If anyone is working on version control for binary files, feel free to get get in touch ... that space is still not explored I think.<p><a href="https://github.com/xyzzyapps/flatvc" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/xyzzyapps/flatvc</a>
From the Anthropic announcement:<p>“Source control for huge monorepos has prior art, notably Google’s Piper and Meta’s Sapling, so we were able to build Scion with their hard-won lessons in mind.”<p>Mononoke is a component of Sapling, as I understand it. In fact, the repo link provided in this article links to a subdirectory of the Sapling repo. I’m not totally sure I understand the complaint.
If I credit my newly introduced car as inspired by Corvette, then sure, it might be ok not to mention the engine (Mononoke is the server part of Sapling)<p>However if my new car's engine is a near copy of the one in the Corvette, and my announcement gushes about the engine using the same terms the Corvette design team invented...<p>Then can you see how a mention might be nice?
The level of inspiration goes well beyond "hard-won lessons". Something like Lore (slop design document aside) can claim that level of inspiration. Here the data model is a direct copy, down to the terminology.<p>To be uncharitable, this is marketing for Anthropic's impending IPO.
I see correlation instead. You IPO when you grow like crazy. You build something like scion when you grow like crazy.
And I think Not Invented Here has turned into Not Invented By Our Agents at many places.
Devil’s advocate: This could turn out to be a good thing for software security. If each company’s stack is home grown, there will still be vulnerabilities (probably even more of them) but they’ll be less portable compared to today’s monoculture where an exploit for a common component will work almost anywhere.
I remain unconvinced that they even need a new VCS to achieve what they want to. One has to wonder what the level of churn is at this number of PRs.
Who cares about your opinions about what number of PRs is right? They want to make more PRs (particularly to a monorepo), they need a new VCS.<p>Even if they weren't making a lot of PRs, Github has been melting down enough this year that they've probably encouraged customers like Anthropic to move off.
I was casting doubt on whether or not they need a new VCS to achieve their goal in the first place, not providing an opinion about the "right" number of PRs. Like most things coming out of these labs it's hard not to look at it as marketing. Their "changes merged per day" is absolutely meaningless unless you know the nature of those changes. I could make a graph like this by making tons of agent-based empty commits. That's not a problem that actually needs a solution, though. Furthermore, they _didn't even build a new VCS_, they copied one that existed and made a bunch of noise about it.
Google and Meta hit these sorts of limits over a decade ago. They then built new VCS stuff to handle it, Meta's part is the subject of this submission. This was even pre-agents.<p>Git is just not suited to truly large monorepos, and it won't ever be. That's totally fine, of course. Less of a monoculture here would be great.
fwiw I've heard accounts that Google's source control is also creaking under the weight of AI code changes, and that there's already a new frontend to it with backend revisions on the way too. When GitHub and Google and Anthropic all simultaneously have VCSs that start buckling I think it's safe to say it's a real phenomenon and not marketing.
Did they make a bunch of noise about it, or did HN? This place loses its mind every time OpenAI or Anthropic posts a blog.
There is no distinction at this point. If you know your blogs always get picked up by HN, and they do know this, then you know your blog is a de facto and gratis marketing channel and will use it as such.
more = better
> Here the data model is a direct copy, down to the terminology.<p>That’s not surprising to me - they designed and built it using their LLMs, of course it’s duplicating prior work. That’s essentially the core of what LLMs do, after all.
Effectively nobody considering buying into the IPO cares about Anthropic's source control system. They could be passing around floppy disks and so long as they were still shipping nobody would care.
Not about the details but the marketing story is all about how "agents" are building so fast they need to design new infrastructure for the new world, etc. Extra points if you spin it as though the "agents" have built some new never-before-seen architecture that is clearly better than the "human scale" stuff.<p>The intended audience is obvious from first paragraph alone:<p><i>> At Anthropic, coding is no longer the bottleneck to building systems or doing research. Claude is able to autonomously iterate on research loops, micro-optimize complex programs, and build new services from the ground up at a speed and scale we haven’t seen before. The bottleneck, now, is all of the developer infrastructure built for human scale: source control, builds, and CI.</i><p>Translation:<p><i>> We are so far at the cutting edge we need to build shiny new infrastructure to replace the smelly "human scale" cruft. How could you /not/ value us at $2T?</i>
That would arguably make it look worse.
Why is that bad?<p>Mononoke and Sapling are open source systems. Why shouldn't new software take inspiration from how they are designed?
I saw RMS give a talk once on Free Software. He wore three quarter length cargo pants and sandals with no socks, and spent a good amount of the talk picking a scab off his shin to the point where he started bleeding. It got on his fingers. No one said anything.<p>There are things in this world that people can and should be stopped from doing, and there which anyone can do unhindered if they so wish. In between those two boundaries there’s a standard of decent behavior that one should strive for in order to be considered a good person.<p>Giving credit isn’t required, but many consider it basic decency.
From my post:<p>> And, to be clear, I do not have a problem with Anthropic copying Mononoke’s design. (This is part of why we put out open source — to benefit humanity through the spread of good ideas.)<p>> But as LLMs continue to assist in designing new systems, they are likely to index heavily on existing designs. Mononoke is open source and in every LLM’s training set. If you ask Opus 5.5 or GPT-6 Astra (thanks Matthew Fowle) about prior art, they both immediately point out the similarities to Mononoke.<p>> Giving credit to those that came before us is now easier — and more important — than ever. There is no longer an excuse.
"I built a thing in the style of X" (which is even more charitable than what Anthropic piece said) is different than "I incorporated X from Y to build a thing this way."
> hard-won lessons in mind<p>Another Claude-written article
When Fable first released, I had it "one shot" a project using an initial spec and a team of agents. I was blown away with how good the results were.<p>And then I noticed some links to images from random small github projects and realized somewhere along the way agents had searched for existing projects and copied almost everything.<p>I wonder if something similar happened here on a larger scale.
GitHub is to agents what StackOverflow was to developers back in the day (in a meme kinda way).<p>More seriously, I'm curious if you checked on the licensing of said codebases, were they permissive or strong copyleft?
I think a lot is memory really. For fun you can try pointing just about any model against the older kaggle challenges and it’ll come up with more or less the winning solution from memory. It’s here where you see a Gemma 27b perform about the same as opus 5.5
It's the same for CTF challenges. Many get 'solved' because a writup was found and steps were followed.
Is this what is expected of how to cite sources? Because if this is the expectation nobody does it.<p>There are two cases and only one is an issue for citations:
- Mononoke was directly consulted and not attributed
- Concepts were reinvented or used as a derivative (Sapling cited Mononoke and implements something similar)<p>For one I know Sapling, Git, and Jujutsu, but up to today I have never heard of Oxide or Mononoke and I am not exactly compelled to look up the research papers of any of them, at most I read through their high level documentation.
To be clear, Mononoke is the server-side part of the Sapling system as deployed at Meta. Scion appears to be <i>very</i> closely inspired by Mononoke.
Sapling does a bit more than cite Mononoke. And Oxide was not involved in Mononoke's development. These are kind of details that would not be expected of a casual user. However, when valuations soar into the trillions, we can expect companies with dedicated writing staff to communicate attribution properly.
Oh wow. Being pretty new to meta and seeing the anthropic announcement I was thinking to myself “wow that sounds a lot like sapling”.<p>I guess that is the case.
Anthropic effectively doing a "git clone" with extra steps here.
Uncharitable?
I don't think so.
If this were about functionality, why not use Sapling/Mononoke or extend it and contribute back to the open source community?
Because that doesn't juice the IPO valuation.
hi rain :) Anthropic’s post reminded me a lot of your work, glad this is getting some visibility. do you think the “time has come” for some of these ideas that previously may not have spread because they need too much learning to appreciate? I wonder what new norms will emerge in creative collectives.
Thanks! Yeah, I think overall several more organizations are going to reach the scale that Meta reached a while ago. I'm not sure if they'll go in the monorepo or polyrepo direction, though; I can see arguments both ways.
Whether the ant post amounts to plagiarism, it is definitely somewhere between extremely lazy and intentionally misleading. No particular idea has its inspirations or origins traced or cited, there is no comparison to comparable tooling or discussion of prior work, and there is absolutely nothing to actually position or discuss the project in a manner that might lead to "Contributing to the wider ecosystem."<p>If only they had had a claude write the post, it'd be full of citations, inspiration credit etc.
Agents tend to act differently than humans here. I would have expected most humans to notice and acknowledge the connection. Passing it off as one's own insight definitely feels like plagiarism. Agents are generally not equipped to deal with this type of thing, since looking for prior art is a detour from their goal or an exercise in post-hoc rationalization of knowledge built into the weights.<p>Whether it is plagiarism or hacking, the buck has to stop with the operators. It's not a good look.
The 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.<p>IP maximalism is the present zeitgeist but that’s just how knowledge flows.
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?<p>Open source is not IP maximalist by any means. I am merely asking that the appropriate credit be provided.
No. I actually don’t do that and I don’t think that all human work should be O(n) deduplication gated.<p>Written about it here before: <a href="https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-09-08/Intellectual_Property_Maximization" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-09-08/Intellectual...</a><p>It isn’t something I care very much about, except when it’s used as a certificate of achievement. I almost never do literature searches with an attempt to dedupe. I only ever do it to see if someone has explored something better than I have. That’s often the case but other times it is not.
If they knew it from working at Meta, it wouldn't be O(n), it would be O(1).<p>I agree that there will be cases where you implement tricks that others have had before you, without knowing. A few years ago, I had a delightful idea, experimented and wrote it up. One commenter directed me to a post that described it as "folk knowledge". There will be other cases where you encountered an idea before, but didn't remember it.<p>Still, crediting what you can easily know you cited is good. Even aside from credit, comparisons to existing systems are part of how we understand what a system does.
Okay, well, I actually do think it is part of the basic duty of an engineer to do that.
I do, solely on the basis of "there are a lot of smart(er) people in the world, and very few truly novel problems".<p>The first step in approaching anything difficult is seeing whether someone else has already solved it.
I see. Well, I suppose we differ on this matter of opinion. May the chips land where they may.
What happened is that it wasn't a FAANG engineer replicating what they know, rather one asked Claude what to do and it told them to replicate what it knew.<p>That's how the knowledge that it was a facsimile was lost.
Absolutely not. When I create projects I only credit other existing systems if they are a direct inspiration. If I independently come up with the same idea as someone else I see no reason for me to do the due diligence and credit them.
Rebuilding what you know from the previous FAANG you worked at is expected on the whole.<p>What is douchey is presenting the whole thing as some sort of intense novelty and stroke of genius required <i>in the age of agents</i>.<p>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 <i>why they wouldn't have started with something off the shelf inside of vibe-conjuring a clone that they would then have to support</i><p>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"
Can anyone explain the difference between sampling vs mononoke?<p>Edit: I was too lazy. From the README: "Mononoke is the server built for the Sapling Source Control System"
It's a bit complicated:<p>1. Sapling can refer to either the system as a whole, or just the client people use (`sl`, forked from `hg`).<p>2. EdenFS is the virtualized FUSE filesystem (closely modeled after SrcFS at Google).<p>3. Mononoke is the distributed system that implements the backend server storage + the API they describe for checkout-less writes.<p>All three come together to form the core of the Meta source control experience. From what I can tell, Anthropic built its own version of 1 and copied 2 and 3, plus also built out a code review tool separately.
Damn. It’s hard not to see it as plagiarism. I can only imagine the surprised Pikachu face you must have made reading that announcement from Anthropic.
Did they know or did the agents just have that in training data?
This headline is very confusing for fans of Basic Channel / Chain Reaction records.
Once it's been through the slopotron, the provenance is laundered away.
Woo, I got cited. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50076122">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50076122</a><p>Another effort I couldn't have done without Astra. Even more so. All I did, the only reason I got cited, was because I'd asked Astra.
I really really wish Sapling could be used externally. It is by-and-large TheWay.<p>Centralized, virtual file system, all commits automatically on cloud, large binary files totally fine, Mercurial CLI. It’s fantastic. People who only use Git really don’t understand how much better things can be.
Working for a few years at Facebook, and then returning to the normal world, it was like stepping back in time -- I really think that the mainstream git culture (by which I mostly mean "github") achieved a local maxima around 2012, and has been holding the industry back since :(<p>(Like GH <i>finally</i> has some support for stacks, 15 years late, with an implementation which is somehow more complicated and less powerful than the prior art...)
The startup I work at is working on exactly this. So I agree :)
Hey Steve, I read your recent blogpost on the ERSC site - have you or David (or anyone else at ERSC) felt like there's a Rusty-enough topic around what your startup is doing to give a talk at Rust NYC/Rust conference soon?<p>There's not really a VCS meetup in NYC, but I got to hear David and others at Rust NYC wax eloquent about Sapling vs Piper and Buck vs Bazel a couple of times, so I think the audience is there!
Rust NYC is certainly one of the things I have missed since moving to Austin :)<p>Maybe, we'll see. I think one thing that's tricky these days with startups is that being super transparent technically about what you're up to is much harder to justify. Look what happened with Origin: tobi vibed up a copy over the weekend after it was announced. Obviously there's balance to be found here, but that's partially why we play our cards a little closer to our chest.
I am delighted to hear this. Please do not forget support for Windows.<p>Let me share with you my previous screeds on this topic:<p>* <a href="https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-version-control/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-...</a>
* <a href="https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/using-zig-to-commit-toolchains-to-vcs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/using-zig-to-commit-too...</a><p>They’re semi-adjacent in that they are about build systems that don’t suck. (buck2 is also mostly TheWay but also not usable outside of Meta and has room for improvement).<p>Save us from Git and CMake Steve! Please I beg you!!
To be clear, we are not building a build system, just a VCS. :) we do use buck2 internally though.<p>I do care about Windows, having used it for years at this point. The client is git or jj, so Windows support is there for sure. For some of the other stuff we’re doing, we’ll see what customer demand is like. Obviously there are tons of devs on Windows, but we also have to make calls about priorities too.
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