What happened
Anthropic built Scion, a centralized source-control system for always-connected coding agents, with a seven-person team in five months. It cut CPU and memory use to about 1/200 of the old Git mirrors and CI CPU capacity by 25%.
Why it matters
Scion moves diffs, history, blame and merge-base computation to the server, so clients keep only a small cache and materialize files on demand. That suggests agent-era infrastructure saves most by assuming constant connectivity rather than copying full repositories.
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Scion is a redesign of source control around the assumption of always-connected agents. The old Git mirror setup made each user hold much of the history, so diffs and history could be computed offline. For a fleet of agents, that strength became a costly duplication, so Anthropic moved diffs, history, blame lines and merge-base computation to the server, recording a change set as a diff against its parent plus a reference to compressed content, and deriving blame lines and path history on demand.
The design choices follow from that shift. Clients keep only a limited cache and working copy, letting CI query an API for diffs without creating a working copy, and allowing auto-bisection and revert operations to run at scale. Anthropic reports that source-control load fell to about 1/200 of the old Git mirrors in CPU and memory and 25% in CI CPU capacity, and the same connectivity assumption is what let a seven-person team ship it in five months.
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