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Fellow Aiden Precision Coffee Maker is $100 Off
Michael Carrick carrying on but senior Man Utd figures concerned by poor performances
French weekend protests to be limited to union demos only, says Macron
Investors break down how founders can raise a Series A today
Ilhan Omar says 'bizarre' pre-dawn raid on her home is forcing her to move out
Exclusive discounts from CBS Mornings Deals
What to know about the PHP bug affecting 70% of world's websites
Crest Whitestrips are 24% off today, beating their Prime Day price
Markets tumble as concerns about Iran war and high AI spending collide
Pete Hegseth’s staff break priceless historic globe he requested for office
Hegseth’s aides, who attempted to move 30in fragile globe themselves, dropped it during relocation, army officials say
A priceless pre-second world war globe coveted by the US defence secretary Pete Hegseth for his office in the Pentagon was damaged by his staff in a botched attempt to relocate it, army officials have admitted.
Photographs published by the Washington Post on Thursday show the shattered 30-inch Eisenhower globe, said to have been used by Dwight D Eisenhower, the 34th US president, as he plotted the D-day landings as allied supreme commander.
Continue reading...Shamonda virus detected in human for first time in France
Investigations under way to determine whether virus normally found in livestock contributed to man’s death
A man in France has become the first human known to have contracted Shamonda virus, with investigations under way to explore whether it contributed to his death.
Shamonda virus is a type of bunyavirus and is spread by bites from infected midges. According to the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety, in animals such as cattle, sheep and goats it can cause diarrhoea, lack of appetite and a decline in milk yield, “as well as abortions and congenital abnormalities in newborn calves, lambs and kids”.
Continue reading...Pete Hegseth’s staff break priceless historic globe he requested for office
Hegseth’s aides, who attempted to move Eisenhower globe themselves, dropped it during relocation, army officials say
A priceless pre-second world war globe coveted by the US defence secretary Pete Hegseth for his office in the Pentagon was damaged by his staff in a botched attempt to relocate it, army officials have admitted.
Photographs published by the Washington Post on Thursday show the shattered 30-inch Eisenhower globe, said to have been used by Dwight D Eisenhower, the 34th US president, as he plotted the D-day landings as allied supreme commander.
Continue reading...Iran threatens to strike oil and AI facilities across Gulf if US and Israel renew attacks
Iran’s security chiefs say there will be ‘zero red lines’ if Trump and Netanyahu attack again
Iran will strike oil facilities, undersea cables, datacentres and AI facilities across as many as seven countries in the Gulf in the event of a fresh US-Israeli attack, Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, has said.
Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Mohammad Ghalibaf, the hardliner who led Iran’s negotiations with the US to end the conflict between the two countries, said Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed in principle on an attack, but could not guarantee a successful outcome. He added: “We see the next conflict as an existential threat. The third war in two years means a threat to existence. Our strategy is ‘zero red lines’.”
Continue reading...Glee’s pro-LGBTQ+ vision captured 2010s hope. Can a reboot handle Trump’s America? | Alim Kheraj
The beloved high school TV show is returning in a different political climate. I’m skeptical that Ryan Murphy has the nuance this moment needs
For months, Ryan Murphy has been discussing Glee. In July, he expressed his love for the musical comedy drama he created. In September, he said that he had finished writing a pilot for a potential reboot, adding that he had reached out to some of the cast about a reunion. And now it is official: Disney+ and Hulu have commissioned a Glee revival.
Glee, which ran for six seasons between 2009 and 2015, was a cultural juggernaut during its initial tenure. The show won six Emmys, four Golden Globes and made stars of actors including Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff, Chris Colfer, Darren Criss and the late Cory Monteith and Naya Rivera. Centred on the trials of New Directions, a scrappy show choir at the fictional McKinley high school in Ohio, the show became known for its peppy covers of show tunes, 80s power pop hits such as Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ (a Glee signature), 2010s chart-toppers and some truly baffling mashups (the amalgamation of Scissor Sisters’ Let’s Have a Kiki and Turkey Lurkey Time from Promises, Promises remains … a choice).
Continue reading...Heartbreak, hope and human imperfection: Leonard Cohen’s greatest songs – ranked!
A decade after his final album, and his death, we rate the best of the Canadian singer-songwriter who brought a deep, spiritual wisdom to love and grief
The synth-heavy production on 1988’s I’m Your Man has always been divisive – even Leonard Cohen’s longtime collaborator Anjani Thomas subsequently expressed misgivings – but on its opening track, it really works. The Pet Shop Boys-ish arrangement chafes against Cohen’s growling vocal, amplifying First We Take Manhattan’s shiver-inducing sense of brooding menace.
Continue reading...Ali G: Who Iz I? review – Sacha Baron Cohen’s high-stakes satire punches up and down with spectacular bad taste
Baron Cohen’s live-ammo prankster is back, 20 years on, but has to battle with his own irrelevance in search of big laughs and the approval of a new generation
If you liked Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G the first time around, you’ll like this less; if you disliked it, you’ll dislike this more; if you suspected it was racist, you’ll be more emboldened to say so – especially as Baron Cohen has dreamed up a whole new character apparently to pre-empt and mock precisely that objection. Broad and crass as it often is – in fact always is – this Ali G sequel is sometimes funny: the athletic vigour of our hero’s pranking and punking is like the umpteenth Jackass film at which you might find yourself laughing, and Baron Cohen blunders with the semi-intentional force of an XL bully into the issue of whether jokes are still allowed.
Unlike the first film, Ali G in Da House from 2002, this is not a full written-through narrative. It is basically another live-ammo series of hoaxes with some spectacular bad taste perpetrated upon the deserving and less deserving; it satirises the shamelessness of anti-woke free speech martyrs, punching up and down with grossout cringe, and the targets include some big names who shouldn’t be revealed here. There are two other subordinate characters: Erran Morad, a sinister Mossad/IDF officer turned US security consultant (who appeared in Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? TV series), and a new figure: Dr Nira Cain-N’Degrocello, a grotesquely supercilious white liberal who is the self-appointed scourge of cultural appropriation. The dupes are built into a big silly climax fabricated with body doubles and (presumably) covert reshooting.
Continue reading...Astronomers challenge dating of Van Gogh’s Starry Night
Study suggests much-loved work was based on a real dawn sky in July 1889 rather than just the artist’s rich imagination
It was long assumed to be a product of Vincent van Gogh’s rich imagination – but scientific sleuthing now suggests The Starry Night may be based on a real dawn sky.
Researchers say the celestial bodies depicted in the famous painting match the sky the Dutch artist may have seen on about 22 July 1889, a month later than the usual date given for the work.
Continue reading...French borrowing costs overtake US amid budget turmoil
France’s bond market hit by another bout of selling as country recovers from weekend protests
French borrowing costs continued to rise on Thursday, as investors fret that France’s government is struggling to pass a federal budget after public protests gripped the country.
France’s bond market was hit with another bout of selling, with the difference between French and German 10-year borrowing costs – a metric for the risk premium attached to French debt – rising to its highest level in almost 15 years.
Continue reading...Russian missiles pound Kyiv as Moscow says over 800 Ukrainian drones downed
Briton Slater, 18, to make practice debut in Mexico
Spotify’s current AI bet is about being the music service that agents choose
The Price of Faustian Bargains with Trump
For the past week, President Donald Trump and his aides have traded accusations with Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, over who restricted Ukraine’s access to a military-grade version of Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite network product that Ukrainian forces depend on to intercept incoming Russian projectiles and target Russian launchers.
Musk blamed Trump and the U.S. military for the decision, writing on X, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Trump insisted that his administration did not disrupt Ukraine’s access to the network. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that decisions about Ukraine’s access to the network were in the hands of SpaceX and Musk and not the White House. The Wall Street Journal and CBS News reported that the decision had been Musk’s.
On Mar. 9, 2025, Musk had promised that, whatever his disagreements with U.S. policy toward Ukraine, “Starlink will never turn off its terminals. We would never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining chip.” Critics have raced to blame Musk alone, casting him as the puppeteer behind the throne, the first business titan to achieve what William Randolph Hearst, Marcus Alonzo Hanna, and J.P. Morgan only aspired to: a latter-day Cornelius Vanderbilt, who is reputed to have scoffed, “Law? What do I care about the law? Hain’t I got the power?”
That gets the story backward. Musk’s businesses are uniquely dependent on the blessings of Washington: a fifth of SpaceX’s revenue comes directly from federal agencies, its satellites require federal authorization to launch and operate, and the possible merger of Tesla and SpaceX will live or die by the decisions of federal regulators.
Confronted with a White House that appeared determined to squeeze Ukraine, whatever its public denials, Musk faced a familiar choice for anyone dependent on political patronage: capitulate, resist, or retreat into ambiguity. He chose ambiguity, revealing the limits of his power. The wealthiest man in the world still answers to someone else.
The finger-pointing creates a haze of ambiguity, giving both men plausible deniability. The apparent aim is to force Ukraine into a settlement by depriving it of the means to resist: a way to secure a quick, short-term peace and lower oil prices at the expense of Ukrainian sovereignty and international law.
But that calculation mistakes capitulation for stability. Rewarding President Vladimir Putin of Russia could encourage him to test NATO’s resolve in the Baltic states, Poland, Finland, or Sweden, raising the risk of a direct confrontation with the alliance. It would also signal to other U.S. adversaries that sufficient pressure can fold Washington’s commitments.
For now, Trump could claim to have brokered peace between Russia and Ukraine, even if the peace he delivers is the silence of a defeated country. Musk can evade responsibility by presenting himself as merely one supplier among many across the defense industry whose failures have weakened Ukraine’s defenses. He could point to weapons manufacturer RTX, whose Patriot interceptors are so scarce that Ukraine reportedly ran out of them this month, or to delays in delivering F-16s manufactured by Lockheed Martin that were promised two years earlier.
Faustian bargains
Beneath the public quarrel lies a familiar pattern: surrender political independence and retain the freedom to accumulate extraordinary wealth. The historians who have studied Putin’s Russia most closely would recognize the pattern instantly. Timothy Snyder has written that Russia’s oligarchs “were tamed, but not by a neutral state.” Rather, “Putin himself became the head oligarch, the boss of bosses.” Anne Applebaum echoed the insight and described Putin as making himself “godfather to all of the other oligarchs.”
Putin laid out the terms of that bargain on Jul. 28, 2000, when he met with 21 of Russia's richest men in the Kremlin, less than three months after his inauguration. The message was simple. The fortunes they had amassed in the chaos of the 1990s were theirs to keep, as long as they stayed out of politics entirely. Keep your distance from power, and the state would leave you alone.
Those who refused the deal faced immediate reprisals. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, whose television networks refused to bend the knee, were driven into exile within the year. Gusinsky’s NTV was seized by state-controlled Gazprom. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, funded opposition parties and lectured the Kremlin on corruption. In Oct. 2003 he was pulled off his plane at a Siberian airport and arrested. He spent a decade in prison and watched his oil company, Yukos, dismantled and its assets transferred to state-controlled companies.
Those who accepted the deal are the ones who got rich, and they have never been richer. Forbes counted a record 155 Russian billionaires this year, the fourth straight year that number has grown, with a combined fortune of $696.5 billion—up 11% from the previous year, even as Putin’s war against Ukraine entered its fifth year. Their collective wealth reportedly now exceeds the bank term deposits of the rest of Russia’s population: 155 oligarchs with fortunes greater than the savings of roughly 146 million ordinary Russians.
“Oligarchies are unstable,” Snyder has observed. “Members disappear.” For those who might have forgotten the terms of Putin’s bargain, an instructive reminder came in 2023, when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, did the one thing the bargain forbade: he challenged the Kremlin’s authority. Prigozhin seized a military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and sent his forces toward Moscow. His column advanced to within 125 miles of the capital before he agreed to stand down under a deal brokered by Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator.
Putin publicly called the mutiny treason, then appeared to forgive him. Two months later, on Aug. 23, 2023, Prigozhin’s private jet crashed north of Moscow, killing everyone aboard. The Kremlin denied involvement, the U.S. intelligence concluded that the plane had been blown up, and The Wall Street Journal later reported that the operation had been ordered by Putin’s Security Council chief. Putin’s eulogy, delivered the next day, described Prigozhin as a man who had “made serious mistakes in life.” No oligarch in Russia needed the rest of the sentence spelled out.
Prigozhin’s fate is only the most spectacular entry on a longer, murkier list. Since the invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, at least 85 Russian businessmen and officials have reportedly died in unexplained or violent circumstances, many of them figures in the energy industry. Among the dead are three Lukoil executives: board member Alexander Subbotin, who died in May 2022 after a visit to a “shaman” outside Moscow; chairman Ravil Maganov, who fell from a sixth-floor window that September; and vice president Vitaly Robertus, who was found dead in his office in March 2024.
In April 2022, two former energy and banking executives were found dead alongside their families. Vladislav Avayev, a former Gazprombank vice president, was found shot dead in his Moscow apartment with his wife and 13-year-old daughter. Sergei Protosenya, a former Novatek executive, was found hanged at a rented villa in Lloret de Mar, Spain, with his wife and daughter stabbed to death inside. Catalan police concluded that Protosenya had killed his family, then himself. His son rejected that finding, insisting that his father had been in good spirits and had no reasons to kill them and himself.
Transneft vice president Andrei Badalov fell from a 17th-floor window in July 2025. The Moscow Times has counted 18 such fatal falls from windows since 2002. Three days later, Russia’s transport minister, Roman Starovoit, was found shot dead in his car hours after Putin fired him. Another transport official died of supposedly acute heart failure the same day.
A shadow over America
Putin’s Russia offers an extreme and grotesque example of the bargain. Yet some critics see an emerging American version, in a far less violent form. Snyder and Applebaum have warned that Western billionaires risk repeating the mistakes of Russia’s oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin, believing they can manage a strongman for profit, only to discover that he is managing them.
Musk spent more than $277 million to help elect Donald Trump, took a desk in the West Wing, and ran the Department of Government Efficiency like a man who believed he was co-president. When that arrangement flamed out in May 2025, he tried to exercise independent political power by turning against Trump, calling his signature legislation, the Big Beautiful Bill, a “disgusting abomination.” Musk threatened to form a third political party and then briefly launched one. He even taunted Trump about Jeffrey Epstein, posting that the president “is in the Epstein files.”
After Trump publicly mused about terminating his contracts, Musk quickly retreated. He deleted the posts, and conceded that they “went too far.” He returned to the fold, shook Trump’s hand at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, accepted the National Medal of Science from him this month, and became the biggest known donor of the 2026 midterms, giving at least $366 million to Republican groups. He has grown vastly richer in the process: SpaceX’s June IPO made him the world’s first trillionaire, while the company remains the U.S. government’s dominant launch provider, with competitors such as Blue Origin winning only a fraction of the contracts.
Musk’s retreat illustrates the bargain: surrender the freedom to oppose the president and preserve the ability to enrich yourself. By that measure, Musk’s political defeat has come with an extraordinary financial windfall. He won by losing. The throttling of Starlink in Ukraine appears to fit this pattern. Last week, after Trump demanded that Ukraine stop striking Russian refineries and Kyiv did not comply, its access to a military-grade version of Starlink was restricted and responsibility disappeared into a haze of accusation and denial.
The costs of such Faustian bargains fall on everyone excluded from them. In Russia, soldiers die at the front by the hundreds of thousands while politically compliant billionaires accumulate obscene fortunes. In Ukraine, drone operators lost contact with their interceptors in mid-flight last week while Russian missiles were in the air; the consequences of a disrupted connection are immediate and potentially fatal. Other customers face the question: can a contract with Starlink be relied upon?
In America, democratic government rests on the principle that neither political office nor private places anyone above the law. Businesses must be free to challenge a president without fearing retaliation, and their owners must remain accountable for their conduct. Those protections help distinguish America from an authoritarian dictatorship like Putin’s Russia.
The Starlink saga does not suggest that America has become Russia. But it raises a troubling question: is political obedience becoming the price of commercial success in America? Putin’s oligarchs struck that bargain in 2000 and have been collecting on it ever since. Whether Americans accept a version of it will depend on how forcefully our institutions and business leaders defend our freedom to say no.
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[Перевод] Надоело платить за VPS — превратил старый смартфон в Linux‑сервер
Однажды мне надоело платить за VPS, ресурсов которого едва хватало для запуска Chrome. В поисках альтернативы я вспомнил про без дела лежащий CMF Phone 1 и решил превратить его в полноценный сервер для личных сервисов. Рассказываю, как удалось запустить Linux-приложения на Android, автоматизировать развёртывание и обеспечить доступ из любой сети — и с какими неожиданными проблемами столкнулся в процессе.
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Air Governance: Manage AI Agents, Access, and Spend Throughout Your Organization
Today, JetBrains Air Governance becomes generally available. Formerly known as JetBrains Central, this is the organization layer of JetBrains Air, a system of products for agentic development. Air Governance gives you one place to manage which AI agents, models, and providers your teams use, set spending limits, and see what that usage costs and delivers. It works with Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI, Junie, and other ACP-compatible agents, across various developer surfaces, including IDEs, the CLI, web browsers, and mobile.
Air Governance is now available to all JetBrains organizational customers, with both free and paid plans available to meet the needs of diverse teams.
Why we built Air Governance
Most engineering teams now use several AI tools from different providers at the same time. They work with AI agents via an IDE, CLI, or web interface, and they switch between Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Junie, and others. Because each tool comes with its own contract, dashboard, and admin settings, it’s hard to get the full picture of who uses which agents and models, how much AI is costing the company, and whether it is actually helping.
We had the same problem at JetBrains. Our AI spend grew roughly tenfold in the first half of 2026, and our first cross-vendor usage report took four days to compile by hand. We built a suite of tools to address this problem, and those tools became Air Governance, which now helps manage the agentic usage of roughly 2,300 people at JetBrains every month.
Air Governance allows admins to manage AI usage through one console. It works across vendors, which means developers can use the agents and models that fit their tasks. When a new agent or model comes out, you can simply add it to the same policies. There is no new contract or separate admin setup.
Managing AI throughout your organization
In the console, you can:
- Set AI credit limits for individual users, teams, and service accounts, so budgets are enforced rather than just reported.
- Manage AI providers and set up centralized BYOK: Use JetBrains AI, or connect your own OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, or Google Vertex AI accounts.
- Define which AI agents are approved for use throughout the organization.
- Configure MCP servers at the company level, so everyone works with the same approved external tools.
- Create AI policies that combine approved providers, models, agents, and credit limits for different groups of users.
Track your costs and what they deliver
Spending more on AI is easy. Explaining to leadership what that spend delivers is much harder. Air Governance allows you to track both cost and impact across all your agents:
- AI costs by user: See where your budget goes, down to each developer.
- AI costs by agent: Compare spend across Junie, Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI, and other agents.
- AI costs by model and provider: Understand which models drive your bill.
- AI outcome metrics: See how AI is changing how your developers work. Metrics include the split between human-authored and AI-generated code, as well as how much code is AI-generated or AI-modified.
For details on how each metric is calculated, see the AI analytics documentation.
What’s next
Air will evolve through a series of releases, and Air Governance will follow the same approach. Here are some of the capabilities we’re working on:
- MCP server propagation to third-party CLIs, so company-approved tools reach every agent, not just JetBrains ones.
- GitHub Copilot support through Air Gateway, our connector for third-party CLIs.
- Connections to cloud agents through Air Gateway.
- Advanced AI analytics.
- Credit limits and custom pricing for BYOK models.
- The ability to manage skills across teams.
Get started with Air Governance
Air Governance is now available for all organizations as part of the Business plan, which costs USD 20 per month for each developer with AI access. Developers don’t need individual AI licenses, and they draw on a shared pool of AI credits, which your organization buys separately and which cover AI usage across JetBrains products and connected agents.
Existing JetBrains customers can explore Air Governance directly in the console (admin access required).
Join the webinar: see Air Governance in action on November 18, 4:00–5:00 PM CET. Our product team will walk you through access and usage policies, spending limits, costs and usage analytics, and answer your questions live.
The Pulse: Anthropic builds its own source control system
Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from last week’s issue of The Pulse. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
Interesting information from Anthropic about why the company moved off Git and built its own custom source control system. From their engineering blog (emphasis mine):
“At Anthropic, coding is no longer the bottleneck to building systems or doing research. Claude is able to autonomously iterate on research loops, micro-optimize complex programs, and build new services from the ground up at a speed and scale we haven’t seen before. The bottleneck, now, is all of the developer infrastructure built for human scale: source control, builds, and CI.
In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day. We don’t expect this rate of growth to slow down anytime soon; the latent demand for merging code is practically infinite, and every bottleneck we remove immediately leads to a further increase in the amount of code we produce.”
That’s a 12x increase in PRs in a four-month period! Interestingly, just a year ago, I shared how I had gathered Google was preparing for a similar tenfold increase across its broader infrastructure. From the deepdive published in July 2025:
“Google is preparing for 10x more code to be shipped. A former Google Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) told me: ‘What I’m hearing from SRE friends is that they are preparing for 10x the lines of code making their way into production.’
If any company has data on the likely impact of AI tools, it’s Google. 10x as much code generated will likely also mean 10x more code reviews, deployments, feature flags and source control footprint.”
Back to Anthropic, a few things about the company are different from many other tech businesses:
- Use of a monorepo. Like most large tech companies, Anthropic has a massive monorepo, where the working copy itself is 25GB in size.
- 25 million git checkouts per day, just for CI! All ~3,000 staff extensively use parallel Claude agents – typically 10-15 per engineer – so a lot of pull requests are created; somewhere in the region of 30,000 per day. All these PRs trigger a massive number of checkouts, mostly from the CI system.
- Nearly all clients are always online. Git was built on the assumption that clients go offline at various times, and that when they come back up, they need to catch up with branches and merge their changes into the repo. However, when clients are always connected to the corporate internet – like at Anthropic – this assumption no longer holds. Design decisions to accommodate offline clients mean inefficient checkouts and more data transferred than necessary.
- Hard to horizontally scale git. Scaling git is done by running git mirrors: replicating git repositories across several mirror nodes. A primary git server accepts the writes, pushes out to all mirrors, and clients fetch from various mirrors. Anthropic ran hundreds of git mirrors, but found that once their repo outgrew the mirrors’ disk capacity, they could no longer scale the repo.
So, Anthropic created a new source control system, which is called ‘Scion’ internally. It’s closed source, and Anthropic has shared the high-level design principles and data structures used, but no code details. The problem with having your own source control system (and moving off Git and GitHub) is that GitHub’s code review system is lost! So, Anthropic also had to build a new code review and code management system, which they call ‘Antique.’
I reached out to the team building Scion and Antique to learn more about how Scion works. Here’s what they told me:
Technical details
The design of Scion is pretty simple: stand up “server” nodes (that contain the whole repository), store changesets inside of Google Spanner (Google’s distributed, highly available database) and blobs (large files) in the highly durable Google Cloud Storage:
I asked Nick G – one of the authors of the original blog posts – about additional details and here’s what he told me:
- Rust: the language that Scion’s server and client are written in.
- Go + React: Antique, Anthropic’s new code review and code management platform has its backend in Go and frontend written in React. It works nicely with Scion.
- More resilient replication strategy: by default, Google Spanner offers multi-zone replication with three replicas. Anthropic has increased the number of replicas (they didn’t tell me the exact number, but an educated guess could be five or more replicas), and switched to multi-region replication. All these changes make sense, given how critical code is and that it’s sensible to reduce the likelihood of losing any data – even at the cost of higher write latencies.
- Backups: on top of replication, Anthropic keeps full backups of the database and soft deletes on the blob storage where file contents live. Spanner’s point-in-time recovery also lets Anthropic restore from a bad write. Smart!
Scaling is an interesting topic. I asked Nick if the system autoscales or scales manually. He told me:
“Every component can autoscale, but so far it hasn’t needed to, even as our merge volume grew more than 10x this year. The data is content-addressed and never changes once it’s stored, so the caching tiers do most of the work.”
A team of seven engineers builds and maintains all of this:
- Four worked on the core Scion server and client
- Three were split between building code search, merge queues, etc.
100% of Anthropic’s monorepo has moved off Git. This was no small feat to pull off! Nick gave me more details about the migration:
“The migration was not simple, but Claude was instrumental in getting it done. It’s also ‘self-healing’ in a way: if we get all the important use cases migrated and have something like 99% coverage, we can just force the cutover and Claude can help us fix anything that actually mattered.
100% of our monorepo is off of git. A few smaller repos that were never in the monorepo are migrating now, and they’re much simpler.
All of our community resources continue to live on GitHub: skills, plugins, Claude Code’s public repo, etc. And last week we launched OSS Scanner, which gives open-source projects free security audits using our strongest models (inspired by Google’s OSS-Fuzz).”
Big Tech moved off Git long ago
My take is that Anthropic has “Big Tech problems” much earlier than most of Big Tech had to tackle them. Anthropic employs around 3,500 staff, but their coding output – thanks to each person using around 10 agents all the time – is closer to that of a tech company with 35,000-70,000 staff! That’s a Meta or Google-sized company by the number of engineers.
Google and Meta have long since moved off Git because it did not scale for them.
Google built its own version control that took inspiration from Perforce. Git itself was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005, seven years after Google was founded. So git was not an option for Google to use in the early years: the company chose Perforce instead. It was around 2011-2012 that Google had ran into scaling issues with Perforce and built its own source control system called ‘Piper.’ It’s also a centralized version control model and still works well enough for the search giant. It’s no surprise to know that Piper was inspired by Perforce, and Google built Piper to be more performant for their use cases than Perforce was. We covered more on Google’s internal stack in the deepdive Inside Google’s Engineering Culture.
Meta found that git and other systems could not scale as needed, and so built ‘Sapling.’ Meta initially moved over to Mercurial, and then custom-built and open sourced Sapling for itself. As the company shared at the time:
“Sapling began 10 years ago [around 2012] as an effort to make Meta’s monorepo scale in the face of ever-increasing engineering growth. Publicly available source control systems were not, and still are not, capable of handling repositories of this size. Instead of moving away from the monorepo and sacrificing engineering velocity, we decided to build the source control system we needed.
Along the way we realized there were also large opportunities to increase developer velocity by improving the source control experience. By investing in new UX, we’ve made it possible for even new engineers to understand their repository and do things that were previously only possible for power users.”
Sapling itself is more of a client-server architecture. From the documentation:
“Sapling started from Mercurial as a distributed source control system, it then transitioned to a client-server architecture to solve the challenges. The server can utilize distributed storage and pre-build various kinds of indexes to provide more efficient operations.
While Sapling is less “distributed”, we tried to make the difference transparent to the user. For example, our lazy commit graph implementation does not require extra commands to “deepen” the graph. The user sees the full history.
That said, we do drop support of pulling from a lazy repo. Commit cloud covers these use-cases.”
Did Anthropic secretly rip off Sapling’s and Mononoke server
I asked Anthropic why it doesn’t open source Scion. Nick G’s reply:
“Mostly bandwidth! Even a no-support code drop takes a lot of work to do well. We have a small team building and running Scion. While the principles we used to build it are durable, the underlying code changes very frequently. For example, we’re still removing git-compatibility layers we only needed for the migration. We’d rather put that time into sharing what we learned, and as the post says, into working with GitHub, GitLab and the OSS community on scaling git.
To emphasize that point: most teams don’t need to leave git! But we think there are things git could benefit from, mainly change sets, derived data, and the checkout protocol. Our goal was to inspire conversation and collaboration around those ideas.”
The explanation, on one end, makes sense. On the other, Meta themselves also emphasized how most teams don’t need to leave git, and still open sourced Sapling for anyone to use, or take inspiration from.
One key component of Sapling is Monoke: the also open source server meant to scale up accepting thousands of commits every hour, across millions of files, written in Rust.
Could have Anthropic avoided open sourcing Scion, because it might have shown how much they copied from existing open source projects? The creator of Monoke wrote a post accusing of the Anthropic team of ripping off Monoke — and the Bonsai data model — writing:
“This [Scion] was a ripoff. My post yesterday was trying to be as charitable as possible given what I knew, and in particular that the similarity to Mononoke was mostly unintentional and the lack of credit was the result of not doing due diligence. However, after publishing the post I privately received confirmation that Scion intentionally and blatantly ripped off Mononoke, and in particular that there was overlap in personnel. There is no chance that this was an unintentional homage. This is something I had a hunch about but was not comfortable saying yesterday, given what I knew back then.
The resemblance is much deeper than just the notion of derived data. Some people pointed out that derived data is just an index, which is a well-known concept. I want to clarify that derived data was merely the most striking resemblance. It goes much deeper than that, and extends to the entire data model, as well as a number of the structures built around it.”
Anthropic did not give credit to Monoke in their original post, and only added a small attribution after the complaint.
To be clear, the point of open source is that you can do what you want with the software without much limitations (save for what the license contains): but it’s poor form that it took a public complaint for Anthropic to admit that the clever data structure they presented in their blog post heavily derived for an existing and open source data strucutre.
Will central VCs stay a niche, or expland beyond Big Tech?
Big Tech has preferred centralized version control systems (VCS), and I wonder how niche of a trend central VCSs will remain. As we’ve seen since well before AI, some of the largest tech companies dropped git because they did not like the performance degradation from offline support they no longer need.
My question is that even with agents, how many companies will see git “break” similarly to how it has at Anthropic? When this happens, how many will find git’s mirroring functionality inadequate for their own needs?
There’s a new batch of vendors positioning themselves as git-compatible version control solutions built for AI scale: Entire, founded by GitHub’s last CEO, Thomas Dohmke (a current podcast season sponsor), Cursor Origin by SpaceX, and Code Storage by The Pierre Company. At the same time, GitHub itself seems to be investing a lot more in making its platform more reliable and scalable.
My hunch is that very few companies will go through the trouble of building yet another source control system. In this way, Anthropic reminds me a bit of Google, which has been known to build custom internal systems which are not publicly available, to address the company’s internal needs. This can be disorienting for Google engineers after they leave the company and find they’ve become out of touch with industry-standard tools.
Read the full issue of The Pulse this is from, or check out this week’s The Pulse. This week’s issue covers:
- Do we need to rethink software security because of AI? Half a dozen of high-profile security incidents and breaches on a single day: and many of them are connected to AI (or sped up because of it). Attackers are gaining unfair advantages with AI, and defenders will have to react.
- Is Anthropic’s new version control system “a rip off”? The creator of Mononoke (an open source, high throughput version control server) accused Anthropic for ripping off their design, and not giving credit, presenting their work like it was novel. Not a good look on the AI lab.
- Industry Pulse. Saudi Arabia made a “problematic” offer to pay alleged OpenAI spy’s bail, Shopify builds tooling for self-healing software, Foursquare’s sale disappoints, Claude Code gets a major speed boost with gzip, and more.
- Predictions on the future of software development. Some bold predictions from software engineer and Amp cofounder Thorsten Ball, like how open source doesn’t make sense in its current form anymore.
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