Rain’s follow-up sharpens their objection to Anthropic’s Scion announcement: the resemblance to Mononoke extends to the design of recorded changes, beyond shared terminology. The article now opens with a resolution: Anthropic added more specific attribution, which Rain considers sufficient.

The argument concerns credit and how an engineering achievement is presented:

  • Rain compares how both systems record a change as a list of changed files and references to their contents.
  • They report private confirmation of intentional reuse and overlapping personnel. That remains the author’s account; the correspondence is not supplied in the essay.
  • Rain welcomes copying good designs. They argue that rebuilding a system with Claude in five months should acknowledge the earlier team’s years of design and production experience.
  • They still call that rebuilding achievement noteworthy, even while disputing the announcement’s framing.

Naming the inherited design lets readers distinguish implementation speed from architectural invention. Rain’s update also matters: the essay’s accusation of inadequate credit describes a dispute that its author now says has been addressed.

The 82-comment thread on Hacker News adds Anthropic’s explanation and disagreement from people describing their own source-control experience.

What the thread adds

  • nickg-anthropic — responding as the announcement’s author: “We credited Sapling because that’s how Meta itself externally refers to the entire system, including the Mononoke server, and we wanted to follow that convention.” On the work involved: “We also did not just tell Claude to build us a version control system; we did a lot of research on what would work and not work for our use case”.
  • sunshowers — accepts the correction directly: “With the new footnote [1], I now believe the attribution is sufficient.”
  • durhamg — a different view from a handle identifying as a former senior member of the source-control team: “I had no problem with your post. I’m just happy to see the ideas and technology helping move the industry forward.”
  • fcarraldo — offers a practical reason to rebuild instead of adopting the existing code: “I looked into it some years ago for a large monorepo, determined it wouldn’t work, and shelved it.” This is their reported experience, rather than evidence about Scion’s development.

Handles are pseudonymous. HN publishes no per-comment scores; its ordering is HN’s ranking. These excerpts are arranged for usefulness: a slice of the thread, not a consensus.