Anthropic details Scion, a git replacement for its monorepo, built by seven engineers with Claude in five months, as daily merges rose from 2.5K in May to 30K+ (Anthropic)
As our merges per day grew more than tenfold, source control became our biggest development bottleneck.
Anthropic faced a significant development bottleneck due to the exponential growth in daily merges from around 2,500 in May 2026 to over 30,000 by September of the same year. This surge in code changes necessitated a more efficient version control system, prompting the team to build Scion, an in-house version control system, in just five months.
The engineers, aided by Anthropic's AI assistant Claude, developed Scion with the unique workload in mind, focusing on clients that are always online. Unlike Git's decentralized model, Scion's server-centric approach enables faster data retrieval, reducing the massive data transfer requirements of their monorepo. With Scion, Anthropic can programatically query the source control system, eliminating the need for local repository copies and allowing for more efficient CI jobs and tooling.
The new system also offers horizontal scalability, addressing the limitations faced with Git's centralized model and the strain on their operations as the repository continued to grow.
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