- Source control is the tool developers use to store and combine code change history. Anthropic said that daily code merges rose from about 2,500 in 2026 May to more than September 30,000, and that the existing git-based system became its biggest development bottleneck.
- The company explained that git is designed for many people working separately offline. Because its always-on AI agents and automated jobs read the repository inside the company, it built a new system called Scion and moved the monorepo off git in about 5 months.
- According to measurements the company made in its own environment, Scion's infrastructure needs 200 times less CPU and memory than the existing git mirror infrastructure, and code checkouts for CI and research work became faster, going from minutes to seconds. The source does not include externally verified data.
- The source presents this work as a case in which a team of 7 people built Scion together with Antique, a code review tool. Engineers reviewed the intent of changes rather than reading every line of code, and their role was to keep AI from creating unnecessarily complex structures.
O: If you are on an infrastructure team worried about long CI checkout times, it is worth checking whether fetching only the directories you need, instead of a full clone, fits your repository.
X: The Scion performance figures are results Anthropic reported for its own monorepo environment, and the source contains no externally verified data, so they are hard to apply directly to repositories of a different scale.