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Anthropic built Scion, a custom version control system, to replace Git because Claude's code generation capability pushed their merge rate from 2,500 to 30,000+ code changes per day—a scale Git's distributed design couldn't handle. The system treats clients as always-online agents and moves computation to the server, ditching Git's model of complete local repositories.
- Anthropic's monorepo became unmanageable under Git: the history alone is 100 GB, and they were doing 25 million checkouts daily for CI, which would generate 600 PB of traffic if done naively.
- Scion's core design flips Git's assumptions: clients stay thin and online, the server handles all history queries and merges, and there's no single fully-materialized copy of the repo anywhere—everything is distributed and horizontally scalable.
- The system uses "changesets" (write-ahead log entries) instead of Git commits, storing only what changed relative to the parent plus content-addressed pointers to blob storage, allowing high-throughput acceptance with no packfiles or cross-server locking needed.