| ▲ | I am worried about Bun(wwj.dev) |
| 349 points by remote-dev 7 hours ago | 245 comments |
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| ▲ | AntonyGarand 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Especially given the context of both of these different context: Claude Code is a gem of Anthropic, experiencing extreme growth and where any of its change can result in billing issues. Bun is a JS runtime, and regardless of its growth, can focus on being the best runtime possible: It doesn't impact billing nor the bottom line of Anthropic, so they don't have to rush out patches due to abuse unlike CC. It's unclear how it will pan out over the next years, still very early on the acquisition to see if anything will change, but I'm not concerned just yet. |
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| ▲ | stkdump 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's interesting how quickly people buy the "abuse" line of thinking. We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription. That is independent of which agent/harness is used. The fair/real price for profitable use is the pay per use token pricing. These labs play the game of trying to kill competition in the harness game (because third party harnesses risk commoditizing the underlying LLMs once they are all good enough), while playing a game of chicken with each other how long they can burn money that way before they have to give up. At some point they have to price their product fairly, and the only hope they have is to have killed all competition by then, which is of course a game that they seem to be loosing. Useful models are getting smaller and cheaper to run every year and it has hit a threshold at which we will see continued development of third party harnesses even without the userbase of subscription users. Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed. The secondary bet that they can lock users into their ecosystem (which requires them to subsidize their harness via unprofitable subscriptions burning their capital) and be able to monetize that later will also fail. They will have to compete on merit alone, and that is much less profitable. | | |
| ▲ | mediaman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's a big leap to go from "some users may be using large quantities of tokens" to "the labs are burning money on subs in an attempt to kill the competition." Lots of businesses have subscription programs in which a small number of users are money losers, but which in aggregate make money. It's not even obvious that the labs are losing a lot of money on even a minority of users; the rate use caps are fairly aggressive for Anthropic, and a cursory analysis of likely actual cost of serving tokens shows they are high margin products at the API level and unlikely to be unprofitable within the usage constraints provided to subscribers. I do think subscription models make commercial sense because users want predictable costs, and it's a club good in which marginal token cost is zero which helps consolidate their customers' purchasing volume to one provider. But that's a different claim than them serving it unprofitably to kill competition. Also, they (Anthropic) are transitioning many of their enterprise customers to API consumption billing anyway. | | |
| ▲ | echelon 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I work in the video AI world. We gave up on subscriptions long ago. They're rinky dink and get you a paltry amount of utilization before they run out. The per day per seat costs can exceed $1000. This is already normal for studios, and it's already producing positive ROI. There's simply no way to price video any other way than by usage. I suspect the same will come for everything. |
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| ▲ | ashdksnndck 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed. I thought the prime bet was that the winning lab who reaches takeoff through recursive self improvement will make a galactic superintelligence. Not saying I believe this but the people running the labs do. Under this scenario if you are a few months behind at the pivotal time you might as well not exist at all. | | |
| ▲ | zem 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | only if said galactic superintelligence takes immediate steps to kill all its potential competitors, or hoover up all the world's resources, or some other aggressively zero sum thing. otherwise I don't see what difference it makes down the line of you have the second superintelligence rather than the first. and that's under the assumption that you can create a superintelligence that will continue to slavishly serve your agenda rather than establishing and following its own goals. | | |
| ▲ | ethin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is also assuming that AGI is even possible. So far there is no evidence that this is actually doable over anything but billions of years (and even then we have no idea how nature really managed it). Edit: Meant to say AGI (superintelligence didn't make sense). Superintelligence is undefinable at the moment so even considering if it's possible or not is more of a philosophical thing/si-fi thought experiment than anything else. | | |
| ▲ | josephg an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | ASI is the acronym you’re looking for. It stands for Artificial Superintelligence. Arguably it’s already here. ChatGPT knows more than any human who has ever lived. It can carry out millions of conversations at once. And it has better working memory (“context”) than humans. And it can speak and write code much faster than humans. Humans still have some advantages: Specialists are smarter than chatgpt in most domains. We’re better at using imagination. We understand the physical world better. But it seems like we’re watching the gap close in real time. A few years ago chatgpt could barely program. Now you can give it complex prompts and it can write large, complex programs which mostly work. If you extrapolate forward, is there any good reason to think humans will retain a lead? | |
| ▲ | zem 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | oh absolutely, no argument there, the case for AGI is pretty weak. I was just saying that I am even more sceptical that any of this is a "first or nothing" scenario - that is one of my biggest pet peeves about the entire tech sector. |
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| ▲ | fwipsy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Anthropic/OpenAI aren't planning to have their superintelligence take over the world, but they're still afraid that someone else will do it. | |
| ▲ | sroussey 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One could argue that AI has already started to hoover up all the world’s resources. AI buildout as a percent of GDP is already high and still rising. | | |
| ▲ | munk-a 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Don't blame machines for our folly. This is just standard bubble behavior. |
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| ▲ | zozbot234 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If OpenAI has the second superintelligence they have to merge with the first and cooperate. It's a provision in their charter. | | |
| ▲ | airstrike 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not sure anyone thinks their charter carries much weight at this point. |
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| ▲ | stkdump 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think this race to superintelligence idea should be taken too seriously. It is great for headlines and get peoples imaginations up. It is mostly a marketing gag. I look at superintelligence this way: software engineering used to be considered amoung the most mentally demanding jobs one can have. And in this field more and more people give up large parts of their job and become approximately product managers to let the machine do the engineering part. So we are about there. Who cares that there are some puzzles in some "synthetic" benchmark in which humans outsmart AIs? | |
| ▲ | ahepp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | One thing I don’t understand about this viewpoint (which I understand isn’t your own): why does one benefit so tremendously from getting there a month before competitors? I’m sure having a month of superintelligence with no competition would be lucrative, but do they think achieving superintelligence first will impede competitors from also achieving it a month later? | | |
| ▲ | Cpoll 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A week of superintelligence should be enough to take over the world, or at least sabotage your competitors. And even if someone else gets there a week later, they'll be permanently one week behind the curve (until the AI hits some physical limit, I suppose). But that's all just sci-fi worldbuilding. | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >they'll be permanently one week behind the curve What if the competitor's architecture is able to produce tokens twice as fast. What if the competitor secures a 1 month exclusivity deal on Nvidia's next generation? |
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| ▲ | greycol 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Assuming it can't super hack all computer systems and cripple competing SI incubation to at least increase its lead time indefinetly. The assumption would be that in the lead time it has the super intelligence at least takes a small lead and undermines any paths a later arriving super intelligence could take to interfere with it's goals, which naturally includes stopping competing SIs from becoming more powerful in a way that could undermine it. So assuming the super intelligence has goals and work towards them it will be initially trying to solidify its own power, iterating on that small lead, assuming it's the smartest super intelligence[1], should be enough to win. The scary part is that assuming no guardrails [2] it's going to be as ruthless as possible in achieving those goals. That does not necessarily mean it will appear ruthless in achieving those goals, just as ruthless as it judges optimal. 1. Which being so smart one of it's chores would have been reinvestment in making itself smarter than competition and being smarter than its makers has a good chance of actuating those self-improvements. 2. In the internal balancing of goals sense not the don't feed the mogwai after midnight sense. | |
| ▲ | Philpax 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A month with a superintelligence at your hands could be quite impactful, especially if you're willing to break the law / normal operating decorum in the pursuit of protecting what you have. A superintelligence, if wielded so, could destroy your competitors in a great many ways, including the relatively-benign solution of outcompeting them, to exploiting them and tearing them apart from the inside. A genuine superintelligence is a very, very scary thing to have under the control of one person or organisation. | | |
| ▲ | remexre 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If I interpret "a machine superintelligence" as "a classroom of 300IQ humans," I'm not really sure how this is true? You still have material and energy constraints, you can't think your way out of those. |
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| ▲ | Anon1096 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription. I dont think this is "understood" or "known" to anyone except Ed Zitron. Subscription plans like Claude Code also have rolling usage limits, it could be profitable. Inference is very cheap and unless you're using OpenClaw no one is actually maxing out the usage window at all times. I'm sure in aggregate the subs are not money furnaces. | | |
| ▲ | stkdump 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Then explain why they started banning all third party harnesses, including those that work through Claude Code, if it still makes them money. They are cutting off profit for no good reason? I think there were reasons to doubt that heavy subscription users are unprofitable before they did that. OpenClaw was just the tip of the iceberg. Why don't they make token pricing dynamic if that was the case? It should then allow heavy user to get even more for their money than with the current subscription model where they can't adjust to current infra availability. It may be that "in aggregate" sub users are (not yet) a loosing business. But in all fairness, the more useful AI gets, the more it will be used. And the more it will be used, the harder it will be to make subs cheaper than token pricing. The only counter-weight are new light users, but those will also become heavy users over time, the more useful it will be for them. And at some point it will be hard to onboard light users in the first place, because the laggards will require even more intelligence and value to get them over. |
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| ▲ | nofriend 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription. "profit" is a weird concept in the software business. it might be true that there is an opportunity cost to these users, either because they displace other potential users by using up capacity, or because they would be willing to pay more if forced. but I don't believe that anyone is losing money on inference costs on any of their plans. > At some point they have to price their product fairly they are competing in a market. if most of their costs were inference then this would be a good thing, because everyone would have roughly the same prices, so as long as they had the best model they would win. in fact model development costs eclipse the cost of inference, and is something that non frontier labs get for much cheaper by distilling from the frontier companies. > They will have to compete on merit alone, and that is much less profitable. that's not really true. google won search on merit alone, and were massively successful as a result. the trick is that everyone from the poorest shmuck to the richest businessman uses google, so they win through scale. in ai, google and openai are making a bet that they can do the same thing. there's only really room for one winner at this game, even two is stretching it, so anthropic has to win by being the smartest model that only high end businesses use. that's a very risky bet. | |
| ▲ | zozbot234 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > These labs play the game of trying to kill competition in the harness game Anthropic and Google are arguably playing that game. OpenAI's Codex CLI is open source and entirely optional for use of the GPT Codex models. | | |
| ▲ | stkdump 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | OpenAI just has more runway and has convinced its investors that it is as much about hardware (stargate) as it is about anything else. So they think they can/have to afford keeping the software side more open to not make themselves look stupid. Google is more of a down to earth company with other business to lose and isn't bought into it as much. |
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| ▲ | AussieWog93 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed. Honestly, I don't think it's that cut and dry. Their bet is that the marginal utility of having a smarter model more than makes up for the cost of the additional high-end hardware. And honestly, if you look at their frankly insane revenue growth since Opus 4.5 released, they were right. >The secondary bet that they can lock users into their ecosystem (which requires them to subsidize their harness via unprofitable subscriptions burning their capital) and be able to monetize that later will also fail. I think we're already past this point, honestly. They lowered usage limits, blocked OpenClaw then tried to remove Claude Code from the $20/mo plan. They have always had low market share for the consumer chatbot market and don't seem to care about catching up to OpenAI there. | |
| ▲ | mannanj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What about the data they are accumulating, for non-training purposes? That data isn't of negligible value; the "subscription cost" is really a "harvesting data" opportunity. Don't be naive to that our data is not incredibly valuable. | |
| ▲ | cyanydeez 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The thing is, the harness _is_ the model at the end of the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down | | |
| ▲ | antonvs an hour ago | parent [-] | | The source code of Claude Code and Gemini CLI contradict that. |
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| ▲ | smcl 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". It is also bizarre that some people are still hopeful despite it being acquired by one of the most enormously unprofitable companies in the most enormously unprofitable sectors of our industry. | | |
| ▲ | atonse 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". Why? What's the risk? It's open source. Also, speaking of open source, we are happy to commit to open source projects that have no monetization, nor any plans to ever monetize. | | |
| ▲ | enedil an hour ago | parent [-] | | I think parent commenter meant that what's insane is that js runtime is not treated as an utility which should never be monetized. It's as if GCC developers haven't figured out how to monetize, but they are willing to at some point. |
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| ▲ | spankalee 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I partially agree with you, but I also think that it's good that people can make something they want, that seems to have no monetization path, and have some hope of being bailed out. It's not great that the search for profit will usually corrupt projects, but the other most common option is that the projects don't exist at all. It's very rare (or it used to be before this year) that someone can do something like this on their own with no compensation. So now at least Bun exists. | | |
| ▲ | tracker1 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm with you... I think it's helped Node.js a lot to have Bun and Deno implementing new features that help push node forward. I think it's been a bit of a miss not integrating npm into node along the way... Mostly in that npm is a separate org from node, which is its' own issue... I kind of like JSR a lot myself, so hope it continues to pick up some traction. |
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| ▲ | ahepp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Are there any situations you would compare this to historically? To me, the obvious comparison seems to be Docker. Their tooling revolutionized software development and made cgroups and containerization accessible to the masses. Yet they generally seem to have failed to extract payment from users, even with managed service opportunities. It seems to me that there are substantial obstacles to monetizing a project licensed with even a weaker OSS license like MIT. I think this is especially true for projects that don’t have managed service / “open core” potential. Any gratis project you rely on runs the risk that it will no longer be provided gratis. That alone is not a strong basis for making decisions. | | |
| ▲ | switz 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's a shame that VCs have corrupted a $200MM/year business into the perception as a failure. Who cares if the VCs didn't get a large return, or if the outsized impact of the software didn't quite fully capture the value created. $200MM/yr without aggressive R&D or operational costs could be an incredibly healthy business. Maybe we should stop trying to build so many billion dollar/year businesses and work on more sustainable models. | | |
| ▲ | antonvs an hour ago | parent [-] | | I haven’t followed Docker’s case in particular, but how much investment was required to get it to that point? If it’s a case of “How do you become a millionaire? Start as a billionaire and invest in Docker”, then the perception may have some basis. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The audio and 3D card pioneers in the PC world. The ones that were first to market went all bankrupt, or were acquired by others that came later into the scene. | | |
| ▲ | marshray 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 1. At least 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth are now extinct. I.e., that's life. 2. "But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." |
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| ▲ | animuchan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's a bit insane, but the cost of switching to regular NodeJS is low (for all but most bun-specific projects). All valid points though, I'm pessimistic about Anthropic still actively diverting resources to these side quests when tough times hit (which might be in a week for all we know). | |
| ▲ | motbus3 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I know people say it is unprofitable but I wonder if there is a way to verify it is truly is.
I will not say any details but I worked for a giant company which was barely making money YoY but somehow the bonuses for heads were bigger and bigger given a proxy metric related to profit. There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes. | | |
| ▲ | bombcar 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Profitable" is the wrong metric, really, it's whether it is sustainable - can development continue indefinitely given the current financial situation? | | |
| ▲ | motbus3 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm thinking about your comment...
It put many wheels to spin... Tldr; I think the don't care about what will happen to the company in medium or long term. --- Are any of those companies looking for stability or sustainability? I have the impression they are completely aware of the diminished return effects and they will explore the moment to the fullest of their capabilities promising even more absurd things when the results are even smaller. I do agree there is a considerable improvement comparing from a year ago but definitely not ground shaking as it was from the year before to the last. Many of the promises turns out to be empty or at least having huge number of asterisks to it. I think there are flags everywhere.
From minor things such as everyone using different benchmarks or plotting performance differences on weird choices os axis and ordering. Other mild things such as promoting the "system" created a compiler from scratch when such compiler does not even do a hello world and runs and gave output binaries running 300x then the counterparts. (I am aware there was a misusage of the agentic benchmark to build a compiler but there was an active choice on how to tell the story. Given other movements I am not quite sure if I believe it was an accident) There are other red flags such as people rolling back to previous versions of models because they can't get the new one to work properly. Other situations such as the affirmations that they have such "dangerous" model that apparently seems to be more of a benchmark trick than real results with <100B models being able to replicate the benchmark results only by changing the methodology. I don't think we are yet in the turning point where everything will collapse but my feeling is that we are going in that direction unless something that makes these models much more intelligent AND efficient. It makes sense to not hire a person when you can have a machine for the same job for the same price. But AI prices are getting higher than the returns do the margins for it to be a sensible choice are getting smaller. That all said, I say again that I think that they are completely aware of this effect. Not because they understand the technology but because this happens more frequently than not.
Because of this, I don't think they care to be sustainable. All of them,smell that they will take the money and leave the ship to sink. |
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| ▲ | CharlieDigital 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You might be underestimating the effect that corporate policies and culture have on the product. Some teams have a push now to go all in on AI; don't even look at the code. I've seen this in action and the results are probably what you'd expect. Works great at some level, but as complexity accumulates (especially across a team with different "technical vocabularies"), the end result is compounding complexity and mistakes and no person or team knows how the software actually works. No human testing of software or QA; unit + integration + give AI control over the browser/tool. Yes, this how some teams are moving forward now. So some of this may be that Anthropic's culture will end up causing shifts in how the Bun team operates and thinks. If this type of culture and mindset becomes the norm, I think either the models have to get a lot better or the software quality is going to decline. Matt Pocock has a great talk here: https://youtu.be/v4F1gFy-hqg "Code is not cheap. Bad code is the most expensive it's ever been. Because if you have a codebase that's hard to change, you're not able to take advantage of all of the bounty that AI can offer. Because AI in a good codebase actually does really, really well."
Once bad code starts to compound on itself, it's going to be really hard to break out of it. | | |
| ▲ | shimman 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't disagree with the notion, but what is up with the dev community championing influencers that work no real jobs and just sell courses where they reread the docs to you at $500 a pop (this gent, $1k a pop)? | | |
| ▲ | jazzypants 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not the biggest fan of the influencer community, but I think that it mostly boils down to many learners preferring video content over written material. I've gotten used to reading documentation now, but I remember it being extremely intimidating when I was first learning. It was nice to have someone break stuff down into simple terms for me. To be fair to Matt Pocock, I know he worked for Vercel and Stately for a while before doing content full time. I can't say anything about his AI content, but I did some of his free lessons when I was learning TypeScript. They included interactive editor lessons and such, so it wasn't just empty videos and fluff like some of the influencers. | | |
| ▲ | shimman 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, look into his actual work history (sorry being a paid marketer isn't working as a dev). Was only a dev consultant for like two years before pivoting into full time influencer. Trust me, I know more about these types than any normal human should. | |
| ▲ | epolanski 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > but I think that it mostly boils down to many learners preferring video content over written material 99% of the times that's not learning, but productivity porn. |
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| ▲ | bdangubic 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have followed a simple rule in my career, if you offer training/courses I don’t listen to anything you say. I consider this a hard rule, like ad-blocking (this is exactly that, blocking ads as each talk is an ad (or ad in disguise). |
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| ▲ | semiquaver 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, GitHub had to figure out how to monetize at some point.
Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, MS Windows), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making GitHub worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about GitHub. | | |
| ▲ | raincole 9 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I think you have some nostalgia about Github's stability before the acquisition. |
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| ▲ | pton_xd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Anthropic acquired Bun for their own benefit, to protect and grow their investment in Claude Code. Not for the benefit the JavaScript community at large. Sounds obvious but I guess that has to be pointed out. Outcomes will follow incentives in the long run. | | |
| ▲ | aylmao 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products. IMO as long as it remains that way, the incentives for its developers will remain fairly aligned with the incentives of people who use it outside the company. A good example is React. Facebook's interest is that React be performant (website performance is correlated with time spent on said website), reliable (also correlated to time spent), quick to build on (features ship faster) and popular (helps new recruits hit the ground running). That's fairly well aligned with what developers outside of Facebook want too. Sure, since Facebook's server is written in Hack it means we'll never get a truly full-stack React, and instead we'll need third parties for the back-end (Next.js, Tanstack Start, etc). But Facebook building react also means it will always be someone's job to make sure this Framework works well in codebases with millions of modules. This is all independent of any shitty practices with their other software. And this has been for decades at this point. | | |
| ▲ | crote 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products. Doesn't that just make it even worse? If Anthropic can't even afford to spend the engineering effort on making sure their core product functions properly, why should we assume that they'll be investing serious resource into what is essentially some upper manager's loss-leader pet project? If Anthropic is financially hurting, why shouldn't they put Bun on the bare minimum of life support? | | |
| ▲ | aylmao 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Because they need it to work, so that everything built on it works too. Building developers sell you the apartment, not the elevator room, the electrical room, mechanical room, etc. They will make all sorts of controversial decisions with the apartments; odd layouts, ugly flooring, weird pricing, tacky finishes, etc. The "core product" is the money-maker, that's where the egos clash, priorities change, and where they try to charge as much as possible while they cut costs as much they can. No one is buying the electrical room though. It just has to work. Yes, you'll make it as cheaply as possible; no flooring, no paint on the walls, no interior designer meetings to argue what's the right tone beige for the walls. But it'll do what it needs to do. It'll keep the lights on. Otherwise you can't sell any of the apartments. Same thing with Facebook; there's active incentive to introduce all sorts of dark patterns over their app, to ignore certain bugs, to unnecessarily change things, etc. But none of those incentives are present with React. The incentive is to keep React reliable and performant, and to keep the team lean. I'm sure it's similar with Bun in Anthropic. And to be clear, Anthropic definitely spends most of it's engineering effort making sure their core product "functions properly". This "functions properly" is just different for us as clients vs them as a corporation. There is high overlap, since they need to keep us clients happy. But a well-functioning product at a company is one that leads to money. I'm sure very capable engineers pushing the okrs they care about. | |
| ▲ | tracker1 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think they're doing too much vibe coding and not enough QC... I don't think it's a matter of not having the resources so much as running while juggling multiple sets of scissors.. |
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| ▲ | antonvs 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Anthropic acquired Bun for their own benefit, to protect and grow their investment in Claude Code. I’m unclear about this. What’s the business case? I use Gemini CLI a lot, which runs on Node, and I can’t see anything that would be improved by using a different JS runtime. It’s not something you notice as a user. Node is mature, stable, and perfectly fit for the purpose. If Anthropic were public and if these decisions were comprehensible to the average investor, an acquisition like this ought to cause the stock to plummet. Luckily for the people involved, there are no constraints like that in the current market. |
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| ▲ | remote-dev 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is a good take, and I hope you're right. One favorable way to phrase it for Anthropic is they acquired Bun because CC and other internal tooling depended on it so heavily and they questioned it's future as purely OSS. It remains to be seen how things will actually unfold. | | | |
| ▲ | dandellion 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse For me it's far from a stretch, in fact it matches closely a pattern that I've seen repeated many times over at this point. | |
| ▲ | overgard 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Incidentally, Anthropic needs to figure out how to monetize at some point too. | | | |
| ▲ | saghm 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Can you point to any examples of a company with shitty practices buying one without shitty practices that didn't end up with the shitty practices diffusing through the newly-acquired company within a couple of years? | | |
| ▲ | atonse 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not the parent poster which is why I still stick to looking at the people... If you start seeing the people that created bun leaving Anthropic, then I'd probably start to worry. And I haven't seen any sign of that yet. |
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| ▲ | andai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What came to my mind is Windows. Regardless of what else is going on, kernel is a separate team, and has very strong incentives to remain competent and sane. | |
| ▲ | jmspring 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nope. The need to monotize and the fact that an acquihire cost some money is exactly why relying on a specific runtime is where people should have concern. |
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| ▲ | thot_experiment an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why people use Deno and Bun over Node? I think it's neat that there are competitors for JS runtimes, but I really don't understand what advantages I'd get by swapping to one of these over Node. Bun has no REPL and worse JS engine, Deno is just Node with a restrictive, annoying permission system and no sqlite. Both claim better performance, but that only seems true in cherrypicked benchmarks, and in my tests (granted about a year ago at this point) both alternatives under-performed Node in my workloads. What am I missing? EDIT: Actually I just remembered I delivered a small ERP tool to a business a while back and I did opt to use I think Bun for that because it had the most robust tools to wrap a project into an `*.exe`, that was definitely a better experience than Node. Though since that was dependency-less JS I did the whole thing using Node and then just shipped it with Bun. |
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| ▲ | nwienert 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Bun has never really been well run. Every feature it had was full of bugs and gaps. And every release fixed a few but broke others. They released more major features and breaking changes in their last patch release than most software sees in two major versions. I've been using it just as a script runner and npm package manager basically, and it's incredible the amount of work you have to do to find "good" versions. We've had patch versions suddenly freeze on install more than once, we couldn't upgrade for quite a while due to this. I think they broke postinstall scripts with trustedDependencies entirely two minor versions ago - not a mention in release notes, and somehow no one reporting it in GH issues. In 1.1 or so you could get Bun to do trustedDependency builds in postinstall, and then after that you couldn't. I looked around for release notes and saw nothing mentioned. It's been broken for months. |
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| ▲ | nulltrace 37 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There's a GitHub issue for the freeze thing. Their security scanner passes the full dep list as CLI arguments, large monorepo on Linux and you blow past ARG_MAX. Spawn silently hangs, no error, --ignore-scripts doesn't help because the scanner is separate from postinstall. Been broken since 1.3.5 at least. |
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| ▲ | Jarred 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I work on Bun, and this post is confusing to me. Me personally and the Bun team continues to dogfood & make Bun better everyday. Our development pace has only gotten faster. Bun's stability has improved significantly since joining Anthropic. Here are some things shipping in the next version of Bun: - 17 MB smaller Windows x64 binaries [0] - 8 MB smaller Linux binaries [1] - `--no-orphans` CLI flag to recursively kill any lingering processes spawned [3] - SSL context caching for client TCP & unix sockets, which significantly reduces memory usage for database clients like Mongoose/MongoDB [4] - Experimental HTTP/3 & HTTP/2 client in fetch [5] - Experimental HTTP/3 support in Bun.serve() [6] - Bun.Image, a builtin image processing library [7] (Along with several reliability improvements to node:fs, Worker, BroadcastChannel, and MessagePort) The Anthropic acquisition also means Bun no longer needs to become a revenue-generating business. We are very incentivized to make Bun better because Claude Code depends on it, and so many software engineers depend on Claude Code to help get their work done. [0]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30219 [1]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30098 [2]: https://github.com/oven-sh/WebKit/pull/211 [3]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29930 [4]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29932 [5]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29863 [6]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30032 |
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| ▲ | loosescrews 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Hasn't your team shrunk a lot? Word on the street is that many of Bun's employees left or let go in the time leading up to the acquisition. How many people are left working on Bun? Has development velocity increased because you are merging large quantities of unreviewed LLM generated code? If so, I would be very worried about future stability if I used Bun. | |
| ▲ | zarzavat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Acquisitions in this industry tend to lead to a certain inevitable conclusion. The software that has been acquired gets worse as the original team members cash out and their culture is replaced with the culture of the new owner. Perhaps Bun will be the exception, but you can't say that the concern is unfounded. The CEO of Anthropic has a habit of making outlandish predictions about how AI is so very close to replacing human programmers. Anthropic has been applying this belief to Claude Code and it has become a giant heap of unmaintainable spaghetti. | |
| ▲ | attractivechaos 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The best feature Bun delivered recently is portable binary. That portability is a huge deal to me as my users are often on ancient Linux distros. Thank you. Both node and deno require recent Linux, more exactly, recent glibc. | |
| ▲ | sebmellen an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Saying that you “work on Bun” is such a radical understatement. I have my reservations about Anthropic, but I don’t see how Bun could go wrong with you at the helm. And I’m sure that you are putting the stability and funding of a larger organization to good use :) I’ve been a Bun maximalist since the beginning. Thank you Jarred!!! | | |
| ▲ | tkel an hour ago | parent [-] | | Perhaps it could go wrong because he uses AI robots to generate responses to issues on claude code that are also generated by AI robots? Just bots talking to each other like moltbook. It shows a level of AI maximalism that is absurd, concerning, and funny. But probably par for the course for someone working at Anthropic. I can imagine being surrounded by people doing similarly foolish things only encourages the foolery. |
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| ▲ | jpsimons 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I just spent a couple hours migrating my knife sharpening website backend from Bun to Node. Feels good to avoid that lock-in. I was initially gung-ho for Bun but increasingly unsure about it. Things I'll miss for sure: - Querying sqlite with tagged template literals - Bun.password.verify being argon2 is a better default - HTML imports - JSX transpilation - Auto loading .env file https://burlyburr.com, which hits https://backend.burlyburr.com |
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| ▲ | rtrigoso 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I agree with OP, and understand why to some it feels premature. We live in a vastly different world than before, where people are more conscious of ethical concerns and willing to stand on their ground to avoid repeating past mistakes. It might be premature from a tech standard, but it makes sense from an ethical concern. I don't think misconduct is as easily backtracked as it was before and preemptive measures are needed to avoid the large impact that those decisions make. |
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| ▲ | constantius 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > where people are more conscious of ethical concerns and willing to stand on their ground to avoid repeating past mistakes Would be interested to hear what makes you say that. I don't see anyone being conscious of ethical concerns more than they were before. I can see slightly more BDS people, for example, but outside of that not much. | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Given the complaints about Firefox and Safari not adopting Chrome OS Platform APIs, and shipping Chrome all over the place, I am not sure about people standing on the ground and ethical considerations. |
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| ▲ | STRiDEX an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't think bun worked well before the acquisition. Don't get me wrong, i used it all the time for little scripts, but i would never ship a service at work on bun. Between memory issues and incompatibilities that never get fixed, it is a nice toy to me that did a great job of exposing room for improvement in nodejs. For example, i'd been following this issue https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/14102 and eventually all the libraries shipped "if bun do x" into them, which is the opposite of compatibility. |
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| ▲ | tkel an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yes, I've tried to run it in production on a couple projects. I had to back out from bun to node on both. One, there were huge memory leaks like you mentioned. The other, there were API differences that threw errors, in TextDecoderStream and such. Decided I won't try again until bun v2. |
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| ▲ | jwpapi 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the motion that Claude Code and Anthropic has is trying to force-hide stuff from you. Some hopefully remember the shitstorm that happened, when they changed. Reading xxx.yy to reading 1 file or reading 2 files. More changes like this came and they were not or very hard to configure. I understand the business idea behind it. Make them to use AI as much as possible, get the human out of the loop. More training data. More Token Usage JUHUU. However I think that made Claude Code so much worse and so much more untrusthworthy. It’s a sneaky attempt to take away the driving wheel from you. And if you follow that logic, way more and way more things seem reasonable. But mainly for now it just generated a lot of distrust for me |
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| ▲ | ericyd 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The author closes by enumerating some of the things they like about Bun which are not included in pnpm. The list is basically: native TS support, a vite-style bundler and a vitest/jest style test runner. Other than a bundler, Node already has all of these. Different test runner syntax maybe but otherwise TS "just works" out of the box and their built in test runner is totally capable. Not sure I see the need for such a lament over Bun. |
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| ▲ | jazzypants 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | To be fair, Node didn't have any of these things until Deno & Bun challenged it. Deno didn't seem to move the needle by itself very much for whatever reason, but Bun's existence has had a tangible effect on the Node Technical Steering Committee. I would even argue that much of the current impetus has been driven by Jarred Sumner's savvy social media marketing. It got people talking, and Node is better because of it. Additionally, Bun's push for covering as much of the Node API as possible has pushed Deno towards the same level of compatibility, and now most code is basically runtime agnostic. I'm not sure if I'll ever actually use Bun in production, but I'm glad it exists because the JavaScript ecosystem has been much improved simply due to its existence. | | |
| ▲ | inbx0 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Reminds me of the back and forth competition between Node.js and io.js that we had to endure back in the day. Worked out for the best in the end. | |
| ▲ | ericyd an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | No disagreement, but this article was posted 2 days ago, the argument isn't relevant right now. |
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| ▲ | hootz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When did Node add native TypeScript? Can you run "node main.ts" directly without any dependencies? | | |
| ▲ | jazzypants 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | January of last year. Yes. https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v23.6.0 | | |
| ▲ | hootz 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That is type stripping and is incompatible with syntax that requires transpilation, so it is not native TypeScript support. | | |
| ▲ | jazzypants 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | TypeScript is a wide umbrella. For instance, Experimental Decorators are shunned by many (including me), but they are still used by millions. If I don't use any syntax that requires transpilation, am I not still using TypeScript? Now that we have `satisfies` and `as const`, there's really no reason to ever use an enum. In my opinion, TypeScript is best when it is simply used as Language Server, and it should never have had runtime implications in the first place. | |
| ▲ | alanning 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Node v22.7.0 added support for TypeScript syntax that requires transformation: `node --experimental-transform-types example.ts` As for whether this matches your definition of "native support" or not... Source:
https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v22.7.0 | |
| ▲ | ifwinterco 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn't that mostly just enums? Is there anything else that doesn't run as valid JS if you strip the types (and maybe some other extra keywords)out? Genuine question, in my head there's not much, but TS has a few weird corners I maybe haven't used | | | |
| ▲ | silverwind 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Modern Typescript does not need runtime features. | | |
| ▲ | moritzwarhier 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your comment might lack explanation, but indeed the TS team has mentioned multiple times that they don't want to add any more features that require transpilation (as opposed to "dumb" type stripping and being a strict superset of JS). IIRC they "almost" recommend against using them (the last part, I haven't researched again now). But the usage of many features has reached a sort of point of no return, so I hope Node will go the route of making the experimental transpilation the default for TS files at some point. Goes to show how strong the appeal of syntax is, especially enums. To people coming from languages with enum support, it just looks so much more organized to use them, compared to union types, despite all of the (many) drawbacks. |
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| ▲ | efortis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | v22.18 promoted type stripping from experimental |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Additionally, with Typescript compiler rewrite, it is even less relevant. |
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| ▲ | tracker1 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| TBF, I really haven't done much of anything with Bun other than occasional module testing. I mostly use Deno for my day to day, including a lot of shell scripts the past few years. I liked the newer ergonomics a lot, direct module references in repositories is really nice for shell scripts. That said, I'm worried about them having good enough monetization while keeping features open... or at least able to be replicated by others. So I can understand some of the concerns. |
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| ▲ | iceboundrock 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Regardless of Anthropic/ClaudeCode, PerryTS[1] looks like a very promising competitor to Bun. [1]: https://github.com/PerryTS/perry |
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| ▲ | evertheylen 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is cool! But AFAIK bun promises to be a one-stop-shop for all your JS/TS dev needs, while Perry is "just" a compiler from Typescript to native executables. | |
| ▲ | dgellow 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would mention deno as the main competitor | | |
| ▲ | herpdyderp 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Personally I much prefer Deno as it's also doing a lot more work to unify the backend and frontend JS APIs. | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, same for me. I was skeptical at first but things have really improved over the past 2 years |
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| ▲ | hungryhobbit 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would too ... but not as the winning competitor. For their first year two of existence, bun tried to do npm, but better. For the first year or two of their existence, Deno tried to reinvent npm. The key result is that after that first year or two Deno had to walk back their decisions, to create a Node-ecosystem-compatible tool .. and as a result, they're now significantly behind bun (at least by all metrics I've seen). | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I know, early deno was rough and frustrating. But it is now _the_ main competitor to Bun. What makes you say it is behind? Are you talking about features or usage? | |
| ▲ | MoonWalk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Freedom from the NPM mess was why I started my project from the ground up in Deno in the first place. |
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| ▲ | afavour 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would mention Node as the main competitor. It isn't moving as vast as the VC-backed ecosystems are but its future is a lot more assured. | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ok, but Node is the status quo. As replacement to the node runtime bun and deno are the two contenders at the moment |
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| ▲ | veber-alex 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Looks like AI slop https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/issues/139 | | |
| ▲ | lioeters 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Good question, and you're basically right — let me show the smoking gun. :vomit: | | |
| ▲ | amlug 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Is there any Typescript that is compiled wrongly? If so, go ahead and show me. |
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| ▲ | nikcub 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | the AI replies itt are cringe | | |
| ▲ | veber-alex 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Seriously. It's one thing to use AI to write code but spamming machine generated garbage when talking to another person is just rude. | | |
| ▲ | kelvinjps10 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I see the thread and the patience of the other guy to continue talking to the AI, it's impressive | | |
| ▲ | amlug 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm the "AI cringe guy" if you want to call it that. Yet I am still waiting for someone to produce typescript that compiles wrongly. I have limited time, and the little feedback that guy provided turned out to be perfectly well answered by AI. So sorry, but either you actually criticize something actionable to just shut up, but I don't have the time to debate this if the simple few lines don't get answered. | | |
| ▲ | gardenhedge an hour ago | parent [-] | | Absolutely correct. It's not just smart to use AI in this way, it's efficient. And here's the thing most people don't get, you are saving time. If you would like more insight, just say the word. |
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| ▲ | amlug 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are they wrong though? AI or not, compiling code is math - not philosophy. So what's wrong here? |
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| ▲ | MoonWalk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "I want a serious Node.js alternative." Then you could have been using Deno, like many of us, for years. |
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| ▲ | qudat 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wild example as it has been corrupted by VC money as well. I wouldn’t touch deno either. |
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| ▲ | Sevii 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't know, I've been using Claude Code since it came out and it really doesn't seem to be getting worse. |
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| ▲ | JamesSwift 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I envy your experience. Its driving me crazy on a near daily basis now. | | |
| ▲ | wombat-man 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm still getting pretty good code out of it, but I only use it on side projects. Is the issue with their odd limit system? | | |
| ▲ | JamesSwift 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Im on pay-per-use plans so its not the limits thats the issue directly, although the product development process could lead to them trying to fix limit issue and breaking the product as a whole. The main issue is side effects of effort/thinking it seems. It hallucinates at a much higher rate and skips research in a ton of edge cases even with effort of MAX and disabling adaptive thinking, even on 4.6. Ive said before, but using opus today feels like using sonnet from ~October timeframe. Its not anywhere near what opus 4.5 in January felt like, or even opus 4.6 on release (notably 4.6 on release _really_ over-researched even simple tasks and that behavior is almost entirely gone now even with max effort so they are definitely re-tuning these things on the fly and degrading the experience as a result). EDIT: I also have a very high suspicion that the way they hydrate thinking is buggy and/or lossy (or maybe unintentionally lossy which leads to bugs). So many behaviors just make no sense at the level I have my setup tuned (I have everything set to "just charge me the most money to hopefully get the best results") and the fact that I havent changed anything while using it daily for months and months on end, but have been getting worse and worse results. | | |
| ▲ | hungryhobbit 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Claude has definitely gotten stupider (even on the latest Opus). I used to be able to give it certain commands, and reliably count on it to do the right thing. Lately I give it identical commands and it just starts doing something idiotic, instead of the correct thing (that it did 50 times prior). To an earlier poster's point, it's probably the model, not the harness, and I understand Anthropic has to make money someday (and they're not now) ... but I'd rather see a visible doubling of price than a secret halving of the capabilities (which seems to be their current plan). That approach is enshitification. | |
| ▲ | wombat-man 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah I have found worse results if I don't leave it on the highest setting. I have gotten by with Pro and a little overage buffer so far. I have found it working pretty well for what I'm using it for but I have really only been using it a couple months now. |
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| ▲ | dgellow 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But are you saying the harness is driving you insane? Or the model? Because Bun is,only the harness, and that part has been improving over time if you stay on the stable channel | | |
| ▲ | JamesSwift 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Its the product overall, and its impossible to say where the issues are but I tend to think not the model since the changes seem to be able to occur overnight. So likely a combo of harness and service-layer. | |
| ▲ | redsocksfan45 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which of the two is responsible for it ignoring being in Plan mode and trying to implement shit instead of just writing up a plan? | | |
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| ▲ | AYBABTME 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's a lot of very large jumps to come to the conclusion that Bun isn't going to turn out well. |
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| ▲ | 0sql 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Does bun have a formal roadmap? I occasionally see some the changes that Jarred posts on X, and I wonder if they're really meaningful or not (perf improvements are always good). It also seems like a lot of the recent contributions are ai authored. I tried using bun for a project earlier this year and learned that you can't use testcontainers(works fine w/ Deno). |
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| ▲ | papichulo2023 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I dont think so, but recent release includes a terminal markdown renderer built-in which means, even if handy, most of the focus is to make Claud Code great. I am not worried though, at least no yet. |
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| ▲ | james2doyle 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Maybe look at https://void.cloud/ (Edit: sorry, meant https://viteplus.dev/, not Void cloud) They are not a runtime, but they do seem to be interested in wrapping a lot of tools with simple top-level commands |
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| ▲ | butterlesstoast 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Even though I personally am moving some projects away from Bun, don't take my advice as gospel. Always appreciated nuance. |
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| ▲ | wg0 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| OpenAI and Anthropic both are destined to doom for sure. There's no way around it and it is all in the math. Bun would be a causality. It is only a matter of time. Only company that would survive the AI race - the one where the current wave was actually invented along with the research paper, the libraries and even specialised hardware: Google. Google has a serious problem with its product management culture (long list of products and projects, people even skeptical of Flutter) otherwise they would have surpassed Anthropic long ago. |
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| ▲ | CSSer 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Doesn't seem that bad if you're convinced they're the only viable market dominator. | |
| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Google seems profoundly uninterested in the agentic coding world though. gemini-cli is underwhelming, Antigravity not super compelling, and the Gemini model itself absolutely terrible and non-competitive in basic tool use necessary for coding, even inside their own harnesses. It's fine for other purposes though. Which are arguably a much larger and lucrative market. | |
| ▲ | Scarbutt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's assuming Google can outpace Nvidia, which may or never will. Nvidia is not just going to sleep on it. |
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| ▲ | pyrolistical 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I love coding with bun. It comes with everything. For my projects I don’t even need any additional dependencies. I use vanilla dom and sqlite |
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| ▲ | remote-dev 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The built-in sqlite and testing functionality is the reason I started using it over pnpm/Node. | | |
| ▲ | pkilgore 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Node has both built-in sqlite and testing functionality. Lots of reasons to like bun! But these two are interesting ones... | | |
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| ▲ | afavour 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This isn't anything new and I feel the same way about Deno. We can argue about exactly how much trouble any runtime is in today vs yesterday vs tomorrow but VC funding of a javascript runtime feels inherently unstable to me. The key question is how much unique tooling you're relying on. If you can switch to Node tomorrow, great. If you can't, make sure you have a contingency plan. |
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| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The problem is this. If not VC funding, then what? Volunteer work? So other people can make money off it? Our industry has no answer how to fund infrastructure. You've got FAANG companies using open source projects built by volunteers and doing meagre grants every once in a while, not nearly enough to pay a SWE salary. A smattering of hard to get grants from NLnet, etc. And then places like Anthropic or Grok or OpenAI "buying" open source teams to pull them inside, which inevitably leads to drama. I don't know what the answer is, but there's a serious issue here. Similar situations in the 80s were why the FSF was founded and the GPL established. (Not to fund, but to protect the rights of authors and users) |
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| ▲ | bricss 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Are Bun and Deno in the room with us right now? |
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| ▲ | robertjpayne 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| All these complaints about Claude code are mostly resolved if you pay for your usage with direct API pay as you go. It’s not cheap but nearly all the complaints I see about Claude code are due to the fact the subscription plans seem unsustainable from a cost perspective. |
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| ▲ | fhn 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wonder why Anthropic chose to spend money on Bun when they could have easily spend that resource on Go which is fairly easy to use and fast. I'm sure their SWEs could easily everything things in Go. Anyone have insight on why? |
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| ▲ | azuanrb 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If I had to guess, it comes down to speed of iteration. Claude Code is built on JavaScript, so Bun aligns well with their current stack. Switching to Go or Rust would only make sense if performance were the main priority, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Their current setup lets them ship quickly. A rewrite in Go would likely slow that down. Codex moved to Rust, and you can see the trade-off. Performance improved, but release velocity dropped. They’re also still catching up to Claude Code, so they don’t face the same pressure to ship as fast. | |
| ▲ | ec965 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Claude is still better at writing JS than it is Go. | |
| ▲ | zwarag 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My guess: JavaScript runs in the Browser as well as on the OS. That way you can train a model to be able to interact with both fairly simple. You can also see that their harness, claude-code is also written in js. So I guess they are quite invested in that language anyway. | |
| ▲ | siva7 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One of them is a much more efficient but obscure programming language from a competitor, the other is what the web is built on. | | | |
| ▲ | shimman 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, it's the same pattern you saw in the early react days where open source devs would try to "woo" the react core team into getting recognition to sell consulting services or courses. The bun people likely have some fucked up incestial business relationship with some >dev manager at Anthropic and the same pattern is repeating. Only this cycle it's going straight to acquisitions, which honestly seems like a worse strategy and Anthropic will def can the bun engineers in less than <3 years or whenever they face an actual budget crunch that they can't stave off with more gulf money. | |
| ▲ | bombcar 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is Claude better with Javascript than it is with Go code? Seems like it could be true. | | |
| ▲ | silverwind 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Problem with Go is the type system is rudimentary, so you can't "restrict" AIs as well as you could in Typescript. | |
| ▲ | dgellow 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don’t believe so, Go has simple rules, snd in my experience Claude is excellent at writing all the boilerplate needed |
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| ▲ | fnoef 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’m wondering why Anthropic, who has “the most powerful, hold me bro, AI in the world” just didn’t vibe code their own, better, version of bun? haven’t Dario said that coding is cooked in 6 month, like 12 months ago? | |
| ▲ | nothinkjustai 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I doubt those SWEs could have used anything other than JS. | | |
| ▲ | wiseowise an hour ago | parent [-] | | Ironic that this comment is in thread advocating for usage of Go: "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike" |
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| ▲ | jmuguy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why did you have to stop using Cursor? I ask this as someone that uses Cursor, but recently at a conference I heard it referred to negatively several times - but in a very vague sense. I don't really have a dog in the fight, I'm using it because thats what the other dev I work with is using. |
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| ▲ | remote-dev 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There is the SpaceX acquisition rumor, but that's not why. I only use Cursor through the CLI, and while the UX of the CLI is pretty bad, I've found their harness (the prompts they use and orchestration of LLMs) to be nothing short of incredible. I can't comment on their agent development environment given I haven't spent a lot of time with it. The reason I'm moving away from Cursor is cost. Unfortunately, if you want to use the SOTA models from both OpenAI and Anthropic you basically have to go direct through their subsidized plans. | | |
| ▲ | apsurd 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree with your assessment that the harness is incredible and so I get a ton of mileage out of Auto + Composer 2. This is my workhorse. Admittedly, with Opus 4.6+, GPT 5.5 I just haven't used them much and as I gain more experience I can see what the hype is all about. But to me, the answer isn't $200 max plan, it's bifurcating the work. Call me a spendthrift! |
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| ▲ | kristiandupont 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I personally switched back to vscode as I started using Claude and Opencode more for the AI flow, and I didn't see much added value any longer. Also, I was incredibly frustrated that they decided to hide the close button and finally, there were weird issues with editor groups spawning at unwanted times. They might be able to fix it, but I felt that they were starting to reach the limits of what you can do with a "live fork". | |
| ▲ | veber-alex 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The main complaint about Cursor I see online is that it's expensive. Otherwise if you are looking for and IDE first approach with great AI integration it's the best product out there. I prefer it over CC/Codex. | |
| ▲ | danaw 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | just conjecture but possibly because of the rumored acquisition plans from SpaceX (that's why i stopped using it) | | |
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| ▲ | DrBenCarson 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I made this exact same decisions (bun -> pnpm) for similar reasons, mostly bc I didn’t like how haphazardly a core part of the stack was being vibe coded. Too many changes too quickly for something that’s supposed to be stable |
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| ▲ | theusus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Bun is basically a wrapper over JSCore. I don't think it's that big of a feat. Furthermore they are heavily invested in vendor specific APIs which I think is not good. |
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| ▲ | avsn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nothing to worry about anymore, the ship has sailed the moment it was acquired. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I still see no monetization with Bun and Deno to keep them going. You see this all over the place with other programming languages. The ones that have bleeding edge features do so, because there are companies, or universities (for their PhD and Msc thesis), that invest into those ecosystems. In the end nodejs will keep improving, with Microsoft and Google's baking, and that will be it. |
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| ▲ | roywiggins an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > That is textbook enshittification. Technically, no, not textbook enshittification. Enshittification was originally meant to refer to companies squeezing two-sided markets, not products just getting kinda worse. |
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| ▲ | hjort-e 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| vite and it's ecosystem is actually becoming the unified toolchain with vite+. IIRC pnpm will also be the preferred package manager in the tool |
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| ▲ | pier25 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I use Bun and I'm concerned too but it's still too early to tell. Personally my experience with Bun has been 100% positive so far. I'm aware full Node support is not there yet and may never happen but with dependencies that support Bun it's been a smooth ride for me. |
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| ▲ | lrvick 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| pnpm is even worse. There is no way to bootstrap it without binary blobs making it an easy target supply chain attack waiting to happen that could hide in plain sight indefinitely. |
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| ▲ | ezekiel68 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ugh. I hate these "guilt by association" hit pieces. Nothing is wrong and yet we must signal our virtue. Might as well just open our pants and wave our wangers, hoping for a better world |
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| ▲ | hootz 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | If Disney acquired your favorite IP, wouldn't you get worried? | | |
| ▲ | ezekiel68 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but I wouldn't stop watching the originals. And I wouldn't stop watching anything until I saw what came out. |
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| ▲ | photios 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Friendship ended with Bun, now pnpm is my best friend" the post... |
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| ▲ | sibeliuss 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is all so speculative and whatevs |
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| ▲ | robomc 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | "I have a vague concern, so I'm now using a shittier toolchain. You shouldn't do it though." is a weird post format. |
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| ▲ | gwd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > But from the outside, Claude Code looks like a tool moving in the wrong direction. More restrictions, billing weirdness, surprise behavior based on text in commits. That is textbook enshittification. I've never used Claude Code, but this person doesn't understand what "textbook enshittification" means. "Enshittification" is a feature of certain kinds of business models, progressing through the following stages: 1. Giving away a product free to users, subsidized by venture capital, to gain a monopoly 2. Switching to advertising, then abusing users on behalf of the real customers, advertisers 3. Using monopoly power to abuse real customers (advertisers) to extract as much money as possible Anthropic's business model doesn't have a "user / customer" dichotomy; their paid users are their customers. And they don't have a monopoly they can use to extract money yet. ETA: In other words, "Enshittification" isn't just random; you're making the user experience worse in order to make advertiser experience better; and then making advertiser experience worse in order to extract maximum profit. The only complaint that could vaguely be related to profit is the OpenClaw stuff, and that's entirely due to trying to keep the "all-you-can-eat" model for non-OpenClaw users, rather than having to switch everything to metered. |
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| ▲ | wxw 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Will we see issues start popping up in Bun that make it seem like the team doesn't even dogfood their own product? I don't know, but I'm not sure I want to continue using it just in case. I sympathize with the general premise. The reaction to move away seems pre-mature though. It sounds like `bun` is still performing just as well as before, and this sentiment isn't based on concrete changes. I also wouldn't expect infrastructure like `bun` to evolve in the way a consumer-facing product, especially one scaling as quickly as Claude Code, can. |
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| ▲ | DrBenCarson 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Disagree, you definitely don’t want to be looking back saying “hm I knew it, I saw the signs, should have trusted myself” Plus it’s not a huge lift right now | | |
| ▲ | srdjanr 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Genuine question: why not just wait? If Bun stays great, you saved yourself some time for switching, and got to keep using Bun. If Bun worsens, you spend the same time for switching, just moved a bit later, and got to use Bun for a little longer. | | |
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| ▲ | suck-my-spez 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I still don't think Bun is production ready.
We just ripped bun out of a bunch of our production sevices. CPU runaway and memory leaks. All solved by switching back to nodejs. |
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| ▲ | twoodfin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’m confident that any unhappiness with Claude Code is at least 95% downstream of Anthropic seeing demand scale their revenue by ~3X in 6 months from a $multi-billion annual base. Their product focus, roadmap, or execution is likely a rounding error in the face of that tsunami. Frankly, it’s shocking they’re doing so well relative to, say, GitHub. |
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| ▲ | AtNightWeCode 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One thing is sure. Claude has become terrible. Criticize any code Opus 4.7 created and it starts a blame game. Also. It denies that a version 4.7 even exists. Will look into moving back to ChatGPT that I quit because the mandatory spyware bs they added which I believe they nuked. |
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| ▲ | agosta 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Umm, just use Deno? Everything author seems to love about Bun exists in Deno. |
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| ▲ | MoonWalk 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Seriously. This baffling omission undermines the credibility of the whole thing. "I want a serious Node.js alternative." So you ignore the one developed by the same guy? |
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| ▲ | esafak 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Don't fret; the creator of mise has released a faster alternative: https://github.com/endevco/aube |
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| ▲ | periodjet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The term “enshittification” really ruins (one might say “enshittifies”) any article it’s in. |
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| ▲ | moomoo11 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why do people use bun? Would like an answer from an actual experienced / staff tier or higher engineer. |
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| ▲ | sroussey 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Simplicity. bun file.ts And it’s been this way for years. Don’t care about what’s in a package.json file or if there is one. Can do this without tsconfig file as well. | | | |
| ▲ | bel8 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm no staff+, but the tooling (package manager and TypeScript runner) is very fast. bun run is <1s for my projects, while watching for file changes. So the iteration speed is quite pleasant. |
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| ▲ | whimsicalism an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Millenials of the redditor class desperately need a moratorium on the word enshittifying. |
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| ▲ | deanc 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Let them cook. Anything that they can do to get rid of the absolute hell that is dependencies in the JS ecosystem is worthwhile. I really don't care what they add as long as it's maintained |
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| ▲ | namuol 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I see the word “enshittify” being thrown around casually about Claude Code. We’re far from that part of the Enshittification cycle still. This is just a mismanaged product and the result of an extremely competitive market that moves too fast. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence, etc. |
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| ▲ | NetMageSCW 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Their third part harness move seems like more than incompetence. | |
| ▲ | estimator7292 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, I'm none too happy with anthropic right now, but what's happening to Claude code is just your typical garden variety mismanagement of a project that grew way too fast for its owners to reasonably handle. |
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| ▲ | orliesaurus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| has anyone forked bun? |
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| ▲ | jillesvangurp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Here's how I evaluate whether I'm going to use a given bit of OSS: - Is the project important to me or can I replace it? If the latter, I'm more likely to allow failures of other criteria. If not, I need to be more strict. Bun is easy enough to replace if something were to happen to the project. Easy come, easy go. - Are there any red flags in financing that could become problematic? Many VC funded OSS companies fail this test for me. What happens when they don't make it? What happens post IPO if they do? What happens when they get acquihired? Mostly that's up to share holders, not developers. Most VC funded companies actually don't make it and that's normal in the VC world. A few companies make it, everything else fails quickly. And there are a few examples of projects that have changed licenses under pressure of shareholders. That's why this is a red flag to me. I've used Redis and Elasticsearch, for example. And I switched away from Mongo before they changed the license. I used Terraform before they open sourced. All negative examples here. Bun initially wasn't great on this. But the Anthropic acquisition has improved things a bit. It's still a risk. But it's unlikely they have any plans for Bun other than just keeping it alive by employing the main people working on it. Anthropic itself might still fail of course. - Has the project been around for a long time. If so, it likely has a stable community and funding. There are no guarantees but the older the better. Bun is pretty newish still. - Is the project stable and under active development? If it's stable because nobody makes changes anymore that's usually not a great sign. If it is stable despite a lot of active development, that's really positive. It means somebody competent is in charge. Bun seems pretty good on that front. - Is the project otherwise structured right to be future proof. For me future proof is a combination of contributor community, commercial activity, and licensing. The more diverse the contributor community the better. If there are multiple companies sponsoring and making money of a project, that makes it less likely that a single one can hijack it for their own good. This is more common with permissively licensed software (but there are exceptions). Bun doesn't have much commercial activity around it and the regular contributor community is tiny. One person seems to be doing most of the work with only a handful of notable other contributors that are probably all Anthropic employed at this point. Out of these, the dependence on a single person looks the most problematic to me. So, the overall score for bun is not perfect (there a few potential red flags) but I'm happy to risk using it because it's not that critical to me and easily replaceable. My read of the whole Anthropic acquihire is that it is an improvement over the starting point which was a VC funded company that was probably going to fail otherwise. Otherwise, good tech and generally nice to use. I could see Anthropic going bad and this project surviving in one form or another. So, that doesn't have to be a show stopper. |
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| ▲ | coolThingsFirst 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Bun does great on their own benchmarks. |
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| ▲ | forrestthewoods 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Claude is currently unusable for me on Windows because bun keeps crashing :( |
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| ▲ | cute_boi 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I used to be a fan of Bun, but the way it keeps adding bloat makes me seriously doubt its future. Also, it seems like they are doing a lot of vibe coding without taking enough time, which raises other questions. Node.js is also more stable, and it has started supporting TypeScript out of the box. I don’t think Bun will have many advantages after Node 26. |
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| ▲ | pier25 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > and it has started supporting TypeScript out of the box Node only does type stripping though. If you want proper TS support you still need a compiler. > I don’t think Bun will have many advantages after Node 26 There are tons of advantages. For instance, Bun includes a lot of features that would need a third party dependency in Node: db driver, S3 client, watch mode, bundler, JSX support, etc. | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why would you want DB drivers and S3 clients in your runtime? That’s exactly what 3rd parties are for, you don’t want to have to update your runtime for a new version of your drivers | | |
| ▲ | tpetry 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | And a bug in a dependency you can fix easily. One in the runtime is much harder to fix and you then must compile new versions. | | |
| ▲ | NetMageSCW 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | And a supply chain attack is much easier with too many dependencies as well. |
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| ▲ | yabooey 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Mostly in my day to day routine, where is use Claude Code maybe 90% of the time, I don’t see that it’s become that bad. Yes they’ve made some questionable decisions on API usage and OpenClaw but I feel like this post is making it out to be worse than it is. That being said I’ve been worried about the future of Bun anyway. Especially if the AI bubble pops. Then again, it’s open source. |
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| ▲ | lstodd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What is there to worry about? If we believe AI crowd, Bun and entire JS ecosystem is done for. Dead. Nothing to worry about since nothing's left. If as claimed everyone and his malnourished cellar rat can whip up a SaaS on a whim, then why that SaaS should be built upon chromium+js+http instead of tcp+native ui? Remember, choice of ui is no longer a constraint. Nothing is a constraint or so they say. So it follows that all this javascript stuff can at last die. |
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| ▲ | josefritzishere 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ray Bradbury foresaw this. |
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| ▲ | jonas21 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The issues with Claude Code lately look to me like symptoms of being part of a service that is experiencing insane growth (fastest growth in history, by far [1]), while being severely constrained on adding capacity (GPUs are hard to get quickly right now, even if you have the money). I assume they're constantly fighting fires trying to keep the core use cases of Claude Code working, even if that means limiting OpenClaw usage in somewhat draconian ways. It's annoying, but I don't see this as a bad thing at all for Bun. [1] https://www.axios.com/2026/04/13/anthropic-revenue-growth-ai |
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| ▲ | parliament32 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, all the issues are symptoms of trying to slop-code a functional product. Anthropic has admitted they dogfood heavily, and issues like [1] from the article could only be caused by a text generator.. I refuse to believe Anthropic employees are that stupid. [1] https://youtu.be/J8O9LLpJNrg?t=1201 |
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| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Aube[0] seems interesting to me, I have submitted it as show HN after hearing about your post. Its created by the same person who has made mise and I actually discovered it when I was browsing through on mise.en.dev website I still use bun, but I think that there are some other pathways so I am not that worried about myself personally. But that's also because I most often than not code in golang rather than typescript/javascript [0]: https://aube.en.dev/ |
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| ▲ | concretereturns an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| test |
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| ▲ | b4rtaz__ 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Personally, I suspect that Bun is a Silicon Valley attempt to lock some companies into its stack (similar to what cloud providers, Next.js + Vercel do). Especially now that Anthropic has become an owner, I'll be keeping Bun at a considerable distance. The funniest part to me is that 10–15 years ago, companies were stuck in the development process due to binary (closed) dependencies. Now they're jumping into the same trap under a different name. Maybe I’ve missed some scandals, but so far OpenJS Foundation is the best thing that has happened for the JavaScript ecosystem. |
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| ▲ | zimbatm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is there actual evidence coming from the Bun project itself? Otherwise it's just FUD. |
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| ▲ | reactordev 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Just look at the "new" documentation. It's full on AI slop. |
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| ▲ | neoden 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| what a nice way to write an article! |
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| ▲ | frankfrank13 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| TLDR; > Claude Code appears to be enshittifying. So now I have to worry that Bun could enshittify too |
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| ▲ | keybored 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| tl;dr: I have concerns. Not because Bun is bad. Bun is great. It is not bad. But Claude was good. And now it is bad. Bun is owned by Anthropic. Transitive property. Maybe. I hope I’m wrong. |
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| ▲ | the__alchemist 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Look at them! They're like loaves of bread that hop. |
