The company is predominantly FAANG people. They’re going to just rebuild what they know. I don’t think you need any kind of conspiracy here. One year into ad tech and everyone was using HyperLogLog. Everyone was using 20 years ago LMAX-style disruptor, and single threaded event queue powered by loop called governor. It’s just what happens. People carry in their head what they know.

IP maximalism is the present zeitgeist but that’s just how knowledge flows.

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sunshowers 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Help me understand. When you write a post about designing a system, do you not do some basic diligence about what existing systems you resemble?

Open source is not IP maximalist by any means. I am merely asking that the appropriate credit be provided.

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arjie 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No. I actually don’t do that and I don’t think that all human work should be O(n) deduplication gated.

Written about it here before: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-09-08/Intellectual...

It isn’t something I care very much about, except when it’s used as a certificate of achievement. I almost never do literature searches with an attempt to dedupe. I only ever do it to see if someone has explored something better than I have. That’s often the case but other times it is not.

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hyperpape 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If they knew it from working at Meta, it wouldn't be O(n), it would be O(1).

I agree that there will be cases where you implement tricks that others have had before you, without knowing. A few years ago, I had a delightful idea, experimented and wrote it up. One commenter directed me to a post that described it as "folk knowledge". There will be other cases where you encountered an idea before, but didn't remember it.

Still, crediting what you can easily know you cited is good. Even aside from credit, comparisons to existing systems are part of how we understand what a system does.

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sunshowers 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Okay, well, I actually do think it is part of the basic duty of an engineer to do that.

	▲	gavinray 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I do, solely on the basis of "there are a lot of smart(er) people in the world, and very few truly novel problems". The first step in approaching anything difficult is seeing whether someone else has already solved it.
	▲	arjie 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I see. Well, I suppose we differ on this matter of opinion. May the chips land where they may.

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zamalek 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What happened is that it wasn't a FAANG engineer replicating what they know, rather one asked Claude what to do and it told them to replicate what it knew.

That's how the knowledge that it was a facsimile was lost.

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kccqzy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Absolutely not. When I create projects I only credit other existing systems if they are a direct inspiration. If I independently come up with the same idea as someone else I see no reason for me to do the due diligence and credit them.

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sunshowers 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Okay, well, in this case (even accepting your argument) I've been told there is direct overlap in contributors so there is no feasible way they couldn't have known.

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mycoliza an hour ago | parent [-]

Oh, is that why they only listed the initials of the contributors in their blog post? The plot thickens!

	▲	simonw 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's a pretty weird detail of this. Anthropic don't usually do that - other posts have named the contributors in full, for example: - https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-... - https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/how-we-contain-claude

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cmrdporcupine 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Rebuilding what you know from the previous FAANG you worked at is expected on the whole.

What is douchey is presenting the whole thing as some sort of intense novelty and stroke of genius required in the age of agents when it's just doing what the other BigCo companies did to scale their monorepos already. Like a decade ago.

The reality it is when I first read the thing I was -- as a Xoogler -- like "Oh, yeah, so, like Piper & SrcFs and the stuff that Meta also does" and really didn't understand why they wouldn't have started with something off the shelf inside of vibe-conjuring a clone that they would then have to support

To me it speaks ill, again, of the engineering culture at Anthropic. "We do these things not because they are useful, but because they are novel."

Don't they have better things to do at Anthropic than building their own source control or rewriting Bun from scratch in another language? Like, y'know, basic site reliability? Or a coding harness that doesn't eat multiple GB of RAM?

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simonw 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

Which off the shelf solution would you have used?

Google's isn't open source. Meta's is an option, any others you would consider?

	▲	cmrdporcupine 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well, sure, the article here and Meta's, etc. Even Google started with Perforce originally and only forked/rebuilt when it stopped being able to scale. And did so in a very incremental fashion.