An online-first version control system in this agentic era

Anthropic recently shared an article explaining a version control system (VCS) that they have been using internally to overcome their own limitations around managing their humongous monorepo. The VCS is called Scion and it flips the way how a traditional VCS like Git work. For instance, Git is built around a decentralized model where every client act as a full-fledged, offline-capable server with a complete copy of the repository. This way all these clients can work offline on their own respective copies. On the contrary, Scion assumes that all its primary clients (AI agents and automated jobs) are always online. The server that hosts the monorepo handles history, blame, commits, merges, and rebases. And so, the client doesn’t need to compute complex graph relationships locally. Instead, it maintains a bounded local object cache and relies on the server being reachable. But why did they invent this new tool in the first place? The answer lies into their workflows that involved…