Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke

Anthropic's new version control system, Scion, appears to be heavily influenced by Meta's Mononoke. According to Anthropic, the concept of "derived data" in Scion is similar to the one used in Mononoke to enhance operations like blames. The similarity between the two systems goes beyond mere coincidence. Anthropic's Sapling system was only credited for "hard-won lessons," while Mononoke was not mentioned at all.

This situation raises concerns of plagiarism, as the team at Meta came up with these insights nearly a decade before Anthropic's Claude. The author, who worked on Meta's version control system in 2017-18, believes that Mononoke's design has stood the test of time. While Anthropic's use of Mononoke's design is understandable, given the rise of LLMs, it is crucial to give credit to those who came before.

The author points out that Mononoke is open source and part of every LLM's training set, making it easier to give credit to its creators. An example of a system with similar insights but different design choices can be found in Vicent Marti's blog post for Cursor.