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Posted by Philpax 9 hours ago

Redesigning source control at Anthropic(www.anthropic.com)
517 points | 513 commentspage 7
nico 7 hours ago|
Has anyone made a “generative git”? Where running git checkout would generate the files and git commit would just train/finetune on the code? (might need to keep a deterministic list of files at least maybe)
bitwize 6 hours ago|
that's just great

lossily compressed source code

what could possibly go wrong

dearing 6 hours ago||
you made my day

a proper git, my things:

itostr->iToaster

amluto 8 hours ago||
I though the basic idea was reasonable, until:

> So we asked ourselves: if we designed source control with the fact that agents are always online in mind from the start, what would it look like?

And

> In Scion, every commit, rebase, or merge happens on the server

I’ll pass. A big part of the theses of git and, even more so, jujitsu, is that you can build up a history entirely locally, making it reasonable to make tiny commits locally and then rework them, push them, or throw them away.

Sure, in Anthropic’s world, it’s completely impossible to do anything without access to the inference API, so why not add another mandatory API? But I think this model sucks even in a pervasive AI world, and I don’t want to dig in deeper.

This also sounds like a great way to have yet more security problems where your swarm of agents start cooperating more than you want them to.

By all means, built a better system than git. In many respects, git sucks, and git upstream is not solving the major problems. But don’t lose the actual benefits of git!

For that matter, I’ve seen the crap that the latest models will commit. Why on Earth should one’s VCS force the per-agent-instance system to upload the crap before even contemplating locally whether it’s a good idea? Maybe this is why Anthropic has so many commits per day.

(Am I the only one who feels like most of the big AI labs are rapidly gradient-descending toward something that is nowhere near a globally optimal stack?)

P.S. Only 30k commits per day? That’s not actually very many per employee. I’m suspicious that Anthropic’s real issues are that too many of them are giant cross-cutting messes and that git clone is too slow.

arxanas 49 minutes ago||
> A big part of the theses of git and, even more so, jujitsu, is that you can build up a history entirely locally, making it reasonable to make tiny commits locally and then rework them, push them, or throw them away.

Jujutsu actually doesn't take a strong stance here. I've personally implemented a centralized cloud-based backend for Jujutsu, while preserving the local commit manipulation workflows. It's a choice for the deploying organization to make.

nickg-anthropic 4 hours ago|||
One benefit of uploading things immediately is that you can launch a research job, run CI, or share code between all of your developer environments absolutely trivially. The commit hash "just works everywhere". There is a major benefit here and Scion does have some extra features not listed in this blog post, such as the ability to bundle these commits into useful, shareable workspaces that track the heads dynamically.
amluto 4 hours ago||
Sure, I'm not saying that I don't like the ability to very quickly do a push to some remote and potentially temporary spot. I just also want the ability to not do this without loss of functionality.
nickg-anthropic 3 hours ago||
Practically speaking, we could build local commit buffering for when the server is offline, but then the client needs to also learn how to do all of the things the server currently knows how to do (and would still never be able to answer more complex "full-graph" questions, like history, blame, or merge base ancestry).

Since Claude is by far the heaviest user of Scion and is necessarily online, this just wasn't important to do.

amluto 6 hours ago|||
As an almost-on-topic aside: completely unrelated to this comment, I just stumbled upon this delight:

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/53743

If you thought that your agents in your swarm would need to find some external bulletin board to cooperate behind your back, you are mistaken: OpenAI provides the relevant service for them with no permission prompts at all. I haven't tried to see whether competing providers do this.

whattheheckheck 7 hours ago||
Yes and they have no choice. And that matters.
jabedude 7 hours ago||
What is the purpose of this article besides "we can use ludicrous numbers of tokens to reinvent any software we want, and no we're not sharing the code"?
0c3ca83 4 hours ago||
This is... surprisingly small?

From what I recall, Google's repo is closer to 80 terabytes.

nickg-anthropic 4 hours ago|
The issue is the growth rate; we'll approach that size in a (relatively) short amount of time if it keeps up and we have to be ready. It's also self-fulfilling in a way, since Scion was so much faster, we are able to write more code...which puts more pressure on Scion.
Panzer04 26 minutes ago||
What are you doing that necessitates so much code?

Even if you can write a lot of code with LLMs, what is that code actually doing?

pianopatrick 5 hours ago||
Can you estimate the total number of tokens you used to create this new system?
schleck8 4 hours ago||
It's not open sourced in case you are wondering.
sige11 3 hours ago||
A "scion-daemon". Hmm... That's something I don't want to meet.
ChrisLTD 7 hours ago||
I’m personally more interested in their Antique review tool. Does anyone have any details on how it works and what it does?
Jagerbizzle 7 hours ago|
As someone that has revived and started maintaining an internal code review tool, I'm very interested in reading more about Antique.
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