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Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke
- That totally sucks. Thanks for providing more details.
Makes you wonder about the mathematicians who are also saying similar things.
by duhhhhh1212 - Re-designing a modern source control system for open source projects, you need to consider millions of developers have coding agents running on their computer and/or have Claude Code/Google/OpenAI coding agent accounts. And evidence from the Linux repo and many other GitHub repos, the open source projects are overflowing from coding agent submitted bug reports. If I was accepting a bug report and/or patch, I would want to know the stated problem and reasons why it's a problem, the desired state or fix and reasons why it's preferred, and if a patch is supplied, I would want verifiable proof of provenance: the signed session from the coding agent, including the prompts used to generate it paired with the changed code. This way open source maintenance can become truly decentralized.by espeed
- Recent and related:
Redesigning source control at Anthropic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073633 (996 comments)
Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094694 (149 comments)
by dang - > Even the name “Scion” reverses the syllables of “Bonsai” and drops the “B”! This might be a coincidence, or might not.
huh
by jfrbfbreudh - Open source Mononoke and EdenFS don’t really work outside of Meta. I looked into it some years ago for a large monorepo, determined it wouldn’t work, and shelved it. If I had a team of people and/or agents available we likely would have built it ground up instead of adopting Sapling’s codebase.
Seems a bit silly to raise all of this fuss over an MIT licensed project that is both open source and not actually usable. What do you expect people to do with the source code, admire it?
by fcarraldo - > my default assumption now is that Anthropic’s public engineering presentations are largely bad-faith ripoffs. That’s a shame.
Couldn't agree more.
I got nervous when the company claiming to be working on the most impactful technology in human history takes time away to instead brag about writing a slightly more efficient version control system.
The fact that they didn't actually build the side project themselves, and ripped it off from someone else also calls into question their good faith mission to shepherd humanity into a new era...
- Hi! 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 using the same words.
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.