anthropic built their own git. Most interesting mental shift here, and if you buy that changing code happens more and more autonomously, faster*, then this will make a ton of sense:

Git was designed so that any client could serve the repo. Fully offline,
your *build time* dev stack is never in the hot path for your *run time* deployment.

Anthropics new version control system (VCS) does not work offline. There’s a central server which must be reachable for clients to function. They found a bunch of benefits to doing it this way.

At first this sounds wild. Today if GitHub is down, you can’t pull or push or merge. Imagine if you couldn’t COMMIT if GitHub was offline.

But in a (someday, maybe) future where code changes 1000x per day with no human in the loop, then your VCS is basically part of production anyway, so you might as well lean into keeping it online with a team of SREs etc, and then you get all sorts of interesting perf benefits for CLIENTS because you can offload some processing to server and re architect what all needs to be stored where

* I’m not sure I buy this, but the labs are certainly pushing “don’t read the code, leverage signals like “outage, feature request, user behavior change” as STIMULUS to agents to drive change in deployed code” as the future, so it lines up

Does that make sense? Are we going back to CVS instead of distributed? Will there be another swing back to distributed 5-10 years after things like Scion become Mainstream?