Commenters distinguish between independent reinvention and deliberate copying
5 Nov 2 12:27 AM · 9d ago · 6 comments · 1 source · development 5 of 5
Discussion clarified that the concern centers on Anthropic publishing a blog post advertising Scion while allegedly copying existing work, with one commenter noting suggestions that this "wasn't a case of Anthropic's model reinventing stuff without attribution so much as them deliberately copying existing work without attribution."
“But a clear line is when you start writing a blog post advertising your work, like Anthropic did”
andyctypesanitizer Databricks Source Control engineerAnthropic AI companyRain Paharia Technical writer/analystDurham Goode Former Facebook Source Control team lead
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What people said 15 voices · verbatim
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There are some other negative incentives with a monorepo, which show up whenever Google people touch a project with downstream dependencies. In a monorepo, API providers and API consumers are in the same place. If you want to refactor a component then you can, and then CI will catch any places you failed to fix consumers and you can fix them…
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> I recall being frustrated with that, and half-jokingly proposing that it would be good to move to a more custom storage solution or have custom indexes next to Git’s storage itself. There's surprisingly very few options for databases with good structural sharing. I think Pijul's…
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> A part of me wonders if ex-googlers have just kinda poisoned the ranks of staff engineers all over the world and gotten everyone to copy the monorepo + bazel over and over again. I think it's more that if you do multiple repositories you have to figure out policy and tooling for how they're all going to be coordinated. A monorepo means you can…
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Thank you for this write up! I love your writing style and how in depth it is! I do think the "7 people full time on a major migration (with tokens)" is an interesting strategy. That's probably enough people to really have a good idea of all the parts, that can tackle a _lot_ of different tiny issues, but (if they have the right autonomy) they can…
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I think this is bound to happen, and there are no norms right now. But a clear line is when you start writing a blog post advertising your work, like Anthropic did ...
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I remember seeing a blogpost that made the claim "if you don't have a monorepo, you don't have 'continuous integration' - you have, at best, 'very frequent integration'"
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I keep thinking "oh, it would be nice to have something like Manifold" (which, for my purposes, I understand to provide lower-latency-than-S3 access to immutable, content-addressed objects). Then I realize that, as a member of the source control team, it's probably _my_ job to build it 😅
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You'd need to make sure that you have sign-off gates for anything that changes things outside of a specific team's responsibility, but ideally you'd also want CI that cloned two different versions of the monorepo and did testing with different subsets against others. But it's not really about what is possible, it's about what is *easy*. Things…
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> In this case, you could say that Mononoke depends on magic, infinitely-scalable object storage, but this is no longer remarkable because everyone has access to it these days! Fun fact, Mononoke was one of the first users of Meta's S3 equivalent, Manifold. Though we multiplexed object writes across Manifold and MySQL (the latter used as a…
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Oh yeah, if we ever decided to write a blog post or a journal article (this is an area where we could at least plausibly publish a paper) you bet I would do a thorough literature search. Though IIRC there was some talk I saw implying that this wasn't a case of Anthropic's model reinventing stuff without attribution so much as them *deliberately*…
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> To see the impact of this in practice, compare the effort involved in building a ten-year-old Android and iOS app for the latest OS release. I thought that Android specifically is managed quite differently at Google? Is it still part of the monorepo, just synchronized with the separate public git repos?
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Is that something that we can blame on monorepos, though, or is it Google's engineering culture and its incentives, and they took advantage of a monorepo to make it possible? Facebook had a few repos and steadily switched to a monorepo following the same internal incentives, and I don't think it's the wrong choice for either of them. If well…
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This post quoting Anthropic's post: > where tools built for human scale start to strain. I can see two kinds of strain here. Human style use of tools on a magnificent scale, or some new, AI-style use of tools that requires previously-unattainable levels of resources. Too bad this isn't clarified. I bet it's human-style-use on a large scale. "AI"…
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From the depth on the post: > This makes Anthropic’s achievement significantly less impressive Didn't we all know that the whole thing was anyways generated? Claude is a thinking database, for a given set of parameters it found the perfect match and then unzipped it into a new project. It had to know the source though, thus the attribution was due…
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> you have to do the design up front because the cost of changing is high. Interesting point. If that’s the only/a major downside, could you enforce this somehow in a monorepo? Probably not, right?
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