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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

At the rate of change it’s likely going under, and the almost certain inextricable IaC layers, tied to their own deployment processes, I suspect it’s very hard to package for redistribution with very little benefit in doing so for anyone - especially them.

Most big tech have a lot of stuff around SDLC that’s theirs and they couldn’t realistically release it given how specific its deployment, configuration and management is. The marginal benefit to generalizing it is so low that it’s negative.

This is almost certainly worse given the vibed out state of it.

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If there is very little benefit to them by releasing it, that's a lack of imagination on their part. Being able to disrupt Microsofts, dare I say, number one beachhead into developers and their development ecosystem and bringing AI first developers into Anthropics own vertical AI development ecosystem is pretty damn core to winning the future potential avenue for the software industry at large. It won't pay off in the next five years, but it could pay off big in ten.

Imagine waking up next week and Claude Code now ships free with builtin source control management via this tech with a better user experience than workspaces. Github and Microsoft would take an instant market share hit in the traffic that they swear is causing all of their outages. And then that cuts off Microsofts access to code to train their own LLMs on in the background, further hampering an Anthropic competitor in the AI race.

I doubt they have the compute capacity to support a commercial source control platform. I'm sure you've seen how insane GitHub's traffic has become.

Agreed, they probably don't. But the financials of other companies clearly say that they are not above leasing further compute capacity from Oracle and X and would be part of a narrative that they need to IPO to raise money for such projects rather than it just being a naked payday.

I think honestly they should focus on their core competency. Microsoft’s biggest problem is the total lack of focus. GitHub is just a great example of that total lack of coherent direction or product vision. I hope Anthropic can avoid becoming everything and nothing at once as Microsoft has done.

I think Anthropic, a company with no historical skin in the game can come at the problem clean slate and only need to take on the core enterprise coding component. They don't need to worry about being production infrastructure, the don't need to be a connector to their own cloud service like Microsoft needed to feed into Azure. AI isn't something to attach onto source control/cloud, rather the source control is something to attach onto AI development. I don't think Anthropic needs to become a Microsoft competitor, I think they're going to need to become an Nvidia competitor in building a vertical enterprise AI company. Not a cloud, desktop OS, search, gaming or browser company. Just deliver the end to end code tooling cycle. Which probably means in the future they're also going to need to make inroads on Linear/Atlassian, but that's a separate conversation.

> Claude Code now ships free with builtin source control management

They can still do that without releasing the code, can't they?

To a degree, but the second it's in the desktop software, someone is going to reverse engineer the client side day one, guaranteed

In the article they admit Scion is worse than git for most projects.

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