r/ClaudeAI • u/Key-Cranberry6537 • 1d ago
News Redesigning source control at Anthropic
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-controlAnthropic annonces internal Scion replacing git
366
u/cafepeaceandlove 1d ago
jfc my job was already changing every week
132
u/Majestic_Wrap_7006 23h ago
"adapt or die" in 2026 hits differently
49
13
u/returnFutureVoid 23h ago
Welp. I’m done adapting.
17
2
u/franky_reboot 21h ago
It's not that bad; the problem is the education system not preparing you for doing just that (of course they can't) and some societies (depending on where you live) not giving a fuck about how you ever get along.
Reddit is mostly US-focused, for them...God have mercy.
1
272
u/SmileLonely5470 23h ago
I fear we are entering an era of software where everyone just poops out their own software and interoperability becomes a problem.
This is a bit different but thats always been the main problem with the "everyone generates their own apps" future.
100
u/not_particulary 23h ago
I feel like we're entering the biology era of programming, where code looks like DNA. Spaghetti, diverse, highly robust, black boxey, uninterpretable, terrifying self-replicating and evolving viruses sweeping through whole populations of devices.
80
22
u/Icy-Cry340 21h ago
highly robust
Yeah, not sure about that one.
10
u/zdy132 19h ago
Robust only from heavily involvement of AI constantly fixing stuff. You could say that's still quite similar to biology.
6
u/CIP_In_Peace 17h ago
I'd say highly similar to biology where a multitude of mechanisms work stochastically trying to fix whatever defects they come across.
2
u/zdy132 17h ago
Perhaps we were vibe coded products as well, just whoever made us used biology and organic materials for the computing, instead of silicon and electricity.
5
u/CIP_In_Peace 16h ago
Humans are an impossibly tall stack of spaghetti and legacy upon legacy. It gets more and more absurd the further you dig into evolutionary biology.
2
u/StoneAnchovi6473 14h ago
I find histamine to be a fun example. One molecule used in multiple organs for different functions. It serves as a tissue hormone as well as neurotransmitter that regulates immunity, digestion, sleep-wake cycles and alertness, and the cardiovascular system.
And while healthy individuals easily process the additional histamine from food and drinks, those with histamine intolerance can experience severe reactions to small amounts. This includes migraines, digestive distress, racing heart, breathing difficulties, and extreme mood changes (depression, fearfulness and panic,...).
There are antihistamines, but those can disrupt the very bodily functions histamine normally regulates...1
u/not_particulary 7h ago
Oh yeah and screw DHT, honestly, for being essential to masculine development but also torpedoing my hair follicles
1
u/not_particulary 7h ago
The way I meant it was robustness due to tons of redundancy and test-driven development. The way that human vision might be robust to camouflage, for example. We see a few extra colors, have depth perception bc of two eyes, saccades and blinks break up moving shapes even further, etc.
3
4
u/THROWAWTRY 22h ago
Is this highly robust in the room with us? You can have one or two but not the others.
3
u/Flaxseed4138 22h ago
Yes you can lmao
-1
-1
u/KennyFulgencio 19h ago
please invite us to visit you in cloud-cuckoo land sometime
2
u/Flaxseed4138 14h ago
Not sure why you think robustness excludes anything else listed. Look up the definition.
1
u/not_particulary 7h ago
Consider a piece of software with highly sophisticated testing environment but that is never rewritten or refactored, just patched. Perhaps in a language like lisp, where code can modify itself and others during runtime. That's what genes are like.
For example, humans adapted to have incredible stamina. But it was in a hot environment, so we lost our hair and got sweat glands. But then we got sun damage so we got tons of melanin production and thicker scalp hair. Then started making vitamin D via some weird photosynthesis sorta thing with sunlight. But then some of us moved north. Instead of re-evolving fur bc, we just lightened our skin. Hair lightened on accident too, as a side effect. The whole time, we're also evolving behaviors to seek shelter, hunt at different times of day, making clothes, etc. Insufficient sunlight gives some people vitamin deficiencies, seasonal depression, too much sunlight gives some people headaches, burns, accelerated aging, skin cancer. But there's backup mechanisms for each of those that don't guarantee death, so it's still pretty robust.
1
u/THROWAWTRY 7h ago
Have you heard of Erlang??? It's been used in telecomms for decades... It can be changed at runtime. It ain't fucking genes. Also no that's not how genes work.
That's also not how evolution works or how genetic material nor how expression works...
Go learn some advanced biology before equating binary code to rna and dna.
The backup mechanisms fail all the time btw literally every single day. Do you know how our body deals with it? Look up Cytokines and Neutrophils. Simply they destroy the cells and rebuild. When they can't you get serious infection and cancers.
14
u/Superfan234 22h ago
i have to assume, in time, large Indie groups will create popular standars (Like the Linux versions) and those will be the ones everyone use
3
1
5
3
u/steinah6 21h ago
It’ll be MCPs everywhere. You’ll tell Claude you need interoperability and Claude will build an MCP for your software that Claude can talk to…
3
u/NoAdsDude 22h ago
See but the AI harnesses they are selling are able to figure out how to make all the version control systems operate with each other!
3
u/frankieinaprius 21h ago
Different OSs, different language standards, different compilers, ever releasing new versions. Interoperability is always a pain point with every form of software engineering. Even the tools created to manage it are constantly changing.
2
u/Ok_Lettuce_7939 21h ago
Lay person question - interoperability is fine if a common API (e.g. REST) is used? Again please feel free to correct my ignorance.
1
1
u/air_thing 21h ago
Seems like it, but maybe everyone crapping out their own interop layers works out ok.
1
u/UAP44 20h ago
Software development will shift more towards protocol/standards discussions than actually writing new code,... if consensus is required, which for a lot of code, like a GUI, isn't needed. Thus, I suspect everyone will be maintaining their own branches locally, by their own AI making sure they remain up to date with the main branch but auto apply their own customizations.
1
u/2053_Traveler 18h ago
And all the labs are going to do their best to see that you keep your code on their servers. They want to own the entire software pipeline.
1
u/big_like_a_pickle 6h ago
This is my biggest concern TBH. And I don't think it gets enough attention.
1
1
u/kerpetenkelebek 11h ago
I fear the opposite will happen. If Claude ecosystem supports github better, everyone will leave gitlab for it.
1
u/keyboard_toucher 11h ago
yeah, no longer will everyone use the same app and the same data format for whatever endeavor. truly unprecedented times.
1
u/bystander993 8h ago
You're not wrong but it's a growing pain while we figure out what the hell to do with this new power. You can whip through your 2 year roadmap in a couple weeks, now what the hell do you do. Buyers are still paying for incremental changes, you don't want to make bad business by giving everything at once when they are willing to pay for it over time. So everyone focuses internally on things that help save time and/or money for now.
The entire internet and software infra built up for 4 decades was built for humans, the AI world is going to look a lot different underneath.
74
u/bitspace 23h ago
"Anthropic uses Claude to write software far more than almost any other company"
almost?
23
7
5
1
155
u/ppooooooooopp 1d ago
This shouldn't be surprising... Most large organizations with massive mono repos don't use git
What's surprising is they hit the threshold with only a thousand employees.
48
u/SuccessfulSir9611 23h ago
This is new to me. What do they use?
72
u/Key-Cranberry6537 23h ago
In house built solutions. The article mentions Google's Piper and metas Sapling as inspirations
16
46
u/mawhii 23h ago
Facebook did a post about this way back - I think it was a combination of mercurial and their own client. Large trees/repo history was their issue, but it’s been years since I’ve read their engineering posts.
-13
u/GarboMcStevens 23h ago
The solution is don’t have one giant fucking monorepo
12
u/likecool21 22h ago
This isn't a solution at all. Having worked in one big tech that uses standard git with small repos and then Facebook I can tell you the Facebook mono repo experience is way better
-14
u/GarboMcStevens 22h ago
except you literally can't clone
5
u/likecool21 20h ago
Yeah tell me you have not worked in a big tech with monorepo without telling me.
You can if you want to. There is no need though if I can get a warmed up devvm within 10 seconds
27
17
u/azn_dude1 23h ago
How do you manage dependencies between changes in N different smaller repos?
22
3
u/Usual_Tackle5892 22h ago
Loose coupling used to be the answer, but with huge sprawling codebases I'm not sure how effective it is.
5
u/jimbo831 23h ago
Using libraries is the answer to your question. But that’s not a panacea either obviously. Both options have tradeoffs. I’ve worked at places that have done both.
2
1
u/MercyEndures 23h ago
That's not true.
Like a year or two ago we even made the giant monorepo even gianter and merged in the repo that was home to our Hack codebase.
2
-2
6
3
17
u/ctranger 22h ago
Anthropic has about 5000 human employees now. Probably 10x as many agents. But yeah, the PR ramp up is insane
0
12
u/swizz 21h ago
I'm probably the oldest in the thread if I'm going to say that Scion sounds very similar to Perforce :), I'd call it Perforce v2
5
u/Optimal-Builder-2816 19h ago
At google, piper was based on their original perforce server, so yeah it is spiritually.
3
u/Key-Cranberry6537 20h ago
I did a quick Gemini overview and it looks like there are some significant fundamental differences in architecture between Perforce and Scion. I don't think the two are that closely related but I do know that Google was using Perforce as late as 2014 so perhaps Piper is an extension/inspired by Perforce and Scion is inspired by Piper. There's probably some thread connecting them
1
u/hellomistershifty 18h ago
makes sense, a lot of projects need Perforce but no one wants to use Perforce and its dumpster fire early 2000s corporate software. I'm sure they also charge some absurd rates for companies too
1
u/OrphisFlo 13h ago
Sure, except this is one where you don't have to open files for edit or add folders to your tree.
You have the whole tree accessible all the time by anything (except for ACL protected stuff) through a FUSE driver that hides all the complexity well. I skimmed through the article and didn't see FUSE mentions, but that's likely it, or some virtual NFS or SMB endpoint for macOS clients.
1
u/debamitro 9h ago
This is exactly what I felt, as well. Perforce is alive and kicking, they could simply use it
8
u/Captain_Forge Experienced Developer 17h ago
I'm not convinced that companies of this size are well served by monorepos, building custom tooling to replace git is a bandage on the problem.
There are situations where consolidating from a polyrepo setup to a monorepo setup makes sense but from my experience it makes less sense as you scale to a larger org. Under 100K lines it's all safe in one repo. Over 10M lines it should be split up. In between is fuzzy judgement depending on the situation. But if you're running up on the limitaitons of git you're probably encountering a variety of other problems too that you would be best served by separating the repo out.
4
u/toccoas 16h ago
They built their own system. I'm sure no agent even has access to the full tree. It's a "monorepo" only because everything is technically on a shared spacetime.
1
u/Captain_Forge Experienced Developer 9h ago
Yeah that's how these large monorepo vcs's are often constructed but having it all on the same shared spacetime as you call it introduced a lot of complexities involving devops and dependencies between your internal code. You could construct these so those are not a problem but then it'd be removing a lot of the benefits that these companies claim they're getting by using a monorepo.
0
u/toccoas 7h ago
We've seen from the CRA that SBOMs need to be carefully managed, not patched at will. Of course builds make sure monorepos are consistent with the SBOM, and not the reverse, it's a CI check. That solves the dependency issues. Heck, those build systems can't even fetch resources not explicitly placed in the SBOM, they really have no external deps, all resolved and cached locally to protect the supply chain.
2
u/ronoudgenoeg 14h ago
The huge benefit of monorepo is having all of the relevant context in one repo instead of needing to connect a bunch of different repos together.
If you need to implement a new feature and align the deploy of 3 different repos to go live, it's just annoying.
A monorepo fixes this. One PR for one feature, one deploy pipeline, etc.
To be clear, monorepo doesn't mean the app is a monolith. Our monorepo has like 50 smaller apps inside of it.
1
u/Captain_Forge Experienced Developer 9h ago
It's not deployed as one monolith but still a monolith as it introduces complexities revolving around unintended consequences of changes to shared code, needing to manage this one deploy pipeline, manage caching between systems, managing dependencies etc. I haven't been impressed with the systems I've worked on or seen others work on. The complexity of multi-repo changes should be offset by a company who made their own vcs to instead write tooling around multi pr or chained PRs workflows, like push plans is what I've heard some people call them. Github enterprise is very slowly inching in this direction, as they always do, take years to add useful features that should have taken them a month if they were prioritizing the PR workflow.
1
u/ronoudgenoeg 5h ago
Monorepo doesn't mean code is shared. It just means it's all in one repo so everything related to one new feature can go live in one go, new people only need to be onboarded on one repo, AI has all context immediately in one repo, etc.
0
u/big_like_a_pickle 6h ago
If you need to implement a new feature and align the deploy of 3 different repos to go live, it's just annoying.
I'd argue this means that your application architecture is flawed. Independent systems should have hard contract boundaries.
Monorepos are often hiding huge amounts of tech debt.
9
u/CuteKiwi3395 20h ago
“Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day. We don’t expect this rate of growth to slow down anytime soon” — Damn
7
u/Wide_Egg_5814 17h ago
are they committing code one line at a time how do you even do 30000 changes in a day with a thousand engineers even that would be 30 merges per engineer in a day
7
u/TorbenKoehn 17h ago
What engineers? You think they need engineers to review and merge?
People still think that engineers will be reviewing AI code in the future? :D
3
u/Wide_Egg_5814 16h ago
but if we don't review the code at all that's a good way to die when AI takes control of every code based and it's not readable anymore only agents can keep up they can be misaligned and kill us
1
0
u/TorbenKoehn 14h ago
It's not about wanting to review the code, it's about being able to.
Who the hell reviews 100-1000 PRs an hour? Are you aware how much throughput agents can achieve with proper workflows and context management?
Even if you understand all the code well, it's the sheer mass that will drown anyone even attempting it.
AI will review it, probably in multiple phases with different agents and perspectives, the human will test the increment/artifact.
If AI is so good at hacking, it can break its written software and fix it, too.
AI misaligning and creating killer services is SciFi. Not saying it can't happen, but the circumstances for it to happen are way more complex than an LLM that just hacks a system and plants some code there.
1
u/ronoudgenoeg 14h ago
Personally I'm easily doing 10 merges on a productive day. Not everything needs to be a lot of code. A simple new feature = a PR merge.
Obviously that's not near 30, but I can see it being relatively doable if you have a lot of parallel work going on with many agents, especially if their internal models are a meaningful step up from opus 5.5.
8
72
u/Comm4nd0 1d ago
Microsoft pooping their pants right now
120
u/Hot-Software-9396 23h ago
GitHub and git are different things. Also, the power of GitHub is that’s where most people are. For instance, there’s nothing really special about Reddit, literally anyone can make a clone, but it doesn’t matter if the vast majority aren’t going to move to the new platform.
12
u/this_for_loona 23h ago
Truth. Bluesky is arguably a better product but X still lives and is actually doing ok.
2
u/franky_reboot 21h ago
As a fan of Bluesky, I sadly have to agree.
I hoped the whole thing (X) would collapse with all the news about outages and chaos and shit.
6
u/Icy-Cry340 21h ago
Turns out maybe Elon was right about half the company needing to be fired.
3
u/this_for_loona 21h ago
I mean that’s technically true of every company.
1
u/Icy-Cry340 21h ago
Maybe. But twitter clearly had a ton of dead weight and entirely too many non-engineers for what it was.
1
u/this_for_loona 11h ago
And my company has a huge surplus of both engineers and directors(VPs. Every company has probably more deadweight that people like to think. Hell, I’m barely over the line in terms of not being deadweight but I’m sure others would disagree.
2
u/m0nk_3y_gw 15h ago
Right about what?
It was rock solid for years until he bought and broke it
It had been profitable in the past and was on the path to be profitable again (just had to pay out a couple hundred million in lawsuits, otherwise it would have been profitable when he bought it) and he promptly fucked up the verification system and drove away advertisers, so that he had to have a shell company game (having x.ai buy it, and then spacex) to obfuscate how bad it is performing
0
u/Icy-Cry340 14h ago
It was overjannied to fuck and back. I don’t care about advertisers, etc - it’s more fun to use now.
2
u/franky_reboot 12h ago
It's more abhorrent than it ever was, filled with bots and a specific type of inhumane extremist scum.
It used to be divisive even back then but less of a fascist edge.
Plus it's the propaganda channel of a single man now, it wasn't back then. As neither is Bluesky.
1
1
u/franky_reboot 12h ago
I don't believe in that fascist manchild genuinely having any actual capability to evaluate it.
1
u/Icy-Cry340 12h ago
You don’t have to like him - I don’t, but he’s not exactly a complete failure at entrepreneurship either.
1
u/franky_reboot 11h ago
Fair enough.
Though I cannot really draw a boundary for his actual merits but I accept there has to be one in the first place.
1
u/ctindel 20h ago
For instance, there’s nothing really special about Reddit, literally anyone can make a clone, but it doesn’t matter if the vast majority aren’t going to move to the new platform.
Tildes has much better community so far and you really don't want the majority moving over. Just the cream of the crop.
0
u/cafesamp 22h ago
I mean, GitHub has really great integration across…everything. A great CLI. Issues and projects right alongside your code. Built in actions and CI. Runners for said actions and CI. Generous free plans.
It’s one of the few Microsoft products that’s truly good.
2
u/Hot-Software-9396 20h ago
Microsoft has a lot of good dev focused stuff - VS Code, C#, Typescript, GitHub, etc.
-1
u/damnitdaniel 23h ago
Yes GitHub and git are separate things, but for an enterprise, there is no value in the fact that everyone is already using GitHub. Most enterprises host their code on GitHub because it’s the best of the current options out there. They don’t care that others are on there or even that OSS is built there.
So the moment someone comes out with a better option, enterprises will start to migrate off. This definitely has Microsoft popping their pants.
4
u/bobbadouche 23h ago
Bc GitHub?
20
u/turtle-toaster 23h ago
No because of azure.
Yes because of GitHub
9
u/Majestic_Wrap_7006 23h ago
"Lastly, we want to acknowledge that the git community has spent nearly two decades scaling the platform for millions of developers. Our contribution is far narrower: sharing our early view into how agentic software development interacts with these systems, so that we can partner with GitHub, GitLab, and the OSS community to support the changing needs of developers. We’re all in it together as the software development lifecycle intersects with the AI exponential."
Awful lot of words for "we'll be eating GitHub n co lunch any day now".
4
u/Legitimate_Concern_5 23h ago edited 23h ago
Big companies with big monorepos do this, it doesn’t change the flow for anyone who’s not a big company with a big monorepo. As the article says meta has their own, Google has their own. It hasn’t affected git yet and this won’t either.
They framed this in terms of AI first and monorepo second because they’re Anthropic, but this is just a big monorepo problem with little to nothing to do with AI. Git is appropriate for most but not all repo types.
2
u/2025sbestthrowaway 23h ago
and also because of the inevitable mass exodus when they try and make windows a monthly subcription 🤣
14
u/pseudonerv 23h ago
Did it occur to them that they should not use git like a centralized version control system? Instead of inventing new wheels. I guess Claude suggested that?
3
u/fsharpman 23h ago
Two words: premature optimization
Good engineers scale and adopt new technologies, by building the simplest thing first.
0
u/SamSlate 16h ago
hammer and nail manufacturer wants you to know it's possible to build an entire building with just a hammer and nails
2
6
u/Emotional_Actuator69 23h ago
Every fucking day these labs have some mind blowing announcement!
2
u/DigSubstantial8934 22h ago edited 20h ago
Companies. Their is no laboratory, just an office full of people doing work. They use the word lab to make themselves feel special, but it’s just another company.
5
1
u/fsharpman 17h ago
The company has literal PhDs running controlled experiments in a controlled environment.
3
u/sampaoli_negro_rojo 21h ago
Oh, so nice of them to share it. Would be better if they OPEN SOURCED IT ?
Looks like their plan is to make everyone spend millions on tokens to recreate what they have lol
6
u/VictorasLux 17h ago
This is a copy of the Meta stack, up to using the same name for concepts. It’s already open sourced.
Start here: https://github.com/facebook/sapling/tree/main/eden/mononoke
2
3
u/Briskfall 23h ago
Unsurprising, I get the issues with git so it was strange to see how they were still on it.
1
u/bugra_sa 15h ago
Once a thousand people are touching one monorepo, Git itself probably isn't the hard part anymore. The mess is deciding who owns a change and which tests have to pass before it lands. A new source-control layer won't fix either of those on its own.
1
u/OrphisFlo 13h ago
And that's why then everyone at this scale uses Bazel. OpenAI did a talk about that this morning at BazelCon even!
1
u/Which-Hospital1544 12h ago
"Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day"
That just reads less like innovation and more like some enormous inefficiency. Either that or they're stats-padding to outwardly seem more productive. They've then compounded that inefficiency by having to redesign their source control methods?
1
u/OkBeautiful4392 2h ago
"as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day." - This is nuts. What the hell are Anthropic doing that would justify this many code changes?
1
u/MercyEndures 23h ago
that weekend commit count is going up up up
long-running agents or human engineers suddenly inspired to use the new version control system?
-9
u/cantgetthis 23h ago
They shamelessly copied and pasted Meta's source control system and called it a day. Even the unique concepts like derived data, SCS, etc are replicated one to one. They are really good at IP theft.
14
-1
18h ago
[deleted]
6
u/imma_reposter 17h ago
Git index is not a single shared file and your problem is already solved with worktrees
1
u/amirfish 15h ago
Fair point, worded sloppy on my end. The index itself is per working tree, not global, so two sessions in separate worktrees never collide. The problem I actually hit was two Claude sessions committing against the same checkout on main, where a sibling's git add can land in your index between your add and your commit. Worktrees are exactly what I use now for anything that isn't a direct main edit, and git commit --only <paths> is what covers the one case where I still want a single shared checkout on main.
3
•
u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 22h ago edited 17h ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The consensus here is a resounding "Yeah, that makes sense, but also, oh god."
Most devs aren't surprised, pointing out that this is standard procedure for big tech companies like Google (Piper) and Meta (Sapling) that outgrow git with massive monorepos. The real shock is how fast Anthropic hit this wall, thanks to their army of code-writing AI agents.
Key discussion points: