[Digital Today] Anthropic said on its company blog on Oct. 13 local time that it developed an in-house version control system, Scion, and completed a switch from Git in five months.

Anthropic said source management emerged as the biggest development bottleneck as Claude poured out code. The number of code changes merged each day rose from about 2,500 in May this year to more than 30,000 in September. Main-branch history alone is nearing 100 GB, and code checkouts for continuous integration (CI) run at about 25 million a day.

Anthropic said it held out by running hundreds of Git mirrors but hit limits. A Git mirror is a replica server that keeps an exact copy of the original code repository.

The company said Scion does not replicate an entire repository. The server handles history lookups, commits and merges, and the client pulls only the data it needs. It provides all functions through APIs, so many tasks run without a local repository.

The company said the impact is substantial. Infrastructure size, measured by CPU and memory, fell to 1/200 of the previous Git mirror infrastructure. Checkout times were cut from minutes to seconds. It also secured 25 percent of CPU capacity in CI alone.

Scion and the code review tool Antique were developed by 7 people. Anthropic said such a system would previously have taken years to build. The first version of the pipeline to move Git data to Scion was mostly written by people, but after Claude Mythos Preview rewrote it, memory use fell to 1/20 and speed increased fourfold, the company said.

Engineering roles also changed. All participating engineers said Claude was better than they were at writing code. Engineers took charge of system design and trade-off decisions. Engineers were also responsible for blocking Claude when it broke key constraints.

Even so, Anthropic drew a line, saying Scion cannot replace Git for general use. It said it expects similar problems to become common within 6 to 12 months and will work with GitHub, GitLab and the open-source community.