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> 100GB uncompressed git history on main, 25GB

I might be completely out of context, but why is it only 4x compression? Do they commit a lot of binaries? I just don't understand why would code compress so badly.

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Perhaps I'm dense but I don't see how any of that answers the question "why even have source control?"
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I think the answer is that they don't, indeed, need source control but just a way to let their agents resolve editing conflicts. It's basically yet another message board.
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Not using the full names is a mitigation for talent poaching.

There are orgs that are moving to not including names at all as the next step on that trajectory.

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But Piper is a reimplementation of perforce which makes me wonder why they couldn't just license it. Why does it make sense to do this. Perforce should scale to the level they're talking about. Google were using it even when they had many tens of thousands of developers and multiple changesets per second and presumably it got better since then
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Google implemented Piper because Perforce simply didn't scale well. In the years since, P4 has barely improved at all. Licensing P4 would not help and Google doesn't offer Piper licenses.
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It scaled pretty well compared to everything else. I was there, they were running tens of thousands of engineers and hundreds of p4 commands per second off a 16 core box with a few replicas before starting the Piper migration. Commit rates were comparable to what Anthropic report. And although you say it barely improved, they were doing that sort of scale on 15 year old hardware and the p4 admins wrote a paper where they said Perforce had improved scalability a lot over time, so it's not like the software was static. Architecturally Scion sounds rather similar.

It's always a question of opportunity cost. The culture that led to Piper also led to them creating their own IDEs and everything else, often with questionable outcomes. Google had the profitability to get away with that kind of profligacy but do the AI labs really want to go the same route?

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These productivity gains must go somewhere.
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I feel like "didn't scale well" is unfair to Perforce. It scaled to accommodate an absurd monorepo that might have been, at the moment they switched to Piper, the largest single software project in history. It scaled to handle the needs of every organization in the industry except Google and Microsoft.
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In the age of AI writing code, maybe the question flips from "why not license it" to "why not reimplement it"?
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Is it really their comparative advantage? Perforce can use Claude too but can amortize the cost over many customers so it should be cheaper and faster to reuse.

I mean 30k CLs per day isn't much. That's one every few seconds. Well within what a decent perforce setup can do with enough replicas.

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You loose the free promo for your LLM, though.
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All of this is unsustainable in short, not to mention medium term (not just for affordability, even just security reasons) so I don't think there is a reason to look into scaling this mess.
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re: PPS: Employees are an attack vector. Making their identities harder to discover is a protection.

Gives me a vaguely creepy feeling, but it's reasonable.

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Anthropic is protective of employee names because of the sheer amount of hacking/phishing attempts that happen. A friend of mine got a job at Anthropic and within a week he was getting linkedin and email spam from people impersonating Dario.
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So? That's true of any employee at any company worth more than a billy and that's not a small amount of companies. I have gotten personal text messages from the CEO of my company, emails, and fake LI invites all at companies nobody has ever heard of.
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> Many parts of the Git distributed version control are the results of good decision made.

For how the Linux Kernel, a highly decentralized, completely open source project, with a single monotonic product, tyrannically lead (a good thing) - is developed.

Permissions, Partial Checkouts, Sub Repos, Vendoring, pub/sub... How many companies bought into git and then had to buy more tooling (like artifactory) because their 3rd party dependency's needed a home. Thats a feature that git does not support because git, as designed, did not need it.

Think about how much better your life would be if every time you typed npm,pip,goget,cargo it fetched THROUGH your repo. If those updates triggered code reviews of whatever changes you're going to consume. You are code reviewing those updates aren't you (someone is, cause supply chain attacks don't last that long)

Git has some weak points, Google doesn't use it for a reason. Epic created lore for a reason, This exists for a reason. Im not sure that any of them are the next thing that replaces GIT but it's getting to be time. Tools like this are going to keep popping up till someone gets it right.

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