Yet another Hacker News

Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke

159 points sunshowers 1 hour ago 55 comments

duhhhhh1212 1 hour ago | parent

Damn. It’s hard not to see it as plagiarism. I can only imagine the surprised Pikachu face you must have made reading that announcement from Anthropic.

dboreham 1 hour ago | parent

Similar to how git was "inspired by" BitKeeper and Monotone?

sunshowers 1 hour ago | parent

I do not think Linus has ever claimed that Git wasn't following in the footsteps of those systems.

InsideOutSanta 1 hour ago | parent

Neither has Anthropic. They mention Sapling as an inspiration.

sunshowers 59 minutes ago | parent

Scion is far more similar to Mononoke than Git is to BitKeeper.

nomel 46 minutes ago | parent

It's totally wild seeing entities being criticized for writing software based on/very similar to other open source software. Ffs, this used to be what open source software was about. It was actually the fucking point [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_movement

sunshowers 42 minutes ago | parent

Did you read my post?

> And, to be clear, I do not have a problem with Anthropic copying Mononoke’s design. (This is part of why we put out open source — to benefit humanity through the spread of good ideas.)

Followed by:

> But as LLMs continue to assist in designing new systems, they are likely to index heavily on existing designs. Mononoke is open source and in every LLM’s training set. If you ask Opus 5.5 or GPT-6 Astra (thanks Matthew Fowle) about prior art, they both immediately point out the similarities to Mononoke.

I think it is the duty of any responsible engineer to look for and cite prior art and related work, if only to compare notes.

webdood90 19 minutes ago | parent

> I think it is the duty of any responsible engineer to look for and cite prior art and related work, if only to compare notes.

Maybe 5 years ago that would be the expectation but all etiquette has been thrown out the window with AI. I think you expect too much.

duhhhhh1212 36 minutes ago | parent

It’s wild to see people rudely commenting without reading the article. It used to be that people read the article before opening their mouth.

NewsaHackO 34 minutes ago | parent

goalposts

kccqzy 12 minutes ago | parent

GNU is extremely similar to the proprietary Unix flavors that came before it. Is that a problem?

mad_vill 1 hour ago | parent

Oh wow. Being pretty new to meta and seeing the anthropic announcement I was thinking to myself “wow that sounds a lot like sapling”.

I guess that is the case.

gizajob 1 hour ago | parent

This headline is very confusing for fans of Basic Channel / Chain Reaction records.

fhdkweig 47 minutes ago | parent

It is also confusing to fans of Studio Ghibli.

6879346626 1 hour ago | parent

Is this what is expected of how to cite sources? Because if this is the expectation nobody does it.

There are two cases and only one is an issue for citations: - Mononoke was directly consulted and not attributed - Concepts were reinvented or used as a derivative (Sapling cited Mononoke and implements something similar)

For one I know Sapling, Git, and Jujutsu, but up to today I have never heard of Oxide or Mononoke and I am not exactly compelled to look up the research papers of any of them, at most I read through their high level documentation.

sunshowers 1 hour ago | parent

To be clear, Mononoke is the server-side part of the Sapling system as deployed at Meta. Scion appears to be very closely inspired by Mononoke.

BryantD 1 hour ago | parent

From the Anthropic announcement:

“Source control for huge monorepos has prior art, notably Google’s Piper and Meta’s Sapling, so we were able to build Scion with their hard-won lessons in mind.”

Mononoke is a component of Sapling, as I understand it. In fact, the repo link provided in this article links to a subdirectory of the Sapling repo. I’m not totally sure I understand the complaint.

sunshowers 1 hour ago | parent

The level of inspiration goes well beyond "hard-won lessons". Something like Lore (slop design document aside) can claim that level of inspiration. Here the data model is a direct copy, down to the terminology.

To be uncharitable, this is marketing for Anthropic's impending IPO.

whiplash451 55 minutes ago | parent

I see correlation instead. You IPO when you grow like crazy. You build something like scion when you grow like crazy.

muglug 35 minutes ago | parent

And I think Not Invented Here has turned into Not Invented By Our Agents at many places.

simonw 26 minutes ago | parent

Why is that bad?

Mononoke and Sapling are open source systems. Why shouldn't new software take inspiration from how they are designed?

sunshowers 25 minutes ago | parent

From my post:

> And, to be clear, I do not have a problem with Anthropic copying Mononoke’s design. (This is part of why we put out open source — to benefit humanity through the spread of good ideas.)

> Giving credit to those that came before us is now easier — and more important — than ever. There is no longer an excuse.

simonw 23 minutes ago | parent

So you'd like Anthropic to update their announcement so it credits Mononoke in addition to crediting Sapling?

Fair enough.

sunshowers 22 minutes ago | parent

Yes, and I would like it to explicitly say that their data model is very similar to Mononoke's, and avoid even the appearance of the idea that Claude came up with it de novo.

LogicalRisk 17 minutes ago | parent

"I built a thing in the style of X" (which is even more charitable than what Anthropic piece said) is different than "I incorporated X from Y to build a thing this way."

solid_fuel 26 minutes ago | parent

> Here the data model is a direct copy, down to the terminology.

That’s not surprising to me - they designed and built it using their LLMs, of course it’s duplicating prior work. That’s essentially the core of what LLMs do, after all.

teaearlgraycold 56 minutes ago | parent

> hard-won lessons in mind

Another Claude-written article

bayindirh 52 minutes ago | parent

> Another Claude-written article

This is the load-bearing seam.

wakamoleguy 1 hour ago | parent

Agents tend to act differently than humans here. I would have expected most humans to notice and acknowledge the connection. Passing it off as one's own insight definitely feels like plagiarism. Agents are generally not equipped to deal with this type of thing, since looking for prior art is a detour from their goal or an exercise in post-hoc rationalization of knowledge built into the weights.

Whether it is plagiarism or hacking, the buck has to stop with the operators. It's not a good look.

forrestthewoods 55 minutes ago | parent

I really really wish Sapling could be used externally. It is by-and-large TheWay.

Centralized, virtual file system, all commits automatically on cloud, large binary files totally fine, Mercurial CLI. It’s fantastic. People who only use Git really don’t understand how much better things can be.

Shish2k 49 minutes ago | parent

Working for a few years at Facebook, and then returning to the normal world, it was like stepping back in time -- I really think that the mainstream git culture (by which I mostly mean "github") achieved a local maxima around 2012, and has been holding the industry back since :(

(Like GH finally has some support for stacks, 15 years late, with an implementation which is somehow more complicated and less powerful than the prior art...)

forrestthewoods 41 minutes ago | parent

> [Git/GitHub] achieved a local maxima around 2012, and has been holding the industry back since :(

I agree so hard. It’s inertia is too strong and we’ve stalled progress for a decade.

cmrx64 53 minutes ago | parent

hi rain :) Anthropic’s post reminded me a lot of your work, glad this is getting some visibility. do you think the “time has come” for some of these ideas that previously may not have spread because they need too much learning to appreciate? I wonder what new norms will emerge in creative collectives.

sunshowers 36 minutes ago | parent

Thanks! Yeah, I think overall several more organizations are going to reach the scale that Meta reached a while ago. I'm not sure if they'll go in the monorepo or polyrepo direction, though; I can see arguments both ways.

flakiness 47 minutes ago | parent

Can anyone explain the difference between sampling vs mononoke?

Edit: I was too lazy. From the README: "Mononoke is the server built for the Sapling Source Control System"

sunshowers 44 minutes ago | parent

It's a bit complicated:

1. Sapling can refer to either the system as a whole, or just the client people use (`sl`, forked from `hg`).

2. EdenFS is the virtualized FUSE filesystem (closely modeled after SrcFS at Google).

3. Mononoke is the distributed system that implements the backend server storage + the API they describe for checkout-less writes.

All three come together to form the core of the Meta source control experience. From what I can tell, Anthropic built its own version of 1 and copied 2 and 3, plus also built out a code review tool separately.

MeetingsBrowser 45 minutes ago | parent

When Fable first released, I had it "one shot" a project using an initial spec and a team of agents. I was blown away with how good the results were.

And then I noticed some links to images from random small github projects and realized somewhere along the way agents had searched for existing projects and copied almost everything.

I wonder if something similar happened here on a larger scale.

hetspookjee 39 minutes ago | parent

I think a lot is memory really. For fun you can try pointing just about any model against the older kaggle challenges and it’ll come up with more or less the winning solution from memory. It’s here where you see a Gemma 27b perform about the same as opus 5.5

elmer2 35 minutes ago | parent

It's the same for CTF challenges. Many get 'solved' because a writup was found and steps were followed.

bushido 30 minutes ago | parent

GitHub is to agents what StackOverflow was to developers back in the day (in a meme kinda way).

More seriously, I'm curious if you checked on the licensing of said codebases, were they permissive or strong copyleft?

jauntywundrkind 40 minutes ago | parent

Woo, I got cited. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50076122

Another effort I couldn't have done without Astra. Even more so. All I did, the only reason I got cited, was because I'd asked Astra.

sunshowers 39 minutes ago | parent

Thanks!

arjie 32 minutes ago | parent

The company is predominantly FAANG people. They’re going to just rebuild what they know. I don’t think you need any kind of conspiracy here. One year into ad tech and everyone was using HyperLogLog. Everyone was using 20 years ago LMAX-style disruptor, and single threaded event queue powered by loop called governor. It’s just what happens. People carry in their head what they know.

IP maximalism is the present zeitgeist but that’s just how knowledge flows.

sunshowers 30 minutes ago | parent

Help me understand. When you write a post about designing a system, do you not do some basic diligence about what existing systems you resemble?

Open source is not IP maximalist by any means. I am merely asking that the appropriate credit be provided.

arjie 25 minutes ago | parent

No. I actually don’t do that and I don’t think that all human work should be O(n) deduplication gated.

Written about it here before: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-09-08/Intellectual...

It isn’t something I care very much about, except when it’s used as a certificate of achievement. I almost never do literature searches with an attempt to dedupe. I only ever do it to see if someone has explored something better than I have. That’s often the case but other times it is not.

sunshowers 24 minutes ago | parent

Okay, well, I actually do think it is part of the basic duty of an engineer to do that.

arjie 21 minutes ago | parent

I see. Well, I suppose we differ on this matter of opinion. May the chips land where they may.

gavinray 4 minutes ago | parent

I do, solely on the basis of "there are a lot of smart(er) people in the world, and very few truly novel problems".

The first step in approaching anything difficult is seeing whether someone else has already solved it.

kccqzy 15 minutes ago | parent

Absolutely not. When I create projects I only credit other existing systems if they are a direct inspiration. If I independently come up with the same idea as someone else I see no reason for me to do the due diligence and credit them.

sunshowers 4 minutes ago | parent

Okay, well, in this case (even accepting your argument) I've been told there is direct overlap in contributors so there is no feasible way they couldn't have known.

exe34 30 minutes ago | parent

Once it's been through the slopotron, the provenance is laundered away.