Shadowing Practice: Did Anthropic Kill Git? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Did Anthropic kill Git?
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This week, a lot of people on X decided it did.
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One post with over 600 ,000 views says Anthropic has replaced Git internally and the titans are falling.
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Another says this is much bigger than it looks.
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It all traces back to one post from Anthropic's own account, seen more than 6 .5 million times.
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Part of the story is true.
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Anthropic did stop using Git, but only for its own code, inside its own company.
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Git itself is fine.
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Anthropic keeps almost all of its code in one giant repository, a monorepo.
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In May, about 2 ,500 changes were merged into it every day.
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By September, it was over 30 ,000 a day.
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On September 9th alone, 30 ,401 changes went in.
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Their chart even has a dip in late July labeled the quiet week, and right after it, the line goes almost straight up.
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Claude writes a lot of that code, and Anthropic says every bottleneck they remove leads to even more of it.
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At that rate, the repository got heavy.
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The history of the main branch alone is almost 100 gigabytes.
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Their CI system checks out the code about 25 million times a day before you count developers, agent sandboxes, and research jobs.
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Anthropic did the maths.
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If every one of those checkouts fetched the repo the normal way, that would be over 600 petabytes of Git traffic every day.
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Git was designed for a different kind of user.
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Every clone is a full copy of the repository with all of its history, and it can do almost everything offline.
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That's great for a person on a laptop on a plane.
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At Anthropic, almost every client is an agent or a CI job, and those are always online.
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They tried the usual fixes first, like shallow clones and sparse checkouts.
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At the peak, they were running several hundred internal Git mirrors just to keep up.
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So they built their own.
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It's called Scion, and it moves the work from your machine to the server.
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Commits, merges, rebases, blame, and history all happen on the server so there's nothing to push.
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The client keeps a small cache and only downloads the files it actually reads.
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A CI job that needs a diff can ask the server for it and never check out the code at all.
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Between the client and the server sit two layers of caches, one on every machine and one in every region.
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And each layer answers over 99 % of requests by itself.
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Anthropic says it borrowed ideas from Google's Piper and Meta's Sapling, which were built for huge human teams.
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On a developer machine, Git status took almost four seconds, and Scion does it in 19 milliseconds.
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For agents, setting up a fresh work tree went from seven minutes to five seconds.
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The whole system uses about 200 times less CPU and memory than the old mirrors, and CI got a quarter of its CPU back.
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These are Anthropic's own measurements, and nobody outside the company has checked them yet seven people built it.
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In five months, they made Scion, a code review tool called Antique, and a few other systems,
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and they moved the whole monorepo over while the merge rate went up 10 times.
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Claude wrote a lot of that code too.
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The team had handwritten a pipeline to import the old Git history,
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and an early version of Claude Mythos rewrote it to use 20 times less memory and run four times faster.
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Every engineer on the project now rates Claude as better at writing code than they are.
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They also say a big part of their job became telling Claude no
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when it took shortcuts or piled on checks nobody needed.
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On Hacker News, the thread passed 800 points and 900 comments in a day.
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The most replied comment says that every time the writer stops reviewing Claude's code, they later find janky crap.
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Others said a central server you always have to reach sounds a lot like subversion or perforce.
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The older systems get replaced.
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One person asked why Anthropic didn't just split up the monorepo.
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On X, Dex Horthy pointed at the trade -off most people will feel.
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Today, if GitHub is down, you can still commit on your laptop.
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With Scion, if the server is down, you can't.
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So did Anthropic kill Git?
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No. In their own words, Scion is by no means a suitable replacement for Git for general use.
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They say it only makes sense for truly enormous repos, with tens of thousands of engineers or swarms of agents.
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It isn't open source and they don't plan to release it.
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Your repos on GitHub don't change, and Claude code still works with plain Git.
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A small team has already posted an unofficial open source version, but Anthropic has nothing to do with it.
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What Anthropic wants is for Git to pick up some of these ideas,
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like servers that do more of the work and answer questions about history through an API.
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They say they want to build that with GitHub, GitLab, and the open source community,
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and they expect other companies using AI coding tools to hit the same wall within a year.
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If that happens, the changes will most likely land on the server side,
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and the Git on your laptop will keep working the way it does today.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Did Anthropic Kill Git?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Git, Anthropic, code, server, Claude. This video has 65 sentences and 881 words to shadow. The speech runs for 4:49. The speaker talks fast, about 183 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 79% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| server noun | /ˈsɝvɚ/ | A program that provides services to other programs or devices, either in the same computer or over a computer network. |
| laptop noun | /ˈlæp.tɑp/ | A laptop computer. |
| merge verb | /mɝd͡ʒ/ | To combine into a whole. |
| mirror noun | /ˈmiɹɚ/ | A smooth surface, usually made of glass with reflective material painted on the underside, that reflects light so as to give an image of what is in front of it. |
| layer noun | /ˈleɪ̯ɚ/ | A single thickness of some material covering a surface. |
| commit verb | /kəˈmɪt/ | To give in trust; to put into charge or keeping; to entrust; to consign; used with to or formerly unto. |
| developer noun | /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/ | A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products. |
| clone noun | /kloʊn/ | A living organism (originally a plant) produced asexually from a single ancestor, to which it is genetically identical. |
| checkout noun | /ˈt͡ʃɛkˌaʊt/ | The process of checking out of a hotel, or the latest time to vacate a room in one. |
| cache noun | /kæʃ/ | Such a store of physical supplies, placed by humans or other animals for practical reasons. |
| chart noun | /t͡ʃɑɹt/ | A map illustrating the geography of a specific phenomenon. |
| replacement noun | /ɹɪˈpleɪsmənt/ | A person or thing that takes the place of another; a substitute. |
| thread noun | /ˈθɹɛd/ | A cord formed by spinning or twisting together textile fibers or filaments into one or more continuous strands, typically used in needlework. |
| label noun | /ˈleɪ.bəl/ | A small ticket or sign giving information about something to which it is attached or intended to be attached. |
| plain noun | /pleɪn/ | An expanse of land with relatively low relief and few trees, especially a grassy expanse. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| go up verb | To move upwards. | |
| keep up verb | To maintain; to preserve; to prevent from deteriorating or falling. | |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. | |
| set up verb | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | To make ready for use. |
| split up verb | Cease to be together, break apart from the group. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has replaced · has checked · has already posted |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were merged · was designed · were built |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 5 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, can't, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thread /ˈθɹɛd/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: cache /kæʃ/, measurement /ˈmɛʒ.ə.mənt/, shallow /ˈʃæloʊ/, unofficial /ʌn.əˈfɪʃ.əl/, shortcut /ˈʃɔːtkʌt/
- Long words — get the stress right: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, internally /ɪnˈtɜːnəli/, unofficial /ʌn.əˈfɪʃ.əl/, repository /ɹɪˈpɒz.ɪ.t(ə.)ɹɪ/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like server, laptop, merge.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.