If I credit my newly introduced car as inspired by Corvette, then sure, it might be ok not to mention the engine (Mononoke is the server part of Sapling)

However if my new car's engine is a near copy of the one in the Corvette, and my announcement gushes about the engine using the same terms the Corvette design team invented...

Then can you see how a mention might be nice?

To me, this sounds like it's less about the technology, whether it's open source or not, and more about the people in the room that are influencing the design, direction, and implementation of it. All of which are very likely to have previous positions at major companies responsible for the products mentioned.

Perhaps if there is any ambiguity, it's intentional on the part of caution around intellectual property provenance.

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.

> hard-won lessons in mind

Another Claude-written article

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?

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

It is like a vacuum cleaner.

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

I asked it to sketch out something from a research paper, to later find out most of the code was translated from another implementation of the paper.

The most horrible thing is they don't read their own code. They read the "intent"

On one hand they say AI will end the world. On other hand they say well, we just merge PR by reading the "intent" which I think is the AI summary

I think it's worse than just IPO juicing. I think it's "look what our agents can do" and also pushing more on the "software engineers are becoming obsolete" line that Dario public-pronounces. Getting high on their own supply.

Projects seem to be getting approved or pushed there purely on the basis of showing off that they can vibe-build infrastructure.

Which.. yes, you can. But now maintain it. Understand it. Manage thousands of people using it. Those are part of the reasons we re-use proven solutions rather than rolling our own -- not just because the coding part is hard.

Same thing happened with the Bun rewrite. "Oh wow, look what we can do! What's that, nobody adult supervision telling us that this is a bad idea? Let's go!"

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.

Sapling does a bit more than cite Mononoke. And Oxide was not involved in Mononoke's development. These are kind of details that would not be expected of a casual user. However, when valuations soar into the trillions, we can expect companies with dedicated writing staff to communicate attribution properly.

They mentioned Sapling in the post and even hyperlinked it

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.

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.

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.

Rebuilding what you know from the previous FAANG you worked at is expected on the whole.

What is douchey is presenting the whole thing as some sort of intense novelty and stroke of genius required in the age of agents when it's just doing what the other BigCo companies did to scale their monorepos already. Like a decade (or more) ago.

The reality it is when I first read the thing I was -- as a Xoogler -- like "Oh, yeah, so, like Piper & SrcFs and the stuff that Meta also does" and really didn't understand why they wouldn't have started with something off the shelf inside of vibe-conjuring a clone that they would then have to support

To me it speaks ill, again, of the engineering culture at Anthropic. "We do these things not because they are useful, but because they are novel."

Don't they have better things to do at Anthropic than building their own source control or rewriting Bun from scratch in another language? Like, y'know, basic site reliability? Or a coding harness that doesn't eat multiple GB of RAM?

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

It is also confusing to fans of Studio Ghibli.

Monolake, not Mononoke?

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...)

The startup I work at is working on exactly this. So I agree :)

(Okay not literally exactly, for example, jj/git not hg. But the vibe is the same.)

Thanks!