I think this is another case where we need a term for “forking without forking”. The behavior of Anthropic here is that of someone forking a project. They want the same basic implementation but they want to control the future direction. The term forking has a legacy of being tied specifically to a source control action and that doesn’t quite fit. Saying Anthropic forked Mononoke would give some people the wrong impression. However the pre-DVCS impression of forking seems to apply to this and other code duplication by LLM vendors:
Forking is considered a Bad Thing—not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony between the successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction. There is serious social pressure against forking.
I think this is another case where we need a term for “forking without forking”. The behavior of Anthropic here is that of someone forking a project. They want the same basic implementation but they want to control the future direction. The term forking has a legacy of being tied specifically to a source control action and that doesn’t quite fit. Saying Anthropic forked Mononoke would give some people the wrong impression. However the pre-DVCS impression of forking seems to apply to this and other code duplication by LLM vendors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)
I’m a terrible marketer but “slopforking” conveys an ickiness that matches how I feel when I read about these projects. Like eating gruel :)
score 2 · canonical