I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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."<p>Lots of businesses have subscription programs in which a small number of users are money losers, but which in aggregate make money.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Also, they (Anthropic) are transitioning many of their enterprise customers to API consumption billing anyway.
I work in the video AI world.<p>We gave up on subscriptions long ago. They're rinky dink and get you a paltry amount of utilization before they run out.<p>The per day per seat costs can exceed $1000. This is already normal for studios, and it's already producing positive ROI.<p>There's simply no way to price video any other way than by usage. I suspect the same will come for everything.
> Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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).<p>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.
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.
ASI is the acronym you’re looking for. It stands for Artificial Superintelligence.<p>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.<p>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?
ChatGPT can only respond to a prompt, and in the context of that prompt. It has no continuous awareness of anything. That isn't superintelligence. We are easily fooled because we have stupid monkey brains.
We have more like Artificial Superstupidity.<p>Ultimately our current model is extremely unlikely to perform better than the sum of current human knowledge. Godlike super-intelligence is a pipe dream with the current LLM based approaches.
Well no because no one is going to be coming in to work building the next AI model after the Singularity.<p>We’ll all be bblbrvkxn46?/4!gfbxf’mgv5fhxtgcsgjcucz to buvtcibycuvinovrYdyvuctYcrzuvhxh gcuch7…:!
Anthropic/OpenAI aren't planning to have their superintelligence take over the world, but they're still afraid that someone else will do it.
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.
If OpenAI has the second superintelligence they have to merge with the first and cooperate. It's a provision in their charter.
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.<p>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?
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?
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).<p>But that's all just sci-fi worldbuilding.
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.<p>A genuine superintelligence is a very, very scary thing to have under the control of one person or organisation.
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.
For the concrete problem we're discussing, you can hack your competitors out of existence, replace all of your knowledge workers to shed costs, hyperoptimise your logistics, etc. It's not just intelligence, it's speed and scale.<p>Bostrom's <i>Superintelligence</i> (2014) is a bit of a dreary read, and I didn't finish it, but it pulls no punches about the leverage that a superintelligence might have in our highly-connected world.
Assuming it can't <i>super</i> hack all computer systems and cripple competing SI incubation to at least increase its lead time indefinetly.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>2. In the internal balancing of goals sense not the don't feed the mogwai after midnight sense.
That's just what they told the gullible investors to get money.
> 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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
If each additional user is a net benefit for them, but they're still struggling to find enough capacity, it would make sense to cut down usage from existing users so they can onboard new ones.<p>They're trying to capture the market! Can't do that if you have to stop onboarding users because NVIDIA are struggling to manufacture enough GPUs for you.
> 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.<p>"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.<p>> At some point they have to price their product fairly<p>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.<p>> They will have to compete on merit alone, and that is much less profitable.<p>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.
If you were right Anthropic's ARR would be going down but it's not. They just surpassed $30B up from $14B two months ago.
>Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed.<p>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.<p>And honestly, if you look at their frankly insane revenue growth since Opus 4.5 released, they were right.<p>>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.<p>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.
> These labs play the game of trying to kill competition in the harness game<p>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.
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.
The thing is, the harness _is_ the model at the end of the day:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down</a>
> Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.<p>I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a <i>javascript runtime</i> 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.
Are there any situations you would compare this to historically?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Maybe we should stop trying to build so many billion dollar/year businesses and work on more sustainable models.
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.
The audio and 3D card pioneers in the PC world.<p>The ones that were first to market went all bankrupt, or were acquired by others that came later into the scene.
> 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".<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
It's a bit insane, but the cost of switching to regular NodeJS is low (for all but most bun-specific projects).<p>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).
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.<p>There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.
You might be underestimating the effect that corporate policies and culture have on the product.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Matt Pocock has a great talk here: <a href="https://youtu.be/v4F1gFy-hqg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/v4F1gFy-hqg</a><p><pre><code> "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."
</code></pre>
Once bad code starts to compound on itself, it's going to be really hard to break out of it.
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)?
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.<p>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.
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.
> but I think that it mostly boils down to many learners preferring video content over written material<p>99% of the times that's not learning, but productivity porn.
I have followed a simple rule in my career, if you offer training/courses I don’t listen to anything you say.<p>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).
> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This is all independent of any shitty practices with their other software. And this has been for decades at this point.
> Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products.<p>Doesn't that just make it even worse? If Anthropic can't even afford to spend the engineering effort on making sure their <i>core product</i> 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?<p>If Anthropic is financially hurting, why <i>shouldn't</i> they put Bun on the bare minimum of life support?
Because they need it to work, so that everything built on it works too.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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..
> Anthropic acquired Bun for their own benefit, to protect and grow their investment in Claude Code.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
This is a good take, and I hope you're right.<p>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.<p>It remains to be seen how things will actually unfold.
you can own your upstream supply chain while simultaneously being less responsive to user pain points
Own your supply chain. Reduces risk.
Anthropic bought actual engineers to undo the slop their vibe-coders produce with reckless abandon: <a href="https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987</a><p>However, these engineers, too, now start to vibe-code with reckless abandon <a href="https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284</a> and <a href="https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2049780223311548729" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2049780223311548729</a>
> it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse<p>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.
Funding to pay the core team (via revenue/grants/VC) requires a lot of leadership attention for any independent company that is developing an open-source project as its main activity. Yet more leadership attention goes into other administration (Taxes/hiring/legal/policies/etc.).<p>I don't have any direct context, though I have run an open-source business (Zulip) for the last decade wearing both the CEO and technical lead hats.<p>But my simulation is that the Bun leadership team might well be spending 2x as much of their time working on the technology than they reasonably could have as an independent venture-funded company, just because they don't have to do all that other stuff anymore. (There's of course probably a significant bias in that focus towards whatever Anthropic needs from Bun, only some of which other users may care about).<p>So I agree. Personally, I would not be concerned unless you see the tell-tale signs of the team being reassigned to other priorities at the buyer, which tends to be obvious, because, say, the GitHub project activity falls off a cliff.
> 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.<p>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?
> I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.<p>Incidentally, Anthropic needs to figure out how to monetize at some point too.
What came to my mind is Windows.<p>Regardless of what else is going on, kernel is a separate team, and has very strong incentives to remain competent and sane.
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.
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.<p>They released more major features and breaking changes in their last <i>patch</i> release than most software sees in two major versions.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Here are some things shipping in the next version of Bun:<p>- 17 MB smaller Windows x64 binaries [0]<p>- 8 MB smaller Linux binaries [1]<p>- `--no-orphans` CLI flag to recursively kill any lingering processes spawned [3]<p>- SSL context caching for client TCP & unix sockets, which significantly reduces memory usage for database clients like Mongoose/MongoDB [4]<p>- Experimental HTTP/3 & HTTP/2 client in fetch [5]<p>- Experimental HTTP/3 support in Bun.serve() [6]<p>- Bun.Image, a builtin image processing library [7]<p>(Along with several reliability improvements to node:fs, Worker, BroadcastChannel, and MessagePort)<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30219" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30219</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30098" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30098</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/WebKit/pull/211" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/WebKit/pull/211</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29930" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29930</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29932" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29932</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29863" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29863</a><p>[6]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30032" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30032</a>
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.<p>Perhaps Bun will be the exception, but you can't say that the concern is unfounded.<p>The CEO of Anthropic has a habit of making outlandish predictions about how AI is <i>so very close</i> to replacing human programmers. Anthropic has been applying this belief to Claude Code and it has become a giant heap of unmaintainable spaghetti.
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?<p>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.
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 :)<p>I’ve been a Bun maximalist since the beginning. Thank you Jarred!!!
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.
It's a little heartbreaking. The DX of Bun is legitimately amazing and perhaps even revolutionary (I say this as a long-time javascript backender). I'm all for LLM-based development velocity enhancement, but it does really feel like they are taking it too far and moving too fast.
I don't really see the issue here. They are language models after-all and they work by talking. Whether it's one model talking to itself (i.e thinking/reasoning), or one model talking to another it amounts to the same thing.
I think velocity is a real risk to stability, dogfooding or not. That's what made me swear off the python transformers library. It's doubtful that LLMs will change that calculus for the better.
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.
Hey Jarred, first of all, thanks. I've been doing backend JS since the first release of node and bun is genuinely the first really big improvement in terms of DX. It's an absolute delight to build glue and scripts with... Bun.* just seems to have everything I need. Bun.$ is revolutionary. etc. etc. I'm hoping to run a collection of backend services on it in the near future but it seems the general consensus is that there are still some gremlins holding it back (memory leaks, etc.)<p>Can you shed a little light on the recent giant rust based commits though? Are you guys moving away from zig? These kind of big curious movements and the spectre of giant LLM-based commits are not exactly confidence inspiring.
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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?<p>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.
I switched to Deno because it is the only option out of the 3 that allow monorepo workflow without building .d.ts files. Bun and Node both do type stripping or compiling of TS, but it only works for the entry package of the running script, not any of the linked dependencies from the same repo.<p>There are still things I dislike about Deno, but it really does make package development a lot simpler. JSR is a great upgrade from NPM, and Deno makes it so simple to publish to both NPM and JSR. Strict IO permission system and WebGPU support are also nice to have.<p>> wrap a project into an `*.exe`<p>Deno makes this simple too. Though that's where it's bundling features stop. Honestly I am okay with that, I'd rather use Rolldown or Vite for web or library bundling.
Deno has been great for wrapping the dozens of REST API's I need to use in the world in MCP. The no compilation thing means that I can push and it's literally deployed in seconds. I run several dozen of the little servers for various use cases, it's a very cheap way to build an automatable life
> 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.<p>1) You need to retest again, mainly because Bun's own native tools should be faster than Node's.<p>2) My experience is the opposite: For the niche uses I'm on, the rendering process is done 2-3x faster with only a few changes to use Bun's tools.
Started using Bun last year for some quick tests and it ended up fully replacing Node for any new projects after using it for over a decade.<p>I've reduced my dependencies 5-10x. Got full TS and JSX/TSX support with zero setup. Watch mode is instant. You can deploy a single binary.<p>I kept waiting for all the breaking issues people complain online but my experience has been nothing but positive.
> Bun has no REPL<p>Bun has a really nice REPL, can recommend <a href="https://bun.com/docs/runtime/repl" rel="nofollow">https://bun.com/docs/runtime/repl</a>
I like Deno because there is no "install" step for users, you just run it.
The Bun DX is infinitely better than Node's, especially for Typescript projects
Deno has sqlite: <a href="https://docs.deno.com/examples/sqlite/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.deno.com/examples/sqlite/</a>
So does node, since v22: <a href="https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html</a><p>They even added sql template string queries like recent popular libraries in v24.<p>I just built a project using it.
Ah my mistake, this wasn't the case last I used it, thanks for pointing this out, I checked briefly and referenced stale data.
> Deno is just Node with a restrictive, annoying permission system<p>I find Deno's permission system amazing! (although I didn't stick with it until v2)<p>Everything is closed by default but you're able to write code like normal.<p>Whenever it needs a permission the code pauses (like `debugger;`) and the terminal asks you "hey, should this script have access to this file/folder"?<p>- You say yes and the code continues (no need for exceptions).<p>- You say no and the code stops.<p>Then after your program has run, you put only the answers you said yes to in a deno.json file and it never has to ask again.<p>---------------------------------------<p>I'm currently working on a project that takes in heap of files from one one set of devs, processes them with a heap of files from another set of devs, then compiles and outputs the final product.<p>The file structure goes like this:<p>1. Group one devs<p>2. Group two devs<p>3. Build output<p>4. Compiler<p>So group one only works in their folder, and group two only works in their folder, but needs to see group one's folder.<p>With Deno it's stupidly easy to do stuff like:<p>- Scripts in group one only have file read access to group one.<p>- Scripts in group two only have file read access to group one and two.<p>- Scripts in the compiler only have file read access to group one and two's folders, only have file write access to build-output folder, and can read the env file in the project's root directory.<p>- One specific file is only allowed to access a specific URL and port<p>- Another specific file is only allowed to use the FFI to access a specific shared object.<p>I don't need to worry about a dev's script accidentally using the wrong file because they messed up the path.<p>I don't need to worry about a dev accidentally overwriting a file and losing data.<p>I don't need to worry about a dev blindly going down the wrong road because an LLM convinced them to.<p>I don't need to worry about a dev using LLMs agents that are trying to make the project do something it's not supposed to do.<p>I don't need to worry about a dev including a dependency that's doing what it shouldn't be doing.<p>I don't need to worry about the equivalent of `rm -rf ./$BUILD-OUTPUT` but the env file wasn't set up correctly and $BUILD-OUTPUT is empty/undefined evaluating to `rm -rf ./` and nuking the project's root.<p>I don't need to worry about supply-chain attacks.<p>I don't need to worry about namesquatting attacks.<p>There's so many things I don't need to worry about.<p>It's such a breath of fresh air.<p>It's just: you guys read from here, other guys read from here, the compiler writes to here.<p>Whenever something doesn't fit, the program stops and tells you what file is trying to access what permission.<p>---------------------------------------<p>aside: Node added a permission system but it's completely broken by design. Everything's open and you have to manually close each permission yourself. Oh, you don't want this project to have file write permissions? Lets just turn off the file write permissions (and forget to also turn off the subprocess permissions to spawn a shell which rm -rf's the wrong folder).
...try `bun repl` in your terminal<p>otherwise, bun has a big "batteries included" thing going on.<p>For instance,<p>- Bun.$ to run shell commands<p>- an entire redis client at Bun.redis<p>There are dozens of other examples like this<p>For rapid prototyping, complex glue scripts, etc. it's an absolute joy to work with. There is often no reason to pull in any dependencies to accomplish what you want.
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:<p>- Querying sqlite with tagged template literals<p>- Bun.password.verify being argon2 is a better default<p>- HTML imports<p>- JSX transpilation<p>- Auto loading .env file<p><a href="https://burlyburr.com" rel="nofollow">https://burlyburr.com</a>, which hits <a href="https://backend.burlyburr.com" rel="nofollow">https://backend.burlyburr.com</a>
Node supports Querying sqlite with tagged template literals.<p><a href="https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html#databasecreatetagstoremaxsize" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/api/sqlite.html#databasecreatetagstoremax...</a>
Why not just write a small helper library to add back the features you miss? Node includes SQLite and Argon2 at least, if the issue is the interface then that is easily fixed.
Node supports auto loading .env and also supports sqlite
I agree with OP, and understand why to some it feels premature.<p>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.<p>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.
> where people are more conscious of ethical concerns and willing to stand on their ground to avoid repeating past mistakes<p>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.
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.
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.<p>For example, i'd been following this issue <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/14102" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/14102</a> and eventually all the libraries shipped "if bun do x" into them, which is the opposite of compatibility.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
No disagreement, but this article was posted 2 days ago, the argument isn't relevant right now.
When did Node add native TypeScript? Can you run "node main.ts" directly without any dependencies?
January of last year. Yes.<p><a href="https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v23.6.0" rel="nofollow">https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v23.6.0</a>
v22.18 promoted type stripping from experimental
Additionally, with Typescript compiler rewrite, it is even less relevant.
Regardless of Anthropic/ClaudeCode, PerryTS[1] looks like a very promising competitor to Bun.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/PerryTS/perry" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/PerryTS/perry</a>
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.
I would mention deno as the main competitor
Personally I much prefer Deno as it's also doing a lot more work to unify the backend and frontend JS APIs.
I would too ... but not as the winning competitor.<p>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.<p>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).
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?
Freedom from the NPM mess was why I started my project from the ground up in Deno in the first place.
I would mention <i>Node</i> as the main competitor. It isn't moving as vast as the VC-backed ecosystems are but its future is a lot more assured.
Looks like AI slop<p><a href="https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/issues/139" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/issues/139</a>
> Good question, and you're basically right — let me show the smoking gun.<p>:vomit:
the AI replies itt are cringe
Seriously. It's one thing to use AI to write code but spamming machine generated garbage when talking to another person is just rude.
Are they wrong though? AI or not, compiling code is math - not philosophy. So what's wrong here?
This post seems to "throw doubt" on Bun, based on the OP's experience of Claude Code. But this seems unnecessary indirect. It's not like Bun is hidden software: it's open source and actively developed.<p>So the more direct question would be: How has Bun actually been since the acquisition?<p>From what I can tell they have been responding to users as fast as before, and improving the product as well as before.
I don't know, I've been using Claude Code since it came out and it really doesn't seem to be getting worse.
"I want a serious Node.js alternative."<p>Then you could have been using Deno, like many of us, for years.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>I tried using bun for a project earlier this year and learned that you can't use testcontainers(works fine w/ Deno).
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.
Maybe look at <a href="https://void.cloud/" rel="nofollow">https://void.cloud/</a> (Edit: sorry, meant <a href="https://viteplus.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://viteplus.dev/</a>, not Void cloud)<p>They are not a runtime, but they do seem to be interested in wrapping a lot of tools with simple top-level commands
>Even though I personally am moving some projects away from Bun, don't take my advice as gospel.<p>Always appreciated nuance.
That's a lot of very large jumps to come to the conclusion that Bun isn't going to turn out well.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But mainly for now it just generated a lot of distrust for me
> team ships constantly<p>Why do people want this? Shipping constantly is how software breaks. You want tools that are good and stable, not constantly churning. I wish software developers would wake up to the idea that velocity is not a marker of quality.
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
I love coding with bun. It comes with everything.<p>For my projects I don’t even need any additional dependencies. I use vanilla dom and sqlite
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Doesn't seem that bad if you're convinced they're the only viable market dominator.
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.<p>It's fine for other purposes though. Which are arguably a much larger and lucrative market.
That's assuming Google can outpace Nvidia, which may or never will. Nvidia is not just going to sleep on it.
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.
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.
There is the SpaceX acquisition rumor, but that's not why.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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!
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".
The main complaint about Cursor I see online is that it's expensive.<p>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.
just conjecture but possibly because of the rumored acquisition plans from SpaceX (that's why i stopped using it)
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 <i>javascript runtime</i> feels inherently unstable to me.<p>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.
The problem is this.<p>If not VC funding, then what? Volunteer work? So other people can make money off it?<p>Our industry has no answer how to fund infrastructure.<p>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.<p>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)
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.
Ugh. I hate these "guilt by association" hit pieces. Nothing is wrong and yet we must signal our virtue.<p>Might as well just open our pants and wave our wangers, hoping for a better world
So who controls NodeJS? <a href="https://openjsf.org/governance" rel="nofollow">https://openjsf.org/governance</a> has Microsoft as the chair. And Microsoft owns npm. It's kinda hard to avoid a corp controlling these tools.<p>The author seems more focused on the thing where Anthropic fights OpenClaw usage unless you have the right billing set up for that. Frankly I just don't care about those complaints, all the LLM services want you to set up a non-subsidized billing method to use OpenClaw because it uses lots of tokens. It doesn't mean they're going to crap on Bun.<p>The only reason I don't use Bun is I never ran into a situation where Node didn't cut it. Even though my least favorite tech corp controls Node.
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.
vite and it's ecosystem is actually becoming <i>the</i> unified toolchain with vite+. IIRC pnpm will also be the preferred package manager in the tool
I still see no monetization with Bun and Deno to keep them going.<p>You see this all over the place with other programming languages.<p>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.<p>In the end nodejs will keep improving, with Microsoft and Google's baking, and that will be it.
Nothing to worry about anymore, the ship has sailed the moment it was acquired.
I use Bun and I'm concerned too but it's still too early to tell.<p>Personally my experience with Bun has been 100% positive so far.<p>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.
> 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.<p>I sympathize with the general premise. The reaction to move away seems pre-mature though.<p>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.
Disagree, you definitely don’t want to be looking back saying “hm I knew it, I saw the signs, should have trusted myself”<p>Plus it’s not a huge lift right now
Genuine question: why not just wait?<p>If Bun stays great, you saved yourself some time for switching, and got to keep using Bun.<p>If Bun worsens, you spend the same time for switching, just moved a bit later, and got to use Bun for a little longer.
Are Bun and Deno in the room with us right now?
"Friendship ended with Bun, now pnpm is my best friend" the post...
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.
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.<p>Their product focus, roadmap, or execution is likely a rounding error in the face of that tsunami.<p>Frankly, it’s shocking they’re doing so well relative to, say, GitHub.
> 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.<p>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:<p>1. Giving away a product free to users, subsidized by venture capital, to gain a monopoly<p>2. Switching to advertising, then abusing users on behalf of the real customers, advertisers<p>3. Using monopoly power to abuse real customers (advertisers) to extract as much money as possible<p>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.<p>ETA: In other words, "Enshittification" isn't just random; you're making the user experience worse <i>in order to make advertiser experience better</i>; and then making advertiser experience worse <i>in order to extract maximum profit</i>. 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.
> That is textbook enshittification.<p>Technically, no, not <i>textbook</i> enshittification. Enshittification was originally meant to refer to companies squeezing two-sided markets, not products just getting kinda worse.
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.
This is all so speculative and whatevs
Umm, just use Deno? Everything author seems to love about Bun exists in Deno.
Don't fret; the creator of mise has released a faster alternative: <a href="https://github.com/endevco/aube" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/endevco/aube</a>
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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Claude is still better at writing JS than it is Go.
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.<p>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.
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?
Is Claude better with Javascript than it is with Go code? Seems like it could be true.
Problem with Go is the type system is rudimentary, so you can't "restrict" AIs as well as you could in Typescript.
I don’t believe so, Go has simple rules, snd in my experience Claude is excellent at writing all the boilerplate needed
I doubt those SWEs could have used anything other than JS.
Ironic that this comment is in thread advocating for usage of Go:<p>"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"
One of them is a much more efficient but obscure programming language from a competitor, the other is what the web is built on.
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
Why do people use bun? Would like an answer from an actual experienced / staff tier or higher engineer.
Simplicity.<p>bun file.ts<p>And it’s been this way for years.<p>Don’t care about what’s in a package.json file or if there is one. Can do this without tsconfig file as well.
I'm no staff+, but the tooling (package manager and TypeScript runner) is very fast.<p>bun run is <1s for my projects, while watching for file changes. So the iteration speed is quite pleasant.
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.<p>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.<p>Maybe I’ve missed some scandals, but so far OpenJS Foundation is the best thing that has happened for the JavaScript ecosystem.
Bun does great on their own benchmarks.
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.<p>Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence, etc.
Their third part harness move seems like more than incompetence.
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 <i>way</i> too fast for its owners to reasonably handle.
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.<p>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.
Here's how I evaluate whether I'm going to use a given bit of OSS:<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>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.
has anyone forked bun?
Claude is currently unusable for me on Windows because bun keeps crashing<p>:(
The term “enshittification” really ruins (one might say “enshittifies”) any article it’s in.
Millenials of the redditor class desperately need a moratorium on the word enshittifying.
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.<p>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?<p>Remember, choice of ui is no longer a constraint. Nothing is a constraint or so they say.<p>So it follows that all this javascript stuff can at last die.
Ray Bradbury foresaw this.
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.<p>It's annoying, but I don't see this as a bad thing at all for Bun.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/04/13/anthropic-revenue-growth-ai" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/2026/04/13/anthropic-revenue-growth-ai</a>
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 <i>only</i> be caused by a text generator.. I refuse to believe Anthropic employees are that stupid.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/J8O9LLpJNrg?t=1201" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/J8O9LLpJNrg?t=1201</a>
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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<p>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<p>[0]: <a href="https://aube.en.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://aube.en.dev/</a>
Is there actual evidence coming from the Bun project itself?<p>Otherwise it's just FUD.
Just look at the "new" documentation. It's full on AI slop.
what a nice way to write an article!
test
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.<p>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.
> <i>and it has started supporting TypeScript out of the box</i><p>Node only does type stripping though. If you want proper TS support you still need a compiler.<p>> <i>I don’t think Bun will have many advantages after Node 26</i><p>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.
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TLDR;<p>> Claude Code appears to be enshittifying. So now I have to worry that Bun could enshittify too
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.
Look at them! They're like loaves of bread that hop.