Redesigning Source Control at Anthropic

This shows public release dates, not the date when models became available for Anthropic's internal use. My guess is that the introduction of Fable/Mythos class models is a key factor in the increased coding velocity.

"Antique" is their new code review system. The source control system is called Scion, and sounds to me like a reinvention of centralized source control along the lines of Subversion.

(Update: Anthropic credit Google's Piper and Meta's Sapling as "prior art" - it looks like the core concept of "derived data" was heavily inspired by Mononoke, the server component of Sapling.)

They had some pretty extreme requirements:

The history of our main branch alone is almost 100 GB, and a compressed working copy is over 25 GB. We perform on the order of 25 million code checkouts per day for CI, before counting developer environments, agent sandboxes, and research jobs. Fetched naively, that would be over 600 PB of git traffic per day.

The new system was built by a team of seven people, and the migration from Git was completed in five months.

When asked on Hacker News about the lack of offline support, Scion engineer Nick G replied:

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

As an aside, I've been trying adversarial review in my own projects recently, where you have a model try and find flaws (I often play Claude and GPT off against each other). This note from the article reflected my own experience with that:

Anthropic also makes extensive use of adversarial review, and, while this is incredibly effective in many ways, it can also be myopic, so skilled engineers needed to steer Claude away from over-engineering parts of the system in response to hypothetical concerns.