alt Hacker NewsMany parts of the Git distributed version control are the results of good decision made. Anthropic source control team just think that their trade-offs needs are vastly different from other businesses. They said these too:
1. they have no-cap token spend allowance internally
2. their agent swarms are amongst the largest if not the largest, again because #1 above.
3. their git repo is enormously large (100GB uncompressed git history on main, 25GB compressed).
4. their merges per day count grew an order of magnitude from May to September to 30000 times per day, they are not seeing it slowing down anytime and probably only going to accelerate.
5. all of their code agents are networked and has network access, full local pull down is not needed at all and too slow (see #3)
6. their design of the Scion is based off prior art Google’s Piper and Meta’s Sapling.
Given their own constraints and characteristics of their own. It only makes sense to build their own homegrown solution based on prior arts. But this was NOT a complete redesign from scratch - so it's an full online download only what you need type of source control system. The problem is the version control software itself but its prior tradeoffs are misaligned with their scaling needs.
PS, if anyone noticed, Anthropic starts to concealing their employee full names and replaced with only first name + last name initiate, not sure why.
PPS, the project Scion is so bad, scn is worst, it reminds people of prior SVN, which is bad by itself.
Replies
> 100GB uncompressed git history on main, 25GB
I might be completely out of context, but why is it only 4x compression? Do they commit a lot of binaries? I just don't understand why would code compress so badly.
But Piper is a reimplementation of perforce which makes me wonder why they couldn't just license it. Why does it make sense to do this. Perforce should scale to the level they're talking about. Google were using it even when they had many tens of thousands of developers and multiple changesets per second and presumably it got better since then
All of this is unsustainable in short, not to mention medium term (not just for affordability, even just security reasons) so I don't think there is a reason to look into scaling this mess.
re: PPS: Employees are an attack vector. Making their identities harder to discover is a protection.
Gives me a vaguely creepy feeling, but it's reasonable.
Anthropic is protective of employee names because of the sheer amount of hacking/phishing attempts that happen. A friend of mine got a job at Anthropic and within a week he was getting linkedin and email spam from people impersonating Dario.
> Many parts of the Git distributed version control are the results of good decision made.
For how the Linux Kernel, a highly decentralized, completely open source project, with a single monotonic product, tyrannically lead (a good thing) - is developed.
Permissions, Partial Checkouts, Sub Repos, Vendoring, pub/sub... How many companies bought into git and then had to buy more tooling (like artifactory) because their 3rd party dependency's needed a home. Thats a feature that git does not support because git, as designed, did not need it.
Think about how much better your life would be if every time you typed npm,pip,goget,cargo it fetched THROUGH your repo. If those updates triggered code reviews of whatever changes you're going to consume. You are code reviewing those updates aren't you (someone is, cause supply chain attacks don't last that long)
Git has some weak points, Google doesn't use it for a reason. Epic created lore for a reason, This exists for a reason. Im not sure that any of them are the next thing that replaces GIT but it's getting to be time. Tools like this are going to keep popping up till someone gets it right.
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Perhaps I'm dense but I don't see how any of that answers the question "why even have source control?"