Comment by simonw

> ... 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:

  *This makes Anthropic’s achievement significantly less impressive.* Anyone who’s put a distributed system into production knows how many issues tend to crop up during the productionizing process. “Our LLM built this thing, productionized it, and dealt with all the attendant challenges over 5 months” is a significantly more compelling narrative than “the source control team at Meta had spent 10 years building and productionizing this system, and we were able to point our LLM at it and rebuild it in 5 months”.