Anthropic’s Scion: A Four Year Project in Five Months

I’m trying something new, under the name First Takes. These will be quick write-ups of ideas I find interesting. If this goes well, expect to see these more often than my traditional posts, and covering a wider range of topics. If you’d like to only receive my traditional, high-effort pieces, see the instructions at the end of this post.Anthropic’s engineering team just dropped a fascinating post: Redesigning source control at Anthropic. It describes a major engineering project undertaken in a jaw-droppingly short period of time. My Twitter feed is awash in breathless reports of miracles accomplished overnight using coding agents, but this project stands out as a well-documented example of serious engineering that takes full advantage of the latest tools. AI coding tools are no longer limited to vibe-coding lightweight apps; they are revolutionizing the craft of building large-scale, mission-critical distributed systems.The project in a nutshellAny serious software development effort…