Comment by sunshowers
4 days ago
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.
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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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.
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.
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more = better
> 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?
Both things can be true, they're scaling fast and it looks good for IPO.
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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.
So you'd like Anthropic to update their announcement so it credits Mononoke in addition to crediting Sapling?
Fair enough.
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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.
"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."