Comment by BryantD
4 days 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.
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?
Sounds like they did get a mention
They didn’t mention Mononoke.
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It's called "clean room reverse engineering" /s
That's an interesting one.
If you take the statement: "Pretty much 100% of our code is written by Claude Code" (https://x.com/bcherny/status/2015979257038831967)
And you take the statement: "Mononoke is open source and in every LLM’s training set."
There is not much resemblance with any cleanroom implementation anymore.
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To me, this sounds like it's less about the technology, whether it's open source or not, and more about the people in the room that are influencing the design, direction, and implementation of it. All of which are very likely to have previous positions at major companies responsible for the products mentioned.
Perhaps if there is any ambiguity, it's intentional on the part of caution around intellectual property provenance.
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.
I see correlation instead. You IPO when you grow like crazy. You build something like scion when you grow like crazy.
And I think Not Invented Here has turned into Not Invented By Our Agents at many places.
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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.
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> 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.
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.
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?
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That would arguably make it look worse.
Why is that bad?
Mononoke and Sapling are open source systems. Why shouldn't new software take inspiration from how they are designed?
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.
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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.
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"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."
> hard-won lessons in mind
Another Claude-written article
Yea, hard-won, who talks like that... oy vey
> Another Claude-written article
This is the load-bearing seam.
It's not just obvious, it's evident.
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