Anthropic now merges 30,000+ code changes a day…drops git for its own 'Scion'
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Anthropic's daily merged code changes grew from about 2,500 in May to more than 30,000 in September, so it dropped the git version control tool and moved to Scion, a system it built in-house.
In a post on its Engineering blog on Oct 13 (US time), Anthropic said coding is no longer the bottleneck for building systems or doing research. The bottleneck is now developer infrastructure built for human scale, such as source control, builds and continuous integration.
The main branch history alone is almost 100 GB, a compressed working copy is over 25 GB, and CI alone performs about 25 million code checkouts a day. Fetched naively through git, that would be over 600 petabytes of traffic per day, Anthropic calculated. At its peak it ran several hundred internal git mirrors to cope.
Because nearly all clients are always-online agents, Anthropic designed Scion as a centralized system and migrated its whole monorepo in five months. In the same period it built a code review surface called Antique, code search and a source-control permissions system.
Anthropic said it expects other companies to feel the same pressure before long, and shared the case for that reason. The post from its official account passed 13,000 likes.
“New on our Engineering blog: Creating in-house source control. In May, we merged around 2,500 code changes per day. In September, we merged more than 30,000 per day.”