alt Hacker NewsThe company is predominantly FAANG people. They’re going to just rebuild what they know. I don’t think you need any kind of conspiracy here. One year into ad tech and everyone was using HyperLogLog. Everyone was using 20 years ago LMAX-style disruptor, and single threaded event queue powered by loop called governor. It’s just what happens. People carry in their head what they know.
IP maximalism is the present zeitgeist but that’s just how knowledge flows.
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Rebuilding what you know from the previous FAANG you worked at is expected on the whole.
What is douchey is presenting the whole thing as some sort of intense novelty and stroke of genius required in the age of agents when it's just doing what the other BigCo companies did to scale their monorepos already. Like a decade (or more) ago.
The reality it is when I first read the thing I was -- as a Xoogler -- like "Oh, yeah, so, like Piper & SrcFs and the stuff that Meta also does" and really didn't understand why they wouldn't have started with something off the shelf inside of vibe-conjuring a clone that they would then have to support
To me it speaks ill, again, of the engineering culture at Anthropic. "We do these things not because they are useful, but because they are novel."
Don't they have better things to do at Anthropic than building their own source control or rewriting Bun from scratch in another language? Like, y'know, basic site reliability? Or a coding harness that doesn't eat multiple GB of RAM?
Help me understand. When you write a post about designing a system, do you not do some basic diligence about what existing systems you resemble?
Open source is not IP maximalist by any means. I am merely asking that the appropriate credit be provided.