Extra points if you spin it as though the "agents" have built some new never-before-seen architecture that is clearly better than the "human scale" stuff. The intended audience is obvious from first paragraph alone: > At Anthropic, coding is no longer the bottleneck to building systems or doing research. Claude is able to autonomously iterate on research loops, micro-optimize complex programs, and build new services from the ground up at a speed and scale we haven’t seen before. The bottleneck, now, is all of the developer infrastructure built for human scale: source control, builds, and CI. Translation: > We are so far at the cutting edge we need to build shiny new infrastructure to replace the smelly "human scale" cruft. How could you /not/ value us at $2T? | | |
| ▲ | solenoid0937 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Both things can be true, they're scaling fast and it looks good for IPO. | | |
| ▲ | vhantz 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Scaling what exactly? Anthropic doesn't release any new products except models. I'm sure you don't need tens of thousands of pushes every day to train models. Scaling fast is so far just their words, nothing else indicates it. |
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| ▲ | solid_fuel an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Here the data model is a direct copy, down to the terminology. That’s not surprising to me - they designed and built it using their LLMs, of course it’s duplicating prior work. That’s essentially the core of what LLMs do, after all. | |
| ▲ | simonw an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why is that bad? Mononoke and Sapling are open source systems. Why shouldn't new software take inspiration from how they are designed? | | |
| ▲ | sunshowers an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | From my post: > And, to be clear, I do not have a problem with Anthropic copying Mononoke’s design. (This is part of why we put out open source — to benefit humanity through the spread of good ideas.) > But as LLMs continue to assist in designing new systems, they are likely to index heavily on existing designs. Mononoke is open source and in every LLM’s training set. If you ask Opus 5.5 or GPT-6 Astra (thanks Matthew Fowle) about prior art, they both immediately point out the similarities to Mononoke. > Giving credit to those that came before us is now easier — and more important — than ever. There is no longer an excuse. | | |
| ▲ | simonw an hour ago | parent [-] | | So you'd like Anthropic to update their announcement so it credits Mononoke in addition to crediting Sapling? Fair enough. | | |
| ▲ | sunshowers an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yes, and I would like it to explicitly say that their data model is very similar to Mononoke's, and avoid even the appearance of the idea that Claude came up with it de novo. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 37 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I didn't think that their article implied Claude had come up with the design. I thought it was likely that their team of 7 included ex-Meta and ex-Google people with knowledge of those company's internal version control solutions. |
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| ▲ | gorgoiler an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I saw RMS give a talk once on Free Software. He wore three quarter length cargo pants and sandals with no socks, and spent a good amount of the talk picking a scab off his shin to the point where he started bleeding. It got on his fingers. No one said anything. There are things in this world that people can and should be stopped from doing, and there which anyone can do unhindered if they so wish. In between those two boundaries there’s a standard of decent behavior that one should strive for in order to be considered a good person. Giving credit isn’t required, but many consider it basic decency. | | |
| ▲ | bmacho an hour ago | parent [-] | | Stallman famously ate something off his foot during a lecture, on camera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ OTOH I'm not seeing the problem with scraping a scab. I have hands, my attention is focused on something, then my hands will scrape where it itches (the scab). |
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| ▲ | LogicalRisk an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | "I built a thing in the style of X" (which is even more charitable than what Anthropic piece said) is different than "I incorporated X from Y to build a thing this way." |
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| ▲ | teaearlgraycold 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > hard-won lessons in mind Another Claude-written article |
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