Comment by simonw
4 days ago
When Google built their alternative to Perforce it wasn't possible for a team of seven to build a new system from scratch and port the entire company over to it in five months.
4 days ago
When Google built their alternative to Perforce it wasn't possible for a team of seven to build a new system from scratch and port the entire company over to it in five months.
> ...it wasn't possible for a team of seven to build a new system from scratch and port the entire company over to it in five months.
If you're using Anthropic's recently-announced plagiarized source control system as your proof that this is possible, then, well, it's still not possible. That system was not built from scratch, and we both know that you were informed roughly four hours before posting this comment that the folks involved with this have been directly informed of that fact. You even called the failure of Anthropic to acknowledge that this was not a from-scratch project and to credit the project from which they lifted the design that they would have had to pour a lot of time and effort into to replicate -and I quote- "a scandal".
Here's the context for that "scandal" comment: https://lobste.rs/s/plcgps/anthropic_s_scion_is_heavily_insp...
We've since got a few more details, it looks like the new information is that there are people on the team who built Scion who had previously worked at Meta and had direct experience with Sapling and Mononoke: https://sunshowers.io/posts/anthropic-mononoke-2/
I stand by my original comment: back when Google built their version of this it wasn't possible for a team of seven to use LLMs to build a new custom implementation in five months that incorporated existing patterns (in a way that some people would classify as cheating / plagiarism / insert-your-criticism-here).
> ... back when Google built their version of this it wasn't possible for a team of seven to use LLMs to build a new custom implementation in five months...
A quick look around tells us that Mononoke came from Facebook nine years ago. [0][1] Similarly, Piper was built long before LLMs were more than -at best- some very small scale implementations.
Git was started in 2005. IIRC, it went from a blank editor window and some ideas in Torvalds's head to self-hosting in four days and managing the code for the then-latest Linux kernel release in two months. As I understand it, project staffing was also low; somewhere between one and a handful of people. Such amazing velocity and tiny staff size! <strike>Impossible without LLMs!</strike>
I also note that you've weakened your claim from "build a new system from scratch" to "build a new custom implementation ... that incorporated existing patterns". [3]
> Here's the context for that "scandal" comment...
Yes, that's the conversation that I wrote about. The rather unflattering start to that thread that you linked is important context [2], and the blog post you link to talks about the behavior you called "a scandal". I read all of the discussion for the first report, and most of it for the second.
> I stand by my ["]original["] comment...
Like many folks have mentioned to in recent months, occasionally saying "Jeez, that behavior is awful. Yeah, that's inexcusable." doesn't mean anything when you're back at bat for these companies a few hours later.
[0] <https://lobste.rs/c/wk6js5>
[3] The following paragraph from 'anthropic-mononoke-2' seems particularly apropos in light of how you've shifted your claim since I objected to it:
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I'd wager it's still not possible.
You can write it, but can you maintain it? Can you even fully understand what was built? Can you staff the team to manage the bugs? The potential data loss?
Sounds like Anthropic have committed to running exactly that experiment at scale.