alt Hacker NewsHi! I am the original author of the blog post and wanted to clear the air a bit here.
We credited Sapling because that's how Meta itself externally refers to the entire system, including the Mononoke server, and we wanted to follow that convention. We will add an additional footnote to clarify this. [edit: this is done]
We were inspired by many things while building Scion, such as the great ideas in Mononoke's Bonsai data model, and didn't intend to obfuscate that in any way. We were also inspired heavily by https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/03/04/turning-the-database..., for example, which also describes the "derived data" concept.
We also did not just tell Claude to build us a version control system; we did a lot of research on what would work and not work for our use case and coming from an existing large Git repo (rather than Mercurial, as Mononoke did) required many novelties beyond some of these data structures.
The intent was to give credit to Mononoke without getting too deep in the weeds of comparing and contrasting each point of the data model where we diverged. There are many ex-Meta employees at Anthropic who were inspired by how joyful using source control was because of Mononoke, which deserves a lot of credit to you and the source control team there. We had that experience as a north star from the beginning while making decisions that map to our (different) needs.
Replies
It feels strange to put "-anthropic" in your Hacker News username. Never seen this before. What happens if you don't work there anymore?
Thanks for coming on to "take the heat." Do you have any internal tools for auditing the codebase/model outputs to see how much direct overlap there is with the inspiration?
As a human who is deeply familiar with the codebase, what percentage of Scion's codebase would you estimate is directly inspired by Mononoke?
Looking deeper, I think Ant really did copy the work. I don't think you should feel ashamed or defend it by saying that a lot of research is required.
Yes, copying takes a lot of research. It takes a lot of effort to collect OSS data, and a huge amount of research is needed.
While your post sugar coats it in positive words: "joyful", "inspired", and so on, it just largely confirms the accusations in the blog post:
> However, after publishing the post I privately received confirmation that Scion intentionally and blatantly ripped off Mononoke, and in particular that there was overlap in personnel.
I come out of this that Anthropic actually ripped off Mononoke, but did so in a joyful and inspired manner. Maybe the prompt to Claude has a trailing smiling emoji.
As the longest serving and most senior member (now ex-member) of the Facebook source control team, I had no problem with your post. I'm just happy to see the ideas and technology helping move the industry forward.