GoKawiil
Tech News
Anthropic has swapped Git for a custom version-control system called Scion in its main code repository, after daily merged code changes jumped from about 2,500 in May to over 30,000 by September. A seven-person team built Scion and migrated the repository in five months, moving most source-control operations like commits, merges and rebases to servers rather than client machines.
A former Meta engineer who helped build the Mononoke source control system says Anthropic's new version control tool, Scion, uses a 'derived data' concept nearly identical to one he described in 2022 writeups of Mononoke. He notes Anthropic credited Meta's Sapling tool only for general lessons and did not mention Mononoke at all.
Anthropic says daily code changes merged into its monorepo grew from about 2,500 in May to over 30,000 by September, driven largely by Claude writing and iterating on code autonomously. To handle that scale, the company built and fully migrated to a new version control system called Scion within five months, along with a code review tool, code search, and an access-management system.
A developer describes discovering that git supports two additional ignore mechanisms beyond the well-known .gitignore file: a per-clone .git/info/exclude file and a global excludes file set via the core.excludesFile config option. Neither of these files gets committed to the repository, unlike .gitignore, making them suited for personal scratch files and editor or OS clutter respectively. The writer says an AI coding assistant, Claude, prompted the discovery by suggesting untracked personal notes be added to .git/info/exclude.
Git 2.56 ships with over 700 non-merge commits, introducing an experimental 'git history drop' subcommand that removes a specific commit and replays subsequent history, though it fails on repositories containing merge commits. The release also expands 'git refs' with create, delete, update, and rename subcommands, and adds several smaller usability improvements like pull suggestions in 'git status' and a '--delete-merged' flag for 'git branch'.
East River Source Control, a startup operating quietly for over a year, published a post outlining why it believes existing tools like Git are struggling under the pressures of AI-driven, agentic software development. The company says it plans to announce its product soon but is first laying out its reasoning about where version control needs to evolve.
A developer describes abandoning Git for personal projects after learning of a proposal within the Git project to make Rust mandatory. Citing long experience with systems like RCS, CVS, SVN, Mercurial and Bazaar, they chose Fossil as a replacement, noting its C codebase, small footprint, and simpler workflow without a staging area.
A longtime version control industry veteran, who competed against Git with Plastic SCM and now works on Git performance at Origin, argues the field is undergoing its most significant transformation in two decades. He points to two converging pressures: AI coding agents generating commits at unprecedented volume, and growing developer interest in alternatives to GitHub's dominance.
DoltLite, a fork of SQLite that swaps its B-tree storage layer for a Git-style Prolly Tree engine, has reached Beta status at version 0.50.0 just five months after launch. The project reuses SQLite's SQL parser, analyzer and file system code untouched, while the underlying storage was rebuilt to support branching, merging, diffing and syncing like Dolt and Git. The maintainers say the work was largely completed through around 2,000 pull requests generated by AI coding agents using an orchestrator called Gas Town.