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Posted by Philpax 7 hours ago

Redesigning source control at Anthropic(www.anthropic.com)
446 points | 444 commentspage 4
mey 5 hours ago|
Did they reinvent subversion?
orangecat 3 hours ago||
Seems like it, and that's probably not a bad thing. Most companies have no need for git's distributed functionality, and even most open source projects just treat Github (or whatever) as the single source of truth.
tasuki 3 hours ago||
It is a terrible thing. Yes, one generally has a place which is the source of truth. But distributed still gives you offline commits and branching and all the good things, for free.
stigi 5 hours ago|||
I wanted to say, `scn` is waaaay to close to `svn`!
josephscott 4 hours ago|||
Reading through I was thinking the same thing, this reminds me a great deal of subversion.
hxugufjfjf 4 hours ago|||
That was my first thought lol
bsergean 5 hours ago||
[dead]
sige11 1 hour ago||
A "scion-daemon". Hmm... That's something I don't want to meet.
smy20011 6 hours ago||
> as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day.

Their Website/CLI seems keeping the same? What did they do?

Rudybega 5 hours ago||
I would guess a huge chunk of it is for internal testing/experimentation/model development.

They're starting to do things like spinning up wet labs for testing purposes, which requires a lot of hardware interfacing (hence that protocol they announced) and code.

It wouldn't shock me if the bulk of this code was for things typical users don't see.

arjie 2 hours ago|||
Presumably all the internal research and evaluation work. I imagine for each released model they have uncountable unreleased ones.
joshheitzman 5 hours ago|||
Exactly. Commit counts are no better than line counts as a software development metric. Where is the actual software?
justincormack 4 hours ago||
AI models is much of what they build. A lot of software around that to support it.
jpadkins 4 hours ago||
make smarter models?
aogaili 5 hours ago||
This is a nice thoughtful article.

If Anthropic has the best coding model, harness and the best software development methodologies and systems. And then, they scale all that up, with no constrains on their tokens. On top of that, they have access to all kind of ideas their models getting trained on when millions are chatting with it - then in theory they can build any software better than anyone out there. And same goes to science and math..

rfgplk 5 hours ago|
Not true. They can do this in theory iff they have infinite compute. They don't. People actually aren't aware that the leading AI providers, even if they completely redirected 100% of their compute on internal projects they still wouldn't have enough. The complexity space of software development is literally super-exponential, for every new piece of software they add (and polish) they need more-and-more compute. This is eliminating for creativity and other restraints.
aogaili 5 hours ago||
The creativity part I do acknowledge, I think the models are not fully there yet.

But regarding the compute, I disagree a bit. I think the bottlenecks were cognition and ideas, not compute. Given that models are able to outperform humans in output by thousand folds, the differentiation would be the quality of the tokens produced and the ability to scale across different domains.

If they have enough compute to supply the entire globe, I'm sure they can redirect some of it to whatever use case they (or their super AI) deem worthy and loop on it, and if they have the best software engineering systems/methodology to build and release it, then they can out compete any other supplier without those resources.

We are already seeing single developers attempting to rebuild entire corporations history worth of output. We are also seeing the labs dumping hundreds of solutions to math problems.

jareds 6 hours ago||
Is this really something to be proud of? I make heavy use of AI, but for anything that is eventually going to production there's still a human reviewer. Based on this I assume Anthropic is shipping code with no human review? Is the future of our industry going to be oneshotting prompts with out manual code review and then having AI fix the bugs found in production buy customers? I'm not trying to be a Curmudgeon, but am I missing something?
legulere 2 hours ago||
If your customers accept it, why not? It's much cheaper and testing in production is not really new.
these 5 hours ago|||
If AI can improve/speed up writing code, why shouldn't it improve/speed up code review?
jareds 5 hours ago|||
Where do you draw the line, and where does someone take final responsibility? I don't have an issue with allowing AI to do everything with limited to no human verification for hobby projects. I have an issue with allowing AI to write and ship medical device software with no human review. What's the middle ground?
these 4 hours ago||
You still take the full responsibility, I don't think leveraging AI reviews removes any layer of responsibility. The challenge is building the feedback loop (or the agent that builds the feedback loop) to make the review process actually catch what it needs to catch.
agentultra 5 hours ago|||
You can probably still find the leaked code online. It’s not exactly a bastion of software engineering. Plenty of folks have reviewed it deeply.
CaptWorld 5 hours ago||
They review based on the intent of the change not jz blindly.. I think it's mentioned in the article where the job of a developer is to provide high level design decisions and saying no to claude so that it doesn't over engineer solutions.. As the demand for good, but not perfect, software is the bottleneck for anthropic and access to better internal models, I feel that's good enough for their workflow as they've started repeatedly that this is just suitable only for them and they want to share their knowledge like a good software company does.. you talk as though code reviews were not a joke in lots of companies where only specific teams/companies does detailed reviews.. many teams/companies jz blindly approve based on tests passing or just do a high level overview check before merging..
jareds 4 hours ago||
I must have been lucky in my career then, in my experience code review was much more then a five minute check followed by approval.
amelius 6 hours ago||
It would be nice if you could just commit the prompts as your "source code", and let the AI-generated code sit in the repo as a kind of expensive-to-generate build output.
spuz 6 hours ago||
You can do that - it's called Spec Driven Development.
6thbit 6 hours ago|||
Prompts are not specs.
amelius 6 hours ago|||
I don't see the term used in the article.
rocketpastsix 6 hours ago||
its not a Claude-specific term
yoz-y 5 hours ago|||
Problem is that for any non trivial software is that the prompt is a conversation and the steps increasingly depend on the output. Of course you can ask your LLM to write the SPEC.md at any moment but it will lack nuance.

Shameless plug: at https://slopyard.net I embrace this and only let people submit the spec. If somebody wants your software they can regenerate it and change whatever they want.

amelius 2 hours ago||
This reminds me of the halfbakery website from older times.
GuB-42 6 hours ago|||
Do we have reproducible LLMs?

Possible in theory, with a seeded PRNG, but in practice?

batshit_beaver 6 hours ago||
Proponents of LLM coding agents would claim you don’t need reproducibility. As long as the final output passes tests/lint, it’s (allegedly) good to go.
akshitgaur2005 4 hours ago||
If every build is different, no two builds will have the same bug/exploit, so maybe better security??
bitwize 6 hours ago||
One of the goals of "Operation Rapidash" (q.v.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50065342) was precisely this. "You can delete the whole source repo and get effectively the same software back from the specs by running it through [AI agent]."
sige11 1 hour ago||
A "scion-daemon" is not something I want to meet...
nixpulvis 4 hours ago||
> In Scion, every commit, rebase, or merge happens on the server, so there’s nothing to push...

I think this is the wrong way to solve problems and goes the wrong way toward solving real problems.

tasuki 3 hours ago|
I think it is exactly the right way to create problems.

I'm sure the system is being constantly updated and will get more and more bloated over time and interesting things will start happening.

real_faxenoff 2 hours ago||
I don't think this SCM stores only code. I think more than 80% of it consists of tests and various types of gold data. All of this is constantly changing, and we need to keep track of it somehow.
InvisibleUp 5 hours ago|
I'm curious what this "Antropic Antique" is. As I understand code review the tightest bottleneck for a lot of Claude Code users, and I'm curious how this would help with that.
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