Anthropic has moved its monorepo off Git and built an in-house version control system, called Scion, to replace it. The reason, according to the company, is simple: daily code merges grew from about 2,500 in May 2026 to more than 30,000 by September.
In its engineering blog, Anthropic says writing code is no longer the bottleneck to building systems or doing research. Claude can autonomously iterate on research loops, micro-optimize complex programs and build new services from scratch. The slowdown has shifted to infrastructure designed for human-scale development: source control, builds and continuous integration.
Seven engineers and five months of migration
Scion was built by a team of seven engineers in five months, with Claude also used to build the system itself. According to figures the company published, an early version rewrote a prototype pipeline to run four times faster while using twenty times less memory. The system is server-centric and API-first: agents work without cloning the repository locally, a clear break from Git's model.
Anthropic also reports replacing several hundred Git mirrors with much smaller infrastructure, cutting CI checkout from minutes to seconds and freeing 25% of CI CPU capacity. These are numbers the company supplies itself and that have not been independently verified.
Scion will not be released
The company itself says Scion is not a suitable replacement for Git for general use and that no release is planned. Anthropic says it has asked GitHub and GitLab to solve the broader problem of managing agent-driven workloads. For now, teams that need to scale similar workflows have no ready-made solution.
The case shows that the pressure AI puts on software development is shifting from writing code to managing the code it produces. Hosting platforms will have to handle volumes no human team would have generated until recently.
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