> For me this outputs Bun v1.4.0 (macOS arm64). The most recent release of Bun on GitHub is currently v1.3.14 from May 12th, so that v1.4.0 version number in Claude supports them shipping a preview of a not-yet-released Bun version.
And so, the FOSS project "Bun" silently dies in darkness and is now something completely else. I'm glad I still had "Investigate if Bun is worth it" on my TODO list and hadn't yet gotten to it.
What is the governance structure for Bun by the way? Couldn't find any documents/explanations about how it's supposed to work. I'm guessing it's essentially just "Anthropic decides what gets done and accepted" today?
Honestly, I initially thought rewriting an entire codebase with AI would be a huge mistake. After reading this, I'm starting to think I was wrong.
If projects like Bun can be substantially rewritten and shipped to millions of users, it suggests we're entering a very different phase of software development.
Today's AI-generated rewrites may not produce code that humans would consider high quality or maintainable. But I'm beginning to wonder whether that will even matter in a few months. If AI is the primary consumer, maintainer, and refactorer of code, human readability becomes far less important than correctness, performance, and the ability to iterate.
This feels like a shift where software may no longer exist as a long-lived artifact in its current form. Instead of writing and maintaining applications for years, we may generate, adapt, and discard them continuously for each use case.
Some of what you’re saying is likely true but quality is something that will never be optional. There is quantitative data suggest that LLMs perform better on higher quality code base which makes sense. Code that is well organized and coherent will make better use of the context window.
Software refactoring and tech debt is absolutely where LLMs will shine as is evidenced by the Bun rewrite.
Personally my take on the entire affair is quite negative, whatever Jarred or Simonw says about it.
I think Bun owned by Anthropic and the entire rewrite with AI is not the real point (even if it's quite interesting, though).
My take is that Jarred, and Bun,didn't demonstrate a serious, adult approach, from "this is my branch, you are overreacting" message to just proceeding with a 1mil+ PR merged in less than month.
The communication is the issue, and it was handled very badly, in a way that impacted trust and divisions.
Was it so difficult to adopt the approach that the TS team adopted for 7.0?
I don't know, I feel as though Bun went about it much more maturely than zig at any point in the process, from the initial attempted zig compiler commit by the Bun team to the Zig dev team member response to the Bun Rust blog post. Also, I think that fallout over this whole event will definitely favor Bun versus Zig.
There was a recent post on here with a Claude Code issue I and others responses to. Specifically, the person from Anthropic who caused the issue replied on HackerNews. In it, he claimed he was the sole contributor and reviewer of the code into production, that he would “do better” in the future. Commenters were confused how a company like Anthropic could allow something like this occur and for an engineer to publicly admit a complete failure and negligence of build processes.
It’s clear seeing your post here a couple days later what’s going on. It’s deliberate. I can only speculate on their reasons why but it seems to be an intentional form of disrespect on the engineering culture. “Your norms, your work, your principles” mean nothing. We can spend money and invalidate your life’s work. We don’t need your consent or support. That’s my personal guess at a surface level.
Yeah, I noticed. I had Claude write a quick JS script for me a few days ago, it then tried to use Bun to run it. When it couldn't find it, it tried to install it with `sudo pacman`. I had to fucking tell it to use Node instead.
I've been using Claude Code daily for a fairly large FastAPI project and didn't notice anything unusual around that timeframe. If this really was the Rust runtime underneath, "boring is good" seems like the right outcome.
It is absolutely amazing to me that this ai rewrite work so well, maybe claude is not really that much of a complicated tool to stress the bun runtime but still...
The port of Bun, which has >5000 open github issues, is used in Claude Code, which has >11000 open github issues. Do people use Bun in things that are expected to work reliably? Have any such projects tried the upgrade yet?
To be fair, https://github.com/python/cpython has over 5k open github issues, and that's still generally considered fairly reliably technology even if a lot of HN users seem to hate it.
Incidentally, Claude Code has been very buggy for me lately (much more so than before). Lots of TUI rendering issues causing, e.g., the conversation history to be garbled etc.
Anthropic bought Bun, so they kinda, sorta had to make this work. I am sure the cost at $145,000 in Claude time will get some attention.
I am curious how this will work going forward from FOSS perspective. Will humans be allowed to modify the generated code? Only the .md prompts for the agents? Or what?
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 46.3 ms ] threadAnd so, the FOSS project "Bun" silently dies in darkness and is now something completely else. I'm glad I still had "Investigate if Bun is worth it" on my TODO list and hadn't yet gotten to it.
What is the governance structure for Bun by the way? Couldn't find any documents/explanations about how it's supposed to work. I'm guessing it's essentially just "Anthropic decides what gets done and accepted" today?
If projects like Bun can be substantially rewritten and shipped to millions of users, it suggests we're entering a very different phase of software development.
Today's AI-generated rewrites may not produce code that humans would consider high quality or maintainable. But I'm beginning to wonder whether that will even matter in a few months. If AI is the primary consumer, maintainer, and refactorer of code, human readability becomes far less important than correctness, performance, and the ability to iterate.
This feels like a shift where software may no longer exist as a long-lived artifact in its current form. Instead of writing and maintaining applications for years, we may generate, adapt, and discard them continuously for each use case.
Keep in mind that you are not Anthropic, and you'll likely NOT consider rewrite at all if you don't have unlimited budget
Software refactoring and tech debt is absolutely where LLMs will shine as is evidenced by the Bun rewrite.
Personally my take on the entire affair is quite negative, whatever Jarred or Simonw says about it.
I think Bun owned by Anthropic and the entire rewrite with AI is not the real point (even if it's quite interesting, though).
My take is that Jarred, and Bun,didn't demonstrate a serious, adult approach, from "this is my branch, you are overreacting" message to just proceeding with a 1mil+ PR merged in less than month.
The communication is the issue, and it was handled very badly, in a way that impacted trust and divisions.
Was it so difficult to adopt the approach that the TS team adopted for 7.0?
They are in extremely short supply right now.
It’s a mix of serious-wanna be, quasi religious, quasi-technical people running the show right now.
I am so happy to I got to read about the 90s-2000s tech culture, and experienced the post-2008 startup culture.
Just about 10 years ago people were really serious, but chill-looking. Somehow that got flipped.
Terrible project governance.
TS 7 is a good example of what a responsible team that cares about their users should have done.
It’s clear seeing your post here a couple days later what’s going on. It’s deliberate. I can only speculate on their reasons why but it seems to be an intentional form of disrespect on the engineering culture. “Your norms, your work, your principles” mean nothing. We can spend money and invalidate your life’s work. We don’t need your consent or support. That’s my personal guess at a surface level.
Just that?
I was expecting more from that rewrite. Maybe Rust is not so worth it after all.
you are welcome
I am curious how this will work going forward from FOSS perspective. Will humans be allowed to modify the generated code? Only the .md prompts for the agents? Or what?
Can you select text with shift + arrow keys now in the command line client? :)
Yes if we had a Zig->Rust transpiler maybe it would produce similar output. But I can’t find one. We’d have to use an agent to build one first :)