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.
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.
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.
The intended audience is obvious from first paragraph alone:
> 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.
Translation:
> 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?
Claude.ai
Claude Code CLI
Claude Code Desktop (multiple platforms)
Claude Code on the web (aka Claude Code Cloud)
Claude Design
The Claude API
Claude SDK libraries
Cowork (just retired and merged into regular Claude)
Claude Tag
Claude for Legal
They ship a lot of products.
Mononoke and Sapling are open source systems. Why shouldn't new software take inspiration from how they are designed?
> 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.)
> 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.
> Giving credit to those that came before us is now easier — and more important — than ever. There is no longer an excuse.
Fair enough.
I thought it was likely that their team of 7 included ex-Meta and ex-Google people with knowledge of those company's internal version control solutions.
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.
Giving credit isn’t required, but many consider it basic decency.