22 ms·

Anthropic acquires Bun

• hit8run 10mo ago
  I love bun but for a cli tool: why they don’t write Claude Code in Go and call it a day?
• colesantiago 10mo ago
  Is Claude Code the first CLI tool to have a $1BN ARR?
  • CSSer 10mo ago
    I don't know for sure, but it's definitely the first tool of that value to have a persistent strobing (scroll position) bug so bad that passersby ask me if I'm okay when they see it.
    • epiccoleman 10mo ago
      Man, I had never even put words to that problem but you are right that it is beyond annoying. It seems to me like it worsens the longer the Claude instance has run - I don't seem to see it early in the session.
      • CSSer 10mo ago
        Yeah, issues have been open on GitHub for months. I've tried shortening my scrollback history and using other emulators but it doesn't seem to make a difference. It's pretty frustrating for a paid tool.
      • thomasfromcdnjs 10mo ago
        ha I thought it was just a me thing and had have accepted my fate.
  • jedixit 10mo ago
    This graph from the SemiAnalysis blog suggests that GitHub Copilot reached it earlier this year: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BGEe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F118c4f46-97ed-4343-9e24-f90eae892038_1638x849.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BGEe!,f_auto,q_auto:...
    • simonw 10mo ago
      "GitHub Copilot" encompasses so many different products now that it's hard to see it as a CLI tool.
      • altmanaltman 10mo ago
        It doesn't make a lot of sense that they'll compare Microsoft 365 Copilot with Claude Code, though? Like it is a legit CLI tool but we should ignore it because it shares the name with something else?
        • simonw 10mo ago
          The GitHub Copilot CLI tool is brand new, they only launched that in September: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-25-github-copilot-cli-is-now-in-public-preview/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-25-github-copilot-cli-... Prior to that GitHub Copilot was either the VS Code IDE integration or the various AI features that popped up around the GitHub.com site itself.
          • altmanaltman 10mo ago
            Yeah but my point was it's pretty clear which Copilot the article was talking about and pretending like it could be anything beacuse "everything's copilot" is a L take sorry.
  • fragmede 10mo ago
    Terraform gets to $600mm if you squint really hard make up stuff. Kubectl though. Whatever you want to say about kubernetes complexity, it does get a bunch of money run through it. We could also look at aws-cli, gcloud and az, and if we assign cloud budgets that get run through there, I'm sure it's in the hundreds of millions. Then there's git. Across the whole ecosystem, there's probably a cool couple billion floating through there. gh is probably much smaller. Other tools like docker and ansible come to mind, though those are not quite as popular. Cc only hits $1B ARR if you squint really hard in the first place, so I think in this handwavy realm, I'd say aws-cli comes first, then kubectl, then git, with maybe docket and terraform in the mix as well. Nonetheless, Claude is a really awesome cli tool that I use most days, I find.
• ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
  Associated Anthropic post: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-claude-code-reaches-usd1b-milestone https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...
• theflyinghorse 10mo ago
  Congratulations to the bun team!
• victorbuilds 10mo ago
  I use Claude Code CLI daily - it's genuinely changed how I work. The $1B number sounds crazy but honestly tracks with how good the tool is. Curious how Bun integration will show up in practice beyond the native installer.
  • Aeolun 10mo ago
    Doesn’t sound crazy at all? My Max subscription costs me more than all the other netflix/spotify etc combined, but I pay it happily, and spotify would go before Claude does.
• slig 10mo ago
  Love bun! Congratulations!
• re-thc 10mo ago
  Congrats... > Long-term stability. a home and resources so people can safely bet their stack on Bun. Isn't it the opposite? Now we've tied Bun to "AI" and if the AI bubble or hype or whatever bursts or dies down it'd impact Bun. > We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic. There's honestly a higher chance of Bun sticking out that runway than the current AI hype still being around. Nothing against Anthropic but with the circular financing, all the debt, OpenAI's spending and over-valuations "AI" is the riskier bet than Bun and hosting.
  • ricopags 10mo ago
    I say don't muddy the water with the public panic over "will it won't it" bubble burst predictions. The effective demand for Opus 4.5 is bottomless; the models will only get better. People will always want a code model as good as we have now, let alone better. Bun securing default status in the best coding model is a win-win-win
    • re-thc 10mo ago
      > I say don't muddy the water with the public panic over "will it won't it" bubble burst predictions. It does matter. The public ultimately determines how much they get in funding if at all. > The effective demand for Opus 4.5 is bottomless; the models will only get better. The demand for the Internet is bottomless. Doesn't mean Dotcom didn't crash. There are lots of scenarios this can play out, e.g. Anthropic fails to raise a certain round because money dried up. OpenAI buys Anthropic but decides they don't need Bun and closes out the project.
    • pzo 10mo ago
      Opus 4.5 is not living in vacuum. It’s the most expensive of models for coders and there is Gemini 3 pro - with many discounts and deepseek 3.2 that is 50x cheaper and not much behind.
  • phantasmish 10mo ago
    Yeah, no reader of tech news will take an acquisition of a company with four years of runway as anything but decreasing the odds their product will still be around (and useful to the same audience…) in four years. Even without being tied to a company with lots of exposure to a probable bubble.
• throwaway984393 10mo ago
  [dead]
• jedahan 10mo ago
  :(
• qsort 10mo ago
  Anthropic? The AI people?
  • jsheard 10mo ago
    Look, if a terminal emulator can raise $67 million by riding the AI hypewave then a Javscript runtime can do the same. Nobody ever said that AI investments and acquisitions have to make any sense.
• jackblemming 10mo ago
  The Bun team works hard, glad to see it pay off.
• tkel 10mo ago
  Oh no ... unfortunately this likely means a Bun.AI API in my JS runtime.
• afavour 10mo ago
  What matters: it's staying open source and MIT licensed. I sincerely hope it stays that way. Congrats to the Bun team on making a great tool and getting the recognition they deserve. > Being part of Anthropic gives Bun: Long-term stability. Let's see. I don't want to always be the downer but the AI industry is in a state of rapid flux with some very strong economic headwinds. I wouldn't confidently say that hitching your wagon to AI gives you long term stability. But as long as the rest of us keep the ability to fork an open source project I won't complain too much. (for those who are disappointed: this is why you stick with Node. Deno and Bun are both VC funded projects, there's only one way that goes. The only question is timeline)
  • cortesoft 10mo ago
    Nothing gives you long term stability in tech. You have to constantly work at staying stable, and it isn't always up to anything the company is in control of, no matter what ownership they have.
    • afavour 10mo ago
      > Nothing gives you long term stability in tech. Sure. But everything is relative. For instance, Node has much more likelihood of long term stability than Bun, given its ownership.
      • skybrian 10mo ago
        Sure, that makes it a good backup strategy. But there’s little reason to use a worse tool until the time you need the backup comes.
      • pier25 10mo ago
        > Node has much more likelihood of long term stability than Bun Given how many more dependencies you need to build/maintain a Node app, your Bun application has a better chance of long term stability. With Node almost everything is third party (db driver, S3, router, etc) and the vast majority of NPM deps have dozens if not hundreds of deps.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• pelagicAustral 10mo ago
  Godspeed. Seems like a good pairing. Bun is sort of the only part of the JS ecosystem I like, and Code has become such an important tool for my work, that I think good things will come out of this match. Go Bundler as well.
• wiseowise 10mo ago
  Hope nobody buys Astral or Python is f*cked.
  • zelphirkalt 10mo ago
    Then it would probably be back to Poetry. Or some other newcomer, or maybe a fork of uv.
    • andrewl-hn 10mo ago
      Honestly, given the constant rollercoaster of version management and building tools for Python the move to something else would be expected rather than surprising. I’ve seems like a great tool, but I remember thinking the same about piping, too.
      • baq 10mo ago
        uv is a revolution in every possible positive sense of the word in the Python world and I've been here since 1.5. it is imperative that bitter oldtimers like us try it, I did and the only regret I've got is that I didn't do it sooner.
        • zelphirkalt 10mo ago
          I also tried it and am now using it for new projects. But I was just fine with Poetry too. Yes, uv is faster and probably better code. But my use-cases didn't necessitate to re-create the venvs frequently, so the slowness of Poetry didn't matter that much to me, and I am not using the "one-off script" kind of approaches that uv enables (writing the dependencies in a comment in the script itself). So, yeah, uv is nice, but for me didn't fundamentally change that much.
      • andrewl-hn 10mo ago
        Autocorrect messed up my last line, should say: uv seems like a great tool, but I remember thinking the same about pipenv, too.
    • 10mo ago
• mrcwinn 10mo ago
  Congrats. This is the first time I remember reading a genuine, authentic story about a sale. Much preferred over “this is about continuing the mission until my earn-out is complete.”
• jjordan 10mo ago
  I don't really see how Bun fits as an acquisition for an AI company. This seems more like "we have tons of capital and we want to buy something great" than "Bun is essential to our core business model".
  • nurumaik 10mo ago
    Looks like they are acquiring the team rather than the product
    • simonw 10mo ago
      No, they're clearly acquiring the technology. They're betting Claude Code on Bun, they have an invested interest in the health of Bun.
      • LunaSea 10mo ago
        Why would they want to bet on nascent technology whereas Node.js bas existed for a god 15 years?
        • stonogo 10mo ago
          Because Microsoft already owns that.
          • Octoth0rpe 10mo ago
            Are you referring to node? MS doesn't own that. It's maintained by Joyent, who in turn is owned by Samsung.
            • simonw 10mo ago
              Joyent handed Node.js over to a foundation in 2015, and that foundation merged into the JS Foundation to become the OpenJS Foundation in 2019. I'm not sure if Joyent have any significant role in Node.js maintenance any more.
• myth_drannon 10mo ago
  First major success story for Zig language? (Not trying to diminish Bun's team success)
  • Uninen 10mo ago
    I'd say Ghostty is a pretty big success story as well.
    • Cieric 10mo ago
      Let's not forget about TigerBeetle either. They weren't bought (as far as I'm aware), but they seem to have some pretty good backing from customers.
      • sgt 10mo ago
        Are the benefits of Zig really that amazing compared to Rust that it's worth choosing Zig, which is not even at 1.0 and seems to be constantly changing? Also, Zig is not memory safe the same way. That said, I can easily imagine that the developer experience is superior for Zig. More fun.
        • Cieric 10mo ago
          At this point I'm not sure I can give a satisfying answer, but zig was just fun to use from the beginning. It was just c, but with a bunch of special features like comptime, the lessened foot-gun-ness of zig was just a benefit since most of the conventions were just things I was doing in my head but not putting into the code (since there wasn't really a good way to do so without compromise). The other thing I liked was I could just immediately read and write it without much looking at the docs. Their standard library was a bit of a hurdle, but the fact that the whole thing existed on my disk and I could just pop it open and read the code really helped (I assume this is the same with Rust, but I have trouble reading rust without going to lookup syntax). So while I can't give good reasons for using it in a commercial setting, for personal projects it was just fun. Rust in comparison hasn't really been fun to try and pick up. At this point however I don't really like the way zig is going. So I won't really advocate for zig at this point, but I can say when I first started using it, it was fun and I could just write code that worked.
• smileson2 10mo ago
  Makes sense, I had idea how else the investors would have made money on a javascript bundler/jsc frontend
• ymsodev 10mo ago
  This somewhat answers the question of "how on earth is a JS runtime company going to profit?"
• iyn 10mo ago
  Curious about the deal value/price — any clues whether it was just to make existing investors even (so say up to $30M) or are we talking some multiple? But if it's a multiple, even 2x sounds a bit crazy.
  • dustingetz 10mo ago
    i don’t get it either - bun being the foundation of tons of AI tools is like a best possible outcome, what were they hoping for when they raised the money? Or is this just an admission of “hey, that was silly, we need to land this however we can”? Or do they share major investors and the therefore this is just a consolidation? (Edit: indeed, KP did indeed invest $100M in Anthropic this year. I’m also confused - article states Bun raised 26M but the KP seed round was 7, did they do the A too but unannounced? Notably, the seed was summer 2022 and chatgpt was Nov 30, so the world is different, did the hypothesis change?)
  • jtokoph 10mo ago
    One option is that the current Bun shareholders didn't see a profitable future and didn't even care if they were made even and a return of the remaining cash was adequate. Another option is that this was an equity deal where Bun shareholders believe there is still a large multiple worth up potential upside in the current Anthropic valuation. Plus many other scenarios.
• moralestapia 10mo ago
  What? Why?
• tibbydudeza 10mo ago
  Reminds me of Atlassian buying an AI browser.
• heinekan 10mo ago
  I’m curious to what the acquisition price was. Bun said they’ve raised $26 million so I’m assuming the price tag has to be a lot higher than that for investors to agree to an acquisition.
• yanis_t 10mo ago
  I don't get it. Why would Anthropic need to own a JS runtime?
  • simonw 10mo ago
    Because they have a product that makes $1bn+ a year that depends on having a good, stable, cross-platform JS runtime.
    • LunaSea 10mo ago
      You're describing Node.js which has existed for the last 15 years
      • dboreham 10mo ago
        And is owned by Microsoft. The theory is that by symmetry Anthropic should own a node competitor.
        • joestrouth1 10mo ago
          Microsoft doesn't own node.
    • krashidov 10mo ago
      I'm still confused. Why not just pour a ton of resources into it since it's open source. I guess dev mindshare? It is a great product
      • simonw 10mo ago
        Pouring a ton of resources into an open source project that raised $26m in VC doesn't guarantee that the project will stick around. Acquiring it does.
        • krashidov 10mo ago
          Buying Bun to ensure it sticks around doesn't pass the smell test unless they had very few months of runway left
• Tiberium 10mo ago
  As someone who have been using Deno for the last few years, is there anything that Bun does better? Bun seems to use a different runtime (JSC) which is less tested than V8, which makes me assume it might perform worse in real-world tasks (maybe not anymore?). The last time I checked Bun's source code, it was... quite messy and spaghetti-like, plus Zig doesn't really offer many safety features, so it's not that hard to write incorrect code. Zig does force some safety with ReleaseSafe IIRC, but it's still not the same as even modern C++, let alone Rust. I'll admit I'm somewhat biased against Bun, but I'm honestly interested in knowing why people prefer Bun over Deno.
  • ecares 10mo ago
    It has wayyyyy better nodejs compatibility (day 1 goal)
    • Tiberium 10mo ago
      As far as I know, modern Node compat in Deno is also quite great - I just import packages via 'npm:package' and they work, even install scripts work. Although I remember that in the past Deno's Node compat was worse, yes.
    • 0x457 10mo ago
      Pretty sure one of the Deno day 1 goals was to correct mistakes made during the early days of Node.js.
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
  • TheFlyingFish 10mo ago
    I haven't used Deno, but I do use Bun purely as a replacement for npm. It does the hard-linking thing that seems to be increasingly common for package managers these days (i.e. it populates your local node_modules with a bunch of hard links to its systemwide cache), which makes it vastly quicker and more disk-efficient than npm for most usage. Even with a cold cache, `bun install` with a large-ish dependency graph is significantly faster than `npm install` in my experience. I don't know if Deno does that, but some googling for "deno install performance vs npm install" doesn't turn up much, so I suspect not? As a runtime, though, I have no opinion. I did test it against Node, but for my use case (build tooling for web projects) it didn't make a noticeable difference, so I decided to stick with Node.
• kylecarbs 10mo ago
  Bun has completely changed my outlook on the JS ecosystem. Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance. Now the entire space rallies around it. Congrats to Jarred and the team!
  • nailer 10mo ago
    One important original point of node was that v8 made JS very fast by compiling to machine code, plus it’s had multithreading built in for a decade.
    • whizzter 10mo ago
      Machine code yes (along with Spidermonkey, JSC and Nashorn), the timeframe around 2005-2010 saw the introduction of JIT'ed JS runtimes. Back then however JS was firmly single-threaded, it was only with the introduction of SharedArrayBuffer that JS really started to receive multithreading features (outside of SharedArrayBuffer and other shareable/sendable types, a runtime could opt to run stuff like WebWorkers/WebAudioWorkers in separate processes). Early Node f.ex. had a multi-process setup built in, Node initially was about pushing the async-IO model together with a fast JS runtime. Why Bun (and partially Deno) exists is because TypeScript helps so damn much once projects gets a tad larger, but usage with Node hot-reloading was kinda slow, multiple seconds from saving a file until your application reloads. Even mainline node nowadays has direct .ts file loading and type erasing to quicken the workflow.
  • stefan_ 10mo ago
    That is the most absurd thing I've heard in 20 years. Chrome literally was launched on performance, for JS and beyond. The reality is that the insane "JS ecosystem" will rally around whatever is the latest hotness.
  • satvikpendem 10mo ago
    That's because it's not written in JS at all but a compiled systems language, no wonder it's gonna be fast.
    • 10mo ago
• renewiltord 10mo ago
  Hahaha congratulations. This is amazing. The most unlikely outcome for a devtools team. Fascinating stuff. This is promising for Astral et al who I really like but worried about their sustainability. It does point to being as close to the user as possible mattering.
• andrewl-hn 10mo ago
  I’ll be honest, while I have my doubts about the match of interests and cohesion between an AI company and a JS runtime company I have to say this is the single best acquisition announcement blog post I’ve seen in 20 years or so. Very direct, very plain and detailed. They cover all the bases about the why, the how, and what to expect. I really appreciate it. Best of luck to the team and hopefully the new home will support them well.
  • raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
    But how is another company that is also VC backed and losing money providing stability for Bun? How long before we hear about “Our Amazing Journey”? On the other hand, I would rather see someone like Bun have a successful exit where the founders seem to have started out with a passion project, got funding, built something out they were excited about and then exit than yet another AI company by non technical founders who were built with the sole purpose of getting funding and then exit.
    • simonw 10mo ago
      Anthropic may be losing money, but a company with $7bn revenue run rate (https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-dario-amodei-american-ai-leadership https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-dario-amodei-americ...) is a whole lot healthier than a company with a revenue of 0.
      • tyingq 10mo ago
        If I had the cash, I could sell dollar bills for 50 cents and do a $7b run rate :)
        • simonw 10mo ago
          If that was genuinely happening here - Anthropic were selling inference for less than the power and data center costs needed to serve those tokens - it would indeed be a very bad sign for their health. I don't think they're doing that. Estimates I've seen have their inference margin at ~60% - there's one from Morgan Stanley in this article, for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-anthropic-billions-cloud-revenue-growth-2025-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-anthropic-billions-cl...
• _pdp_ 10mo ago
  It makes total sense to me.
• ctoth 10mo ago
  This decision is honestly very confusing to me as a constant user of Claude Code (I have 3 of them open at the moment.) So many of the issues with it seem to be because ... they wrote the damn thing in JavaScript? Claude is pretty good at a constrained task with tests -- couldn't you just port it to a different language? With Claude? And then just ... the huge claude.json which gets written on every message, like ... SQLite exists! Please, please use it! The scrollback! The Keyboard handling! Just write a simple Rust or Go or whatever CLI app with an actual database and reasonable TUI toolkit? Why double down and buy a whole JavaScript runtime?
  • mccoyb 10mo ago
    Boggles the mind.
  • dboon 10mo ago
    Ink (and modern alternatives) probably are the best TUI toolkit. If you want to write a UI that's genuinely good, you need e.g. HTML, or some way to express divs and flex box. There isn't really another way to build professional grade UIs; I love immediate mode UI for games, but the breadth of features handled by the browser UI ecosystem is astonishing. It is a genuinely hard problem. And if you're expressing hierarchical UI, the best way to do it is HTML and CSS. It has the richest ecosystem, and it is one of the most mature technologies in existence. JS / TS are the native languages for those tools. Everything is informed by this. Of course, there are other options. You could jam HTML and CSS into (as you mention) Rust, or C, or whatever. But then the ecosystem is extremely lacking, and you're reinventing the wheel. You could use something simpler, like QML or handrolled. But then you lose the aforementioned breadth of features and compatibilities with all the browser code ever written. TypeScript is genuinely, for my money, the best option. The big problem is that the terminal backends aren't mature (as you said, scrollback, etc). But, given time and money, that'll get sorted out. It's much easier to fix the terminal stuff than to rewrite all of the browser.
    • frumplestlatz 10mo ago
      The idea that you need or want HTML or CSS to write a TUI is missing the entire point of what made TUIs great in the first place. They were great precisely because they were clean, fast, simple, focused -- and didn’t require an entire web stack to draw colored boxes.
• asim 10mo ago
  It's more honest than the Replicate answer but I think inevitably if you can't raise the next round and you get distracted by the shiny AI that this is the path taken by many teams. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There was an exuberant time when all the OSS things were getting funded, and now all AI things get funded. For many engineer founders, it's a better fit to go build deep technical stuff inside a bigger company. If I had that chance I would probably have taken it too. Good luck to the Bun team!
• copperroof 10mo ago
  Well this just created a lot of work for me. Everything’s turning to shit at an alarming rate.
• torben-friis 10mo ago
  >If most new code is going to be written, tested, and deployed by AI agents That perspective following “in two-three years” makes me shudder, honestly.
• mritchie712 10mo ago
  > At the time of writing, Bun's monthly downloads grew 25% last month (October, 2025), passing 7.2 million monthly downloads. We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic. I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation. > Instead of putting our users & community through "Bun, the VC-backed startups tries to figure out monetization" – thanks to Anthropic, we can skip that chapter entirely and focus on building the best JavaScript tooling. I believe this a bit less. It'll be nice to not have some weird monetization shoved into bun, but their focus will likely shift a bit.
  • drakythe 10mo ago
    Given the worries about LLM focused companies reaching profitability I have concerns that Bun's runway will be hijacked... I'd hate for them to go down with the ship when the bubble pops.
    • Karrot_Kream 10mo ago
      This is my fear. It's one thing to lose a major sponsor. It's another to get cut due to a focus on profitability later down the line.
    • someguyiguess 10mo ago
      At least Anthropic itself has the stated goal of creating ethical AI that benefits humanity. That’s more than can be said for any other AI companies. Time will tell though. Google‘s motto used to be “don’t be evil” and now it’s basically the opposite.
  • serial_dev 10mo ago
    > I believe this a bit less. They weren’t acquired and got paid just to build tooling as before and now completely ignoring monetization until the end of times.
    • velcrovan 10mo ago
      Maybe they were though. Maybe Anthropic just wanted to bring a key piece of the stack in-house.
• a-dub 10mo ago
  they acquihired the team and derisked their investment in building claude code on top of bun. makes sense to me. moreover, now they can make investments in order to make it an an even more efficient and secure runtime for model workspaces.
• ptak 10mo ago
  What a trip. Love both, so all good I guess.
• mhitza 10mo ago
  This acquisition makes no sense. Investors must be happy because Bun never had to find out how to become profitable.
  • baq 10mo ago
    It’s enough Anthropic finds it profitable to run Claude Code on it.
  • dboreham 10mo ago
    > This acquisition makes no sense. except this sense: > Investors must be happy because Bun never had to find out how to become profitable.
    • odie5533 10mo ago
      But what is the upside for anthropic?
  • School-Cotton 10mo ago
    Hard to say it makes no sense when you don't know how much they were acquired for. I would guess it is a trivial amount relative to Anthropic's war chest.
• zwnow 10mo ago
  Well not gonna use Bun anymore I guess
  • jjice 10mo ago
    Why not?
    • zwnow 10mo ago
      Because I avoid all major AI players with everything I got as all of them are thieves.
      • jekrb 10mo ago
        ...you do know that YC has backed several AI companies, right?
        • zwnow 10mo ago
          Does that make it a big AI player? I only read shit on here.
          • rvz 10mo ago
            Did you donate money or time to Bun?
            • zwnow 10mo ago
              Why would I
              • rvz 10mo ago
                There you go. Thank you for showing exactly why acquisitions like this will continue to happen. If you don't support tools like Bun, don't be surprised to see them raise money from VCs and get bought out by large companies.
• suralind 10mo ago
  Good luck, always worried about stuff like that because it happened so many times and the product got worse eventually. At the same time, ai understand how much effort went into building something like Bun and people need to fund their life's somehow, so there's that.
• beanjuiceII 10mo ago
  anthropic wont win, and will just get bought out by an ibm or oracle in the end...time to migrate from bun now
  • mrweasel 10mo ago
    If Bun ends up at either IBM or Oracle, then it's a pretty safe platform, it could stay around for 50 years.
• focusgroup0 10mo ago
  [flagged]
• polskibus 10mo ago
  Wouldn’t it make more sense to write the same functionality using a more performant, no-gc language? Aren’t competitors praised for their CLIs being faster for that reason?
  • munificent 10mo ago
    With AI tooling, we are in the era where rapid iteration on product matters more than optimal runtime performance. Given that, implementing your AI tooling in a language that maximizes engineer productivity makes sense, and I believe GC does that.
    • logsr 10mo ago
      JS/TS has a fundamental advantage, because there is more open source JS/TS than any other language, so LLMs training on JS/TS have more to work with. Combine that with having the largest developer community, which means you have more people using LLMs to write JS/TS than any other language, and people use it more because it works better, then the advantage compounds as you retrain on usage data.
    • timeon 10mo ago
      One would expect that "AI tooling" is there for rapid iteration and one can use it with performant languages. We already had "rapid iteration" with GC languages.
      • munificent 10mo ago
        If "AI tooling" makes developers more productive regardless of language, then it's still more productive to use a more productive language. If JS is more productive than C++, then "N% more productive JS" is still more productive than "N% more productive C++", for all positive N.
  • kurtis_reed 10mo ago
    Codex is written in Rust
• ximeng 10mo ago
  I use bun in a project but Claude Code always uses node to run throwaway scripts. Maybe they can persuade it to use bun as part of this acquisition?
  • simlevesque 10mo ago
    I bet CC will become a binary with bun included and it'll use it's internal JS engine to run most scripts.
  • runjake 10mo ago
    I always tell it to use Bun and it works? Am I misunderstanding?
    • ximeng 10mo ago
      It seems the default is node (despite the project docs saying to use bun and all example script documentation using bun). It will use bun if told, but there’s definitely nothing saying to use node and it uses that anyway.
  • threetonesun 10mo ago
    Oddly I saw it try to use bun the other day, and was confused because everything in the project is in node.
• dzonga 10mo ago
  it boils down to - we didn't have full conviction that over the long run we will prove superior to node.js, however a.i company burning a lot of cash, has invested in us by basing their toolchain on us - so they have no option to acquire-hire us.
  • hu3 10mo ago
    quite the uncharitable take. On the opposite spectrum it's just that Claude and Bun are great technologies that joined forces.
• dboon 10mo ago
  Incredible news on so, so many levels! (1) Bun is what technical startups should be. Consistently excellent decisions, hyper focused on user experience, and a truly excellent technical product. (2) We live in a world where TUIs are causing billion dollar acquisitions. Think about that. Obviously, Bun itself is largely orthogonal to the TUIs. Just another use case. But also obviously, they wouldn't have been acquired like this without this use case. (3) There's been questions of whether startups like Bun can exist. How will they make money? When will they have to sell out one of the three principles in (1) to do so? The answer seems to be that they don't; at least, not like we expected, and in my opinion not in a sinister way. A sinister or corrupting sell out would be e.g. like Conan. What started as an excellent tool became a bloated, versioned mess as they were forced to implement features to support the corporate customers that sustained them. This feels different. Of course, there will be some selling out. But largely the interests of Anthropic seem aligned with "build the best JS runtime", since Anthropic themselves must be laser focused on user experience with Claude Code. And just look at Opencode [^1] if you want to see what leaning all the way into Bun gets you. Single file binary distribution, absurdly fast, gorgeous. Their backend, OpenTUI [^2], is a large part of this, and was built in close correspondence with the Bun folks. It's not something that could exist without Bun, in my opinion. (4) Anthropic could have certainly let Bun be a third party to which they contributed. They did not have to purchase them. But they did. There is a strange not-quite altruism in this; at worst, a casting off of the exploitation of open source we often see from the biggest companies. Things change; what seems almost altruistic now could be revealed to be sinister, or could morph into such. But for now, at least, it feels good and right. [^1]: https://github.com/sst/opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode [^2]: https://github.com/sst/opentui https://github.com/sst/opentui
• Simran-B 10mo ago
  Classic - brand new blog post: > We’re hiring engineers. Careers page: > Sorry, no job openings at the moment.
  • adpirz 10mo ago
    It's the Anthropic careers page that you're likely looking for now: https://www.anthropic.com/jobs?team=4050633008 https://www.anthropic.com/jobs?team=4050633008
    • prathamtharwani 10mo ago
      Is it just me or does this page keep jumping back to the top when I try to scroll?
      • noboostforyou 10mo ago
        It's doing that for me as well (desktop Safari).
      • serial_dev 10mo ago
        Same on iOS. It was probably vibe coded.
      • stack_framer 10mo ago
        It's doing it to me as well in Brave on macOS.
  • antihero 10mo ago
    Maybe the engineers are Claude agents.
• fishmicrowaver 10mo ago
  My first thought went to how openai used Rust to build their CLI tool and Anthropic's CEO bought influence over Zig as a reaction.
  • ivanjermakov 10mo ago
    > bought influence over Zig as a reaction Elaborate? I believe Zig's donors don't get any influence and decision making power.
  • hu3 10mo ago
    That would require them to hire/buy Zig team. Which is not the case.
  • dkmar 10mo ago
    Jarred just tweeted a few days ago about how little influence over zig he has, funnily enough. https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/1994950394955665486?s=20 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/1994950394955665486?s=20
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
• sherbondy 10mo ago
  Congrats Jarred and team! You have saved humanity many hours already, and I'm sure with Anthropic's backing, you will spare us many more. Farewell would-be headaches from Node & NPM tooling and waiting for builds and tests and package updates. Exciting times ahead! Using bun on a side project reinvigorated my love of software development during a relatively dark time in my life, and part of me wonders if I would have taken the leap onto my current path if it weren't for the joy and feeling of speed that came from working with bun!
• giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  Sounds like the goal is to bundle up Bun with Claude Code insanely tightly, to the point where it doesn't matter if you have nodejs installed locally, but also they can optimize key things for Claude Code's Bun runtime as needed. It's a brilliant acquisition, and bun stays open source, which allows it to continue to grow, to Anthropics benefit and everyone else's.
  • mpeg 10mo ago
    A nice start would probably be for Claude Code to stop trying to use npm when it detects a bun lockfile and vice versa...
    • giancarlostoro 10mo ago
      Yeah Claude is very good, but it definitely needs to get "smarter" in some nuanced areas.
    • christophilus 10mo ago
      I just ln bun to npm, npx, and node. This has the added benefit of letting ts_ls and various other tools work without requiring me to have both node and bun installed locally.
• mokarma 10mo ago
  Quote from the CEO of Anthropic in March 2025: "I think we'll be there in three to six months where AI is writing 90% of the code and then in 12 months we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code"
  • WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago
    I actually like claude code, but that was always a risky thing to say (actually I recall him saying their software is 90% AI produced) considering their cli tool is literally infested with bugs. (Or it least it was last time I used it heavily. Maybe they've improved it since.)
  • johnfn 10mo ago
    AI writes about 90% of my code.
    • smcleod 10mo ago
      Probably about 95% of mine now. Much better than I could for the most part.
      • bopbopbop7 10mo ago
        Weird, AI writes terrible code for me that would never pass a code review. I guess people have different standards for good code.
        • sinatra 10mo ago
          Hah. It can’t be “I need to spend more time to figure out how to use these tools better.” It is always “I’m just smarter than other people and have a higher standard.”
          • smcleod 10mo ago
            Spot on.
• tolerance 10mo ago
  Shouts out to the fellow who half-broke the news in this submission that was presumably killed because of the aggressive paywall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46123627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46123627 And apparently the submission's source for being the only org I can tell that anticipated this: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-advanced-talks-buy-developer-tool-startup-first-acquisition https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-advanced-t...
• hedayet 10mo ago
  No strategic roadmap is ever going to tell you: "Build a $0-revenue JavaScript runtime and one day an AI company will acquire you"
  • supportengineer 10mo ago
    Well, that was the playbook in the 1999-2001 dotcom days.
    • Windchaser 10mo ago
      Which is probably why no one's going to recommend it these days ...but hey, things are different during a bubble.
  • wmf 10mo ago
    Honestly that's probably the best play. Monetizing dev tools directly is a nightmare.
    • reddalo 10mo ago
      And you risk ending up like Postman or Insomnia, once beautiful software which is now widely hated by developers.
    • morkalork 10mo ago
      Countdown till Astral is acquired?
  • ironmagma 10mo ago
    It reminds me of hearing that music majors often do well in medical school. Want to go to medical school? Just major in music, duh.
    • OkayPhysicist 10mo ago
      Ha, Physics majors get the same talk about law school. It's just the selection bias of selecting for people willing to make hard pivots filtering out the under-achieving, go-with-the-flow types.
• klysm 10mo ago
  This wasn’t very high up on my list for acquisitions but props to the bun team for cashing in on the AI hype somehow!
• tolerance 10mo ago
  Who is expects Anthropic to migrate all their code to Codeberg.
• NiloCK 10mo ago
  This morning I found myself muttering something I won't repeat as a reaction to Claude Code's remarkably slow startup time. Put the Bun folks directly on that please and nothing else.
• supportengineer 10mo ago
  Curious, how did he pay the bills when spending these years developing Bun?
  • skybrian 10mo ago
    Bun was VC funded.
    • supportengineer 10mo ago
      I thought it said he was building a voxel game in the browser?
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• krig 10mo ago
  This announcement made me check in on the arbitrary code execution bug I reported that the Bun Claude bot created a PR for about 3 weeks ago: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24578 https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24578 So far, someone from the bun team has left a bunch of comments like > Poor quality code ...and all the tests still seem to be failing. I looked through the code that the bot had generated and to me (who to be fair is not familiar with the bun codebase) it looks like total dogshit. But hey, maybe it'll get there eventually. I don't envy "taylordotfish" and the other bot-herders working at Oven though, and I hope they get a nice payout as part of this sale.
  • bopbopbop7 10mo ago
    So you pushed a PR that breaks a bunch of tests, added a 5 layer nested if branch block that mixes concerns all over the place, then ignored the reviewer for three weeks, and you’re surprised they didn’t approve it?
    • throwaway290 10mo ago
      > So you pushed a PR that breaks a bunch of tests, added a 5 layer nested if branch block that mixes concerns all over the place, then ignored the reviewer for three weeks, and you’re surprised they didn’t approve it? ...Did you miss the part where Bun used Claude to generate that PR?:)
      • simonw 10mo ago
        I misinterpreted that first comment too. To clarify: 1. User krig reports an issue against the Bun repo: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/24548 https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/24548 2. Bun's own automated "bunbot" filed a PR with a potential fix: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24578 https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24578 3. taylordotfish (not an employee of Bun as far as I can tell, but quite an active contributor to their repo) left a code review pointing out many flaws: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24578#pullrequestreview-3462495696 https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24578#pullrequestreview-...
• hprotagonist 10mo ago
  So, we can anticipate that the new Anthropic browser will now have the interpreter Ken Thompson previewed for us 41-odd years ago?
• valbaca 10mo ago
  > If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent. and when this bubble pops down goes bun
  • sgt 10mo ago
    Not really, we can just fork it?
• ChrisbyMe 10mo ago
  Interesting that this announcement is tied in with one for Claude Code revenue. Feels like maybe AI companies are starting to feel the questions on their capital spending? They wanna show that this is a responsible acquisition.
• TekMol 10mo ago
  What is the business model behind open source projects like bun? How can a company "aquire" it and why does it do that? In the article they write about the early days We raised a $7 million seed round Why do investors invest into people who build something that they give away for free?
  • rglover 10mo ago
    Either for a modest return when it sells or as a tax write off when it fails.
    • bcye 10mo ago
      VCs do not invest for a modest return.
      • rglover 10mo ago
        No, but faced with either a loss or a modest return, they'll take the modest return (unless it's more beneficial to not come tax season). Unicorns are called unicorns for a reason.
        • bcye 10mo ago
          The question was why do investors invest
  • ChrisbyMe 10mo ago
    I mean if you're getting X number of users per day and you don't need to pay for bandwidth or anything, there's gotta be SOME way to monetize down the line. If your userbase or the current CEO likes it or not.
    • koakuma-chan 10mo ago
      Ads. Have you seen the dotenv JavaScript package?
• catapart 10mo ago
  oh well. it was cool while it lasted! I guess I'll figure out how to make deno do what I want, now.
• reactordev 10mo ago
  Bun is such a great runtime. If you haven't tried it, try it. It's got bells and whistles. This will make sure Bun is around for many, many, years to come. Thanks Anthropic. Why Bun? Easy to setup and go. bun run <something.ts> Bells and whistles. (SQL, Router, SPA, JSX, Bundling, Binaries, Streams, Sockets, S3) Typescript Supported. (No need to tsc, bun can transpile for you) Binary builds. (single executables for easy deployment) Full Node.js Support. (The whole API) Full NPM Support. (All the packages) Native modules. (90% and getting better thanks to Zig's interop) S3 File / SQL Builtin. (Blazingly Fast!) You should try it. Yes, others do these things too, but we're talking about Bun.
  • dawnerd 10mo ago
    > This will make sure Bun is around for many, many, years to come. Well, until the bubble bursts and Anthropic fizzles out or gets acquired themselves.
    • reddalo 10mo ago
      ...and then it's going to be time for an "incredible journey" post.
    • holysoles 10mo ago
      If they keep it MIT licensed, if/when things come crashing down, I think its reasonable to think Bun would continue on in some form, even if development slows pace without paid contributors.
  • croes 10mo ago
    Does it have permission flags yet like deno has?
    • johncolanduoni 10mo ago
      I’ve never understood the security utility of the Deno flags. What practical attack would they protect you from? Supply chain seems to be the idea, but how many npm packages do people use that neither: * Get run by devs with filesystem permissions * Get bundled into production
• everlier 10mo ago
  So many comments about reasoning here, yet none about the very obvious one, it's not stability of the infrastructure, it's future direction of a product like Claude Code. They need to know how to continue their optimisation machine to fit developers needs the best way possible (for good or for worse). I guess we should wait for some opt-out telemetry some time soon. It'll be nothing too crazy at first, but we'll see how hungry they are for the data.
  • sulam 10mo ago
    Don't they already have a ton of telemetry from Claude Code itself? I'd be shocked and expect an instant fork if Anthropic telemetry was added to Bun.
• music4airports 10mo ago
  [flagged]
• egorfine 10mo ago
  Well, Bun is MIT-licensed. So once they change the license and/or kill the project, the community can fork it easily.
  • wmf 10mo ago
    The point of this deal is that they do not need to change the license. Nobody will ever pay for Bun and now they don't have to force it.
• egl2020 10mo ago
  Can anyone provide some color around this: "I started porting esbuild's JSX & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig"? Hypothetical benefits include monolanguage for development, better interoperability with C and C++, no garbage collection, and better performance. What turned out to be realized and relevant here? Please, no speculation or language flames or wars.
• ryanvogel 10mo ago
  video covering it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hEiUq8jWIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hEiUq8jWIg
• lkqjweflkj 10mo ago
  Not to be confused with Bunn [1], the coffee maker makers. [1] www.bunn.com
• clot27 10mo ago
  deno won, rust won
• joewhale 10mo ago
  why couldn't Anthropic simply use Claude Code to write Bun over the weekend??
  • Thrymr 10mo ago
    It is open source (MIT license), Claude should have a pretty good start on it already.
• jaredcwhite 10mo ago
  My long-term bet on Node being "boring" and "stable" continues to pay major dividends. So glad I never invested any time and effort on this ecosystem…
  • pjmlp 10mo ago
    That is the way, when one is long time around, there are these alternatives coming and going, while the reference platforms keep going.
  • fud101 10mo ago
    must be nice to have a 1gb node_modules folder for hello world
• kelvinjps10 10mo ago
  on the post they try to reassure the following question "If I bet my work project or company's tech stack on Bun, will it still be around in five or ten years?" and the thing is that we don't know if Anthropic itself will be around 5 to ten years
• threecheese 10mo ago
  Interesting. Looking through a strategic lens, I feel like this is related to the $1,000 free credit for Claude Code Web (I used a few hundred). What the heck are they aiming for? CodeAct? (https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030)
• zecheng 10mo ago
  So Anthropic sees its CLI (in TypeScript) as the first-class product and maybe planning to expand the claude code with more JS based agents / ecosystem? Especially owning the runtime gives a lot of control over developer experience.
• forrestthewoods 10mo ago
  Why the hell is a CLI coding agent built in JavaScript? It’s wild what happens when a generation of programmers doesn’t know anything except webdev. How far from grace we have fallen.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    The big advantage of a language like JavaScript of Python for a CLI tool of this nature is that they naturally support adding extensions or plugins. That's quite a bit harder if your tool is built using a compiled language like Go.
    • forrestthewoods 10mo ago
      Ehhhh. In either case you have to define a neat clean plugin API. Whether it loads a DLL/SO or just some scripts isn’t that huge of a difference.
• gethly 10mo ago
  > I started porting esbuild's JSX & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig How was Go involved there before Zig?
  • simonw 10mo ago
    esbuild is still a Go app today: https://github.com/evanw/esbuild https://github.com/evanw/esbuild The first hints of what become Bun were when Jared experimented at porting that to Zig.
• hinkley 10mo ago
  I wonder if this is a sign of AI companies trying to pivot? > Bun will ship faster. That'll last until FY 2027. This is an old lie that acquirers encourage the old owner to say because they have no power to enforce it, and they didn't actually say it so they're not on the hook. It's practically a cheesy pickup line, and given the context, it kinda is.
  • matrixhelix 10mo ago
    This is why we can't have nice things
    • hinkley 10mo ago
      I would like to clarify that I wish I weren't right but I probably am.
    • unsungNovelty 10mo ago
      "Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results"
      • hinkley 10mo ago
        Unfortunately that is also the definition of “practice”.
        • unsungNovelty 10mo ago
          Practice expects same results. Not different results?
          • hinkley 10mo ago
            … pardon? Are you confusing practice with rehearsal?
            • unsungNovelty 10mo ago
• CuriouslyC 10mo ago
  I'm sure the Bun team will get Claude Code straightened out. Weird acquisition, but TBH Anthropic needed to fill this hole.
• Jarred 10mo ago
  I work on Bun. Happy to answer any questions
  • linkage 10mo ago
    You said elsewhere that there were many suitors. What is the single most important thing about Anthropic that leads you to believe they will be dominant in the coming years?
    • convenwis 10mo ago
      No idea about his feelings but believing that they will be dominant wouldn't have to be the reason he chose them. I could easily imagine that someone would decide based on (1) they offered enough money and (2) values alignment.
  • elktown 10mo ago
    Is this acquihiring?
    • simonw 10mo ago
      No. Anthropic need Bun to be healthy because they use it for Claude Code.
      • elktown 10mo ago
        But it seems like that could happen faster internally than publicly?
      • PetrBrzyBrzek 10mo ago
        I think it’s an acquihire, and they also like Bun.
        • gaws 10mo ago
          It's not an acqui-hire. Anthropic is keeping Bun.
• kristianp 10mo ago
  I'm confused. I installed claude code with: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code I thought claude code just used Nodejs? I didn't realise the recommended install used a different runtime.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    They switched to recommending this as the installation method back in July: curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash That install script gives you a single binary which is created using Bun.
    • kristianp 10mo ago
      Maybe that's why I didn't have some bugs people were reporting on HN, or because I was using linux.
• elktown 10mo ago
  I've seen a few of these seemingly random acquisitions lately, and I congratulate the companies and individuals that are acquired during this gold rush, but it definitely feels awkwardly artificial.
• ChrisGreenHeur 10mo ago
  A single bun? Is that really newsworthy?
  • saint_yossarian 10mo ago
    Oh you silly goose.
• stack_framer 10mo ago
  Anyone know how much Anthropic paid for Bun? I assume it was at least $26M, so Bun could break even and pay back its own investors, but I didn't see a number in the announcements from Anthropic or Bun.
  • mudkipdev 10mo ago
    Claude said $187M
• intrepidsoldier 10mo ago
  In other news - Amp Code is a separate company now - https://ampcode.com/news/amp-inc https://ampcode.com/news/amp-inc
• bovermyer 10mo ago
  When I saw the headline I was ready to be mad, but after reading the post, I'm cautiously on board with this.
• bblaylock 10mo ago
  This reads more like Anthropic wanted to hire Jarred and Jarred wants to work with AI rather than build a Saas product around bun. I doubt it has anything to do with what is best for bun the project. Considering bun always seemed to value performance more than all else, the only real way for them to continue pursuing that value would be to move into the actual js engine design. This seems like a good pivot for Jarred personally and likely a loss for bun.
  • thatoneengineer 10mo ago
    Nah, it reads like the normal logic behind the consulting model for open source monetization, except that Bun was able to make it work with just one customer. Good for them, though it comes with some risks, especially when structured as an acquisition.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    It doesn't read like that to me at all. This reads to me like Anthropic realizing that they have $1bn in annual revenue from Claude Code that's dependent on Bun, and acquiring Bun is a great and comparatively cheap way to remove any risk from that dependency.
    • Karrot_Kream 10mo ago
      I'm also curious if Anthropic was worried about the funding situation for Bun. The easiest way to allay any concerns about longevity is to just acquire them outright.
    • _jab 10mo ago
      This argument doesn’t make much sense to me. Claude Code, like any product, presumably has dozens of external dependencies. What’s so special about Bun specifically that motivated an acquisition?
      • almosthere 10mo ago
        If they found themselves pushing PRs to bun that got ignored and they wanted to speed up priority on things they needed, if the acq was cheap enough, this is the way to do it.
• dts 10mo ago
  A lot of people seem confused about this acquisition because they think of Bun as a node.js compatible bundler / runtime and just compare it to Deno / npm. But I think its a really smart move if you think of where Bun has been pushing into lately which is a kind of cloud-native self contained runtime (S3 API, SQL, streaming, etc). For an agent like Claude Code this trajectory is really interesting as you are creating a runtime where your agent can work inside of cloud services as fluently as it currently does with a local filesystem. Claude will be able to leverage these capabilities to extend its reach across the cloud and add more value in enterprise use cases
  • robertjpayne 10mo ago
    This is an insanely good take I never thought of.
  • fishmicrowaver 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • ojame 10mo ago
      Currently Claude etc. can interact with services (including AWS) via MCPs. What the user you're replying to is saying the Bun acquisition looks silly as a dev tool for Node. However if you look at their binding work for services like s3[0], the LLM will be able to interact directly with cloud services directly (lower latency, tighter integration, simplified deployment). 0: https://bun.com/docs/runtime/s3 https://bun.com/docs/runtime/s3
      • mrcsharp 10mo ago
        That doesn't make sense either. Agents already have access to MCPs and Tools. Your example is solved by having an S3 wrapper as a set of tools.
        • deleted 10mo ago
          [deleted]
• _jplc 10mo ago
  Hahahahahhaahhahahahahahhahahahahahhahahaha. Regards.
• patrick4urcloud 10mo ago
  wow !
• Anonyneko 10mo ago
  I'm only surprised that it wasn't Vercel who bought them.
• pier25 10mo ago
  I wonder what this means for Deno. Will this make it more or less likely for people to use Bun vs Deno? And now that Bun doesn't need to run a profitable cloud company will they move faster and get ahead of Deno?
  • GianFabien 10mo ago
    I think Deno's management have been somewhat distracted by their ongoing lawsuits with Oracle over the release of the Javascript trademark. I started out with Deno and when I discovered Bun, I pivoted. Personally I don't need the NodeJS/NPM compatability. Wish there was a Bun-lite which was freed of the backward compatability.
    • pier25 10mo ago
      I'm in a similar position. I use Hono, Zod, and Drizzle which AFAIK don't need Node compat. IIRC I've only used Node compat once to delete a folder recursively with rm.
    • Zambyte 10mo ago
      What do you dislike about having node compatibility?
      • GianFabien 10mo ago
        The bloat. I prefer lean designs with plug-in modules for additional functionality. Not only do unused sub-systems take up memory, but they also increase the potential attack surface.
    • carefulfungi 10mo ago
      Ironically, this was early Deno - but then adoption required backwards compatibility.
    • pjmlp 10mo ago
      In regards to Deno, to me that means their business is not really flying and they need this kind of distractions instead. Amount of people at big corps that care about their lawsuit, and would switch their IT guidelines from node to Deno due to such heroic efforts? Zero.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• huqedato 10mo ago
  Aham, tx. Good to know - I'll switch my projects to Deno.
  • killingtime74 10mo ago
    you know Deno is VC backed right
• ngrilly 10mo ago
  Considering that 1) Bun is written in Zig, 2) Zig has a strict no-AI policy [1], and 3) Bun has joined Claude, it seems that Bun and Zig are increasingly culturally apart. [1] https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-policy https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-pol...
  • M4v3R 10mo ago
    Nothing I found says anything about Zig folks being inherently against AI. It just looks like they don’t want to deal with “AI Slop” in contributions to their project, which is very understandable.
  • ignoramous 10mo ago
    > Bun and Zig are increasingly culturally apart That's like saying GCC and NodeJS are culturally apart, as if that has significant bearing on either?
  • dan-robertson 10mo ago
    You’re reading a code of conduct for contributing to the zig project. I don’t think everything there is guidance for everything written in zig, eg ‘English is encouraged’ is something one might not want for a project written in zig by native French-speakers, and I don’t think that’s something zig would want to suggest to them. I read the AI part is much more motivated by the asymmetries of open source project contribution than any statement about the language itself. Fly-by AI contributions are bad because they make particularly poor use of maintainer time. Similar to the rule on proposing language changes, which can suck up lots of reading/thinking/discussion time. When you have people regularly working together (eg those people in anthropic working on bun) the incentives are different because there is a higher cost to wasting your colleague’s time.
• bibimsz 10mo ago
  bullish for js, bearish for python?
• indigodaddy 10mo ago
  Has CC always used Bun? When it tries it out many months ago it was an npm install not bun install in their instructions (although I did use bun install myself). Just odd that if they were using bun, why the installation wasn’t specifically a “bun install” (I suppose they were trying to keep it vanilla for the npm masses?)
• djfobbz 10mo ago
  I finally hope Bun will start to support and work on WSL1
• bilekas 10mo ago
  Genuine question, why acquisition when anthropic could simply sponsor, contribute and influence instead? Acquisition seems like a large overhead and maybe a slight pivot to me.
• piskov 10mo ago
  Genuine question: why js? Why not something like c#: native, fast, crossplatform, strongly-typed, great tooling, supports both scripting (ie single file-based) and compiled to a binary with no dependency whatsoever (nativeAOT), great errors and error stacks, list goes on. All great for AI to recover during its iterations of generating something useful. Genuinely perplexed.
  • hoppp 10mo ago
    Because js became an everything language that everyone can write and its the only language you ever need. I dislike it also..
  • awesome_dude 10mo ago
    You could make a better argument for Go (compiles to native for multiple targets, zero actual dependencies (no need for a platform or virtual machine on the target)
    • mrcsharp 10mo ago
      C# has AOT compilation producing native, single file assemblies. A bit behind on this compared to Go, but it's there.
    • piskov 10mo ago
      C# no longer requires .net installed or bundled inside exe. Like I’ve said: NativeAOT https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/native-aot/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...
    • morshu9001 10mo ago
      Go is the most portable compiled language out there and makes a lot of compromises with the interpreted lang world. But it's got its own issues.
    • metaltyphoon 10mo ago
      >zero actual dependencies on Linux only with CGO_ENABLED=0 and good luck using some non web related 3rd party module which can be used with CGO disabled.
• greatNespresso 10mo ago
  Looks like a good time to try learning Zig again
• rcarmo 10mo ago
  Neat. I just started using bun as my default "batteries included" JavaScript engine, so it's nice they're getting this boost.
• shrubble 10mo ago
  There's no reason to run agents on expensive AI platforms or on GPUs - when you can have the AI create an agent in JS and thus runs with very high performance and perfect repeatability on far less expensive CPUs. At the very least there must be some part of the agent tasks that can be run in JS, such as REST APIs, fetching web results, parsing CSV into a table, etc.
  • awesome_dude 10mo ago
    Am I missing something - I thought that GPUs are for training the weights Being able to create an agent in any language to run on any hardware has always been possible hasn't it?
  • int_19h 10mo ago
    Agents already do this exact thing, except that the go-to language for Claude to write one-off scripts in is usually Python.
• s-mon 10mo ago
  Congratulations to the team. Knowing some of the folks on the Bun team I can not say I am surprised. They are the top 0,001% of engineers, writing code out of love. I’m hugely bullish on Anthropic, this is a great first acquisition.
• qjack 10mo ago
  Anthropic has been trying to win the developer marketshare, and has been quite successful with Claude Code. While I understand the argument that this acquisition is to protect their usage in CC or even just to acquire the team, I do hope that part of their goal is to use this to strengthen their brand. Being good stewards of open source projects is a huge part of how positively I view a company.
  • Wowfunhappy 10mo ago
    > Being good stewards of open source projects is a huge part of how positively I view a company. Maybe an easier first step would be to open source Claude Code...?
    • Aeolun 10mo ago
      I think because their models are open (e.g. CC can send any instruction and it’ll use your max plan), they need to keep the code obfuscated to prevent people from sending everybody and their mother through that API. Codex has the opposite issue. It has an open client, which is relatively pointless, because it will accept only one system prompt and one prompt only.
• grim_io 10mo ago
  Maybe they just like to work together *shrug*.
• devops000 10mo ago
  Shopify should buy Ruby on Rails because they depends on it
  • hu3 10mo ago
    didn't they try a hostile takeover of the ruby gems thing (forgot the name)?
• 123sereusername 10mo ago
  [dead]
• noodletheworld 10mo ago
  If claude code starts having ads for bun in the code it generates, I am never using it again. To some degree have “opinionated views on tech stacks” is unavoidable in LLMs, but this seems like it moves us towards a horrible future. Imagine if claude (or gemini) let you as a business pay to “prefer” certain tech in generated code? Its google ads all over again. The thing is, if they own bun, and they want people to use bun, how can they justify not preferencing it on the server side? …and once one team does it… game on! It just seems like a sucky future, that is now going to be unavoidable.
• javierhonduco 10mo ago
  Wondering to what degree this was done to support Anthropic’s web crawler. Would assume that having a whole JS runtime rather than just a HTTP client could be rather useful. Just hypothesising here, no clue what they use for their crawler.
• blixt 10mo ago
  Extrapolating and wildly guessing, we could end up with using all that mostly idle CPU/RAM (the non-VRAM) on the beefy GPUs doing inference on agentic loops where the AI runs small JS scripts in a sandbox (which Bun is the best at, with its faster startup times and lower RAM use, not to mention its extensive native bindings that Node.js/V8 do not have) essentially allowing multiple turns to happen before yielding to the API caller. It would also go well with Anthropic's advanced tool use that they recently announced. This would be a big competitive advantage in the age of agents.
  • intrasight 10mo ago
    I almost read this as anthropic will be using our idle CPU/GPU resources for their own training tasks ;)
• mcdow 10mo ago
  From the comments here it sounds like most people think the amount Anthropic paid for the company was probably not much more than the VC funding which Bun raised. How would the payout split work? It wouldn’t seem fair to the investors if the founder profited X million while the investors get their original money returned. I understand VC has the expectation that 99 out of 100 of investments will net them no money. But what happens in the cases where money is made, it just isn’t profitable for the VC firm. What’s to stop everyone from doing this? Besides integrity, why shouldn’t every founder just cash out when the payout is life-changing? Is there usually some clause in the agreements like “if you do not return X% profit, the founder forfeits his or her equity back to the shareholders”?
  • kevmo314 10mo ago
    Probably not much more than their valuation, which is the key difference since the investor will still get a net return.
  • deepdarkforest 10mo ago
    All VC's have preferred shares, meaning in case of liquation like now, they get their investment back, and then the remainder gets shared. Additionally, depending on round, they also have multiples, like 2x meaning they get at least 2x their investment before anyone else gets anything
• taf2 10mo ago
  okay so does that mean openai buys deno?
• _andrei_ 10mo ago
  All vendors will have to implement test time code execution, solution exploration, etc. as it's a low hanging fruit with huge gains, so I see it as a great hire. Love Bun, happy for you guys!
  • rashkov 10mo ago
    Do you mean train time?
• Computer0 10mo ago
  So, what if Claude Code starts using Bun in all applicable situations? If model providers train their models to use a tech stack beneficial to their business interests?
• terryds 10mo ago
  Wow.
• hungryhobbit 10mo ago
  But will they fix command line autocompletions?
• fud101 10mo ago
  So this is a rug pull we were afraid of? Bun got me into javascript ecosystem after years of hating on it. This sucks.
• wavemode 10mo ago
  To be honest, I never thought of Bun as something that someone would buy or invest in. What product do they sell?
• notnullorvoid 10mo ago
  I am more shocked about the origin story compared to the acquisition. > Almost five years ago, I was building a Minecraft-y voxel game in the browser. The codebase got kind of large, and the iteration cycle time took 45 seconds to test if changes worked. Most of that time was spent waiting for the Next.js dev server to hot reload. Why in the hell would anyone be using Next.js to make a 3D game... Jarred has always seemed pretty smart, but this makes no sense. He could've saved so much time and avoided building a whole new runtime by simply not using the completely wrong tool for the job.
  • mayo369 10mo ago
    Maybe same for anthropic, they can simply write agent using Rust/Go. Instead they decide to buy and develop a JavaScript runtime.
    • nly 10mo ago
      If anything this seems to be a huge victory for Zig, since Bun is mostly written in Zig.
      • throwup238 10mo ago
        That’s just what the Javascript ecosystem has been missing! A runtime built on an unstable pre-1.0 language to go with the npm dependency churn. It’s been way too long since I’ve had to waste a week debugging what turns out to be a compiler/interpreter bug. (I’m half joking, that’s awesome for Zig!)
        • someguyiguess 10mo ago
          Rushing things to completion using unfinished code is the JavaScript way! - a javascript developer
    • qeternity 10mo ago
      These are completely different. Agents (aside from the model inference) are not CPU bound. You gain much more by having a wider user base than whatever marginal CPU cycles you would gain in Rust/Go. Video games are of course a different story.
• kgc 10mo ago
  Should we be porting our Python projects over to Javascript?
• VerifiedReports 10mo ago
  "Node.js compatibility & replacing Node.js as the default server-side runtime for JavaScript" Except Node's author already wrote its replacement: Deno.
• socketcluster 10mo ago
  Bun is pretty cool. I maintain a Node.js library and updated my Node.js engine version and my library just didn't work on the latest version... In frustration, I decided to try Bun for the first time... I had never used it before but my library worked straight away, no warnings, no errors. I have never seen that level of compatibility before when a library works better with an alternative engine than the one it was designed for. I did end up fixing Node.js compatibility later but it was extra work. Felt like they just created busy-work. Node.js maintainers should stop deprecating perfectly good features and complicating their modules.
• mdtrooper 10mo ago
  It is remembers to me to Arduino buy for Qualcomm. And it was not good news.
• m00dy 10mo ago
  who's going to buy deno ?
• pech0rin 10mo ago
  Look Bun is a great product but something hilarious about the company that is “going to replace all software developers with AI” BUYING software. You are building a product that is supposed to make software cost 0 right? Why wouldn’t you just “vibe” code yourself Bun?
  • fragmede 10mo ago
    Those aren't your customers. The people that want to build things with bun are. The problem with people who already know how to code is that they have opinions if they actually read the generated code. If you sell to people who don't (for whatever reason), you face less criticism.
  • solumunus 10mo ago
    I think you’re confused. > going to replace all software developers with AI No? > building a product that is supposed to make software cost 0 right No?
• tossandthrow 10mo ago
  Maybe now Claude will not assume that I use npm, and actually start using bun?
• mkornaukhov 10mo ago
  That's good news. I hope this will encourage the industry to use the Zig language (and its creators to release version 1.0).
• bababuu 10mo ago
  I find it a little sad, that there is almost no pushback on what a few people with deep pockets are trying to sell here. Normaly on HN an article on balcon gardening would be met with more critical thinking than this piece. Maybe instead of staring to the screen all day long take a break, think about what people with lots of money care about. And I don't judge, making money is nothing illegal. But Anthropic would be absolutely NOTHING without OSS. And then to see the kind of this effusive, submissive admiration and gratitude for their js wrapper thing makes me sick to my stomach.
• tonyhart7 10mo ago
  why not Antrophic just fork or make a clone Bun themselves???? /s
• bluelightning2k 10mo ago
  I think this acquisition in reality has more to do with developer goodwill? And a little to do with the shell game of making these AI companies hard to value because they collect assets like this.
• bluelightning2k 10mo ago
  Since when is a CLI tool like this a sufficiently demanding technical project that it needs to buy the runtime just to get sufficient support? This just isn't the hard part of the product. Like if I was building a Claude Code competitor and I acquired bun, I wouldn't feel like I had an advantage because I could get more support with like fs.read?
• aperture147 10mo ago
  Why don't they use their self-acclaimed SE-replacing AI coding bot to fork Bun and called it AnthroBun instead of hiring actual engineers behind Bun?
• elAhmo 10mo ago
  > Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent. Huh, this feels very odd to read and buying a company outright is definitely not the only way to push Bun to be excellent. Contributing to Bun from their developers, becoming a sponsor, donating through other means, buying 'consulting services' or similar, or even forking it and keeping it up to date would all be also steps towards keeping the Bun excellent. This is vendoring a dependency on steroids, and first moment interests of community are not aligned with what Antropic needs, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds. History has thought us that this will end up with claims in the blog post not holding much weight.
  • smotched 10mo ago
    since Anthropic is one of the only companies using the Bun Runtime, not just the bundler like most do, they want to make sure the runtime stays the focus. This is good for both companies and us tbh since they wont switch focus to whats popular at the moment
• kunley 10mo ago
  So will Bun devs now be obliged to stop coding and only manage ai-driven code, like Anthropic devs say they are? Or perhaps they have in their agreement that Anthropic's own rules don't apply to them? Serious question, in all this madness
• baxuz 10mo ago
  AI slop lovers both of them.
• odyssey7 10mo ago
  Proper tail calls for the win! Hopefully Google, now in its AI race, decides to give V8 its due.
• dgellow 10mo ago
  Congrats to the Bun team, what a wild ride! Is that the first major zig acquisition?
• lionkor 10mo ago
  > Bun will ship faster. What? Oh, lots of slop code?
• soapdog 10mo ago
  oh, I really dislike that. I don't want AI companies encroaching more in my development workflow. Used to really enjoy Bun, but don't want support Anthropic at all. Will switch back to another runtime.
  • esjeon 10mo ago
    Yeah, I really get that. I’ve been a fan of zig and bun since their inception, but, AI corp deep in the dev chain? I feel uncomfortable, because no one knows when they’ll start steering things into weird directions.
    • ignoramous 10mo ago
      > AI corp deep in the dev chain? I feel uncomfortable ... tbf, Google has long been an AI corp. The Big Labs are trying to get in to other products/businesses just like Google did.
      • soapdog 10mo ago
        Not comfy with them either
• phplovesong 10mo ago
  RIP Bun. I guess a bet on deno was the right bet.
  • hu3 10mo ago
    deno is VC funded which means enshitification is expected. It would be ironic if deno ended up having more builtin AI bloat despite Bun being the one owned by an AI company. But I wouldn't be surprised.
• simgt 10mo ago
  We're meant to all be 100x more productive with Claude Code but - Anthropic can't write its TUI app in anything else more suitable than Javascript - They feel the need to buy a portion of their software supply chain
• someguyiguess 10mo ago
  This explains why Claude started transpiling & running JavaScript code! Yesterday, when I asked it to generate a document for me in JavaScript, it generated the JavaScript and then ran it to generate a document. I had never actually seen it compile and run any code before. It only would ever output code and either use the shell (Claude code) to run it on my local computer or allow me to copy and paste it.
  • informal007 10mo ago
    Maybe they want to catch up the steps of Antigravity. Running code is absolutely going to happen for coding assistant.
• danirogerc 10mo ago
  Hopefully it doesn't push other LLM companies to go the same route.
  • gaws 10mo ago
    It absolutely will.
• imjacobclark 10mo ago
  Owning your runtime is not about developer experience at the scale of Claude Code, it’s about your execution-surface area and the control you have over it. Agentic systems are no longer just model-driven — they are increasingly runtime-driven through tools, sandboxes, and orchestration layers. When agents are writing code, executing tests, calling external tools, and validating outcomes, the reliability of the entire system becomes a function of the runtime and environment, not just the model. Controlling the runtime gives Anthropic vertical control across: - Packaging and distribution - Execution semantics - Performance characteristics - Security surface area - Operational stability Of course, owning a JavaScript runtime does not magically make runtime deterministic. The dominant sources of variability still sit lower in the stack: OS behaviour, native dependencies, filesystem semantics, scheduling, hardware differences, and network effects. Runtime ownership is necessary, but not sufficient, for true runtime determinism. What this does signal is a strategic shift in where value is being captured. Model capability is no longer the only critical layer. The execution plane is becoming just as strategic too, can see this in ChatGPT 5’s dynamic model routing capability as well as ecosystem wide Tool Calling and MCP adoption, which are all aimed at increasing LLM determinism through traditional software stacks. Vertical integration here looks far less like a tooling move and far more like a control-plane strategy: consolidate the stack, reduce dependency entropy, and shrink the surface area where behaviour can diverge. Intelligence may live in the model, but reliability, scalability, and trust are increasingly properties of the system that executes it.
  • torginus 10mo ago
    So you're saying Anthropic is making it's own AI-based AWS, like OpenAI is trying to do AI social media?
    • imjacobclark 10mo ago
      not quite, just the runtime above the os layer
• theodric 10mo ago
  That's nothing. I just bought four buns yesterday!