Databricks engineer's outsider take on Anthropic's Scion: 7 people, 5 months, borrowed ideas
ricklamers · x · 2026-11-02
A Databricks source control engineer reviews Anthropic's new in-house VCS Scion and its heavy inspiration from Mononoke. Most design choices (changesets, client-server asymmetry, content-addressed storage, sparse working copies) are either Mononoke's or natural consequences at monorepo scale, with unclear attribution. Notably, Anthropic migrated its monorepo off Git in 5 months with a 7-person team plus an undisclosed number of Claude tokens. The author also questions Anthropic's claim of running several hundred internal git mirrors, when Databricks handles similar repo size with fewer than 10.
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