Redesigning source control at Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073633 (996 comments)

Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694 (149 comments)

Hi! I am the original author of the blog post and wanted to clear the air a bit here.

We credited Sapling because that's how Meta itself externally refers to the entire system, including the Mononoke server, and we wanted to follow that convention. We will add an additional footnote to clarify this. [edit: this is done]

We were inspired by many things while building Scion, such as the great ideas in Mononoke's Bonsai data model, and didn't intend to obfuscate that in any way. We were also inspired heavily by https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/03/04/turning-the-database..., for example, which also describes the "derived data" concept using the same words.

We also did not just tell Claude to build us a version control system; we did a lot of research on what would work and not work for our use case and coming from an existing large Git repo (rather than Mercurial, as Mononoke did) required many novelties beyond some of these data structures.

The intent was to give credit to Mononoke without getting too deep in the weeds of comparing and contrasting each point of the data model where we diverged. There are many ex-Meta employees at Anthropic who were inspired by how joyful using source control was because of Mononoke, which deserves a lot of credit to you and the source control team there. We had that experience as a north star from the beginning while making decisions that map to our (different) needs.

> my default assumption now is that Anthropic’s public engineering presentations are largely bad-faith ripoffs. That’s a shame.

Couldn't agree more.

I got nervous when the company claiming to be working on the most impactful technology in human history takes time away to instead brag about writing a slightly more efficient version control system.

The fact that they didn't actually build the side project themselves, and ripped it off from someone else also calls into question their good faith mission to shepherd humanity into a new era...

> Even the name “Scion” reverses the syllables of “Bonsai” and drops the “B”! This might be a coincidence, or might not.

huh

Recent and related:

Redesigning source control at Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073633 (996 comments)

Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694 (149 comments)

Picasso apocryphally said "good artists copy, great artists steal"

> Imagine how they must feel about their work being deliberately copied wholesale and intentionally presented as someone else’s.

Nobody copies from a mid-tier product.

As someone who worked in open source till recently, I've seen a copycat as validation that my idea was better than what they could come up with on their own.

All those people now have evidence that their approach is the best for an AI native future.

The interesting point is that there is overlap in personnel, so this is less of copied homework, more that Anthropic hired some good people who knew a good solution that worked.

But from a pure AI lens, this is what we're doing - putting great ideas into one system and now everyone can drink from that well.

The bad part is that the well has a coin meter next to it, rather than it being a commons. So the fruits of that is not distributed to the people who planted those seeds. This is also happening too fast that the people whose work is getting redistributed to others are still not done being compensated for their work.

> “Our LLM built this thing, productionized it, and dealt with all the attendant challenges over 5 months” is a significantly more compelling narrative than “the source control team at Meta had spent 10 years building and productionizing this system, and we were able to point our LLM at it and rebuild it in 5 months”.

This is, unfortunately, the largest underpinning issue with a lot of software currently being released from AI-heavy engineering workflows. Even if it wasn't done explicitly, (almost) everything modern LLMs spit out is built on top of decades of prior failures by humans; even if something is "novel", it's trivially easy for the LLM to start with excluding all the paths that failed before (that humans were generous enough to share freely)

tldr; almost everything these days is a copy, even if we don't know what it's a copy of (yet).

The entire thing is beyond confusing. So Anthropic refers to an open-sourced project and credit it in the original article.

I don't know how the author is pissed off. Only thing the author aware is Claude agents researched Mononoke solution, then it claims a closed source repo is a plagiarism case.

I don't get it, and I'm seeing more and more cope here.

Every ducking time I hear Anthropic or OpenAI did some great engineering it either turns out to be shit (c compiler) or stolen (this). Bravo! LLMs are such a marvelous technology, but being developed by such dushbags that I suddenly root for Meta. Disgusting.

How do you feel about the adobe cloned products?

That totally sucks. Thanks for providing more details.

Makes you wonder about the mathematicians who are also saying similar things.

Related:

Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694

It's well known that AI companies shamelessly steal whatever to drum up hype for their company. From their perspective you the problem for trying to stop their hype train.

Although I'm totally on board of the high-level points,

> This remains yet another shameful example of large AI companies appropriating the commons and presenting others’ work as their own.

If you work at Meta which is, you know, one of large (aspiring) AI companies, a bit of self awareness might help boost your credibility a bit more.

An employee at one of the worst companies in human history (META)--whose modus operandi is to destroy the social commons--complains that another of the modern era's potentially worst companies (Anthropic is, after all, offering a 10% chance of human annihilation) stole its data/code/something without proper attribution.

Rhymes with when Anthropic and OpenAI were mad that folks were distilling their models after Anthropic and OpenAI violated every intellectual property law they possibly could to build said models.

How does Anthropic justify blatantly ripping off another company's work like this, especially without credit, then keep on whining about "distillation" when they suspect anyone else is merely using the output of their LLM in ways they don't like.

The other interesting part of this is the amount of time and effort it took Anthropic to do this, despite the fact that they were just copying an existing design - 5 months and (from another thread) 7 humans... Why couldn't one of their coding models/agents have done this by itself given the detailed specification? It's understandable that an LLM can't design a system like this by itself, but a bit surprising that even given the design is apparently can't code it up by itself either (else why did it take 5 months!).

The Anthropic article [1] has author names as initials or first names,and I thought it was to prevent talent pouching, but now other possible intentions come to my mind...

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-con...

Honestly I think this is a really bad look and sour grapes from the OP. Sapling is GPL. You open sourced it. What does “rip off” mean here?

If you think the license was breached and code was copied, that’s one thing.

But claiming ownership over an abstract idea in a project you open sourced seems epistemically confused to me. You don’t get to do that, there is no obligation from anyone to credit what OSS projects they drew inspiration from, as long as they comply with the license.

Having said that it’s nice to give credit to your inspirations, and Anthropic very clearly did:

> 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

This is just needless drama, nobody at Anthropic did anything wrong here.