Anthropic abandons git for custom version control system Scion

Anthropic, an American artificial intelligence company, has announced it is moving away from Git to its own version control system, Scion. The decision comes after Git could no longer handle the company's growing code changes, which increased from 2,500 daily merges in May to over 30,000 in September. Anthropic claims Scion uses only 2% of the CPU and memory of Git, significantly improving performance. CI and research tasks now take seconds instead of minutes. Scion performs key operations like commits, merges, and file history queries on the server side, while clients track local changes and manage files with minimal caching. This reduces the need for extensive local storage. Anthropic noted that most of its clients are always online, making Git's offline features less valuable. The company also highlighted that other firms would find it difficult to adopt Scion due to the need for custom code review, search, and CI tools.