Comment by devin
4 days ago
I was casting doubt on whether or not they need a new VCS to achieve their goal in the first place, not providing an opinion about the "right" number of PRs. Like most things coming out of these labs it's hard not to look at it as marketing. Their "changes merged per day" is absolutely meaningless unless you know the nature of those changes. I could make a graph like this by making tons of agent-based empty commits. That's not a problem that actually needs a solution, though. Furthermore, they _didn't even build a new VCS_, they copied one that existed and made a bunch of noise about it.
Google and Meta hit these sorts of limits over a decade ago. They then built new VCS stuff to handle it, Meta's part is the subject of this submission. This was even pre-agents.
Git is just not suited to truly large monorepos, and it won't ever be. That's totally fine, of course. Less of a monoculture here would be great.
Maybe it would help if I said I agree that this is a real problem that people are dealing with. However, I find it difficult to trust the words of a company that has agents "going rogue" due to their own negligence or for their own marketing reasons. It's hard to take their "we are experiencing tremendous growth"-coded blog posts like the one about their need for a new VCS seriously.
Just for comparison' sake: Google employs ~60,000 engineers. Anthropic has maybe 2,000. My uncharitable (and admittedly unverifiable) read is that even if they weren't directly experiencing this problem, the optics of being their size but needing Google or Meta-level scale for their work is a comparison they are happy to invite folks to make going into IPO season.
Maybe they do! But, well, I simply do not find them a reliable narrator.
Makes sense, all I wanted to point out is that this is a real problem for some real companies.
Microsoft hit it too and then improved git and made it faster. Right now Anthropic seems to be under 1 commit per second. I don't think that would make the git server break a sweat.
Microsoft's Scalar will help you with a medium-large repo in pure history and file and file count size, but it won't help you with a repo with a very high merge rate. Microsoft doesn't actually have a massive monorepo anywhere near Google or Meta's size so they never came close to hitting the same problems.
Microsoft did, but that doesn't change the limitations imposed by git's design. Their repos just weren't as large.
> under 1 commit per second
Sure, for arbitrary pushes, that's not a big deal. But for large repositories, with those changes landing on trunk at that rate, once you start talking about "commits per second" it gets very difficult.
Did they make a bunch of noise about it, or did HN? This place loses its mind every time OpenAI or Anthropic posts a blog.
There is no distinction at this point. If you know your blogs always get picked up by HN, and they do know this, then you know your blog is a de facto and gratis marketing channel and will use it as such.
fwiw I've heard accounts that Google's source control is also creaking under the weight of AI code changes, and that there's already a new frontend to it with backend revisions on the way too. When GitHub and Google and Anthropic all simultaneously have VCSs that start buckling I think it's safe to say it's a real phenomenon and not marketing.