8 ms·

I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does so

I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Especially given the context of both of these different context: Claude Code is a gem of Anthropic, experiencing extreme growth and where any of its change can result in billing issues. Bun is a JS runtime, and regardless of its growth, can focus on being the best runtime possible: It doesn't impact billing nor the bottom line of Anthropic, so they don't have to rush out patches due to abuse unlike CC. It's unclear how it will pan out over the next years, still very early on the acquisition to see if anything will change, but I'm not concerned just yet.

mawadev 5mo ago
Just 3 days later from the blog post, a branch with a potential vibe rewrite from zig to rust surfaced in the bun repo
- lelanthran 5mo ago
  This looks like a vanity project: the value gained switching from zig to Rust is likely to be negative at best, without even the usual caveat devs use of "learned a new skill".
remote-dev 5mo ago
This is a good take, and I hope you're right. One favorable way to phrase it for Anthropic is they acquired Bun because CC and other internal tooling depended on it so heavily and they questioned it's future as purely OSS. It remains to be seen how things will actually unfold.
- sroussey 5mo ago
  Own your supply chain. Reduces risk.
- troupo 5mo ago
  Anthropic bought actual engineers to undo the slop their vibe-coders produce with reckless abandon: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 However, these engineers, too, now start to vibe-code with reckless abandon https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284 and https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2049780223311548729 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2049780223311548729
- htrp 5mo ago
  you can own your upstream supply chain while simultaneously being less responsive to user pain points
smcl 5mo ago
> Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". It is also bizarre that some people are still hopeful despite it being acquired by one of the most enormously unprofitable companies in the most enormously unprofitable sectors of our industry.
- motbus3 5mo ago
  I know people say it is unprofitable but I wonder if there is a way to verify it is truly is. I will not say any details but I worked for a giant company which was barely making money YoY but somehow the bonuses for heads were bigger and bigger given a proxy metric related to profit. There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.
  - bombcar 5mo ago
    "Profitable" is the wrong metric, really, it's whether it is sustainable - can development continue indefinitely given the current financial situation?
    - motbus3 5mo ago
      I'm thinking about your comment... It put many wheels to spin... Tldr; I think the don't care about what will happen to the company in medium or long term. --- Are any of those companies looking for stability or sustainability? I have the impression they are completely aware of the diminished return effects and they will explore the moment to the fullest of their capabilities promising even more absurd things when the results are even smaller. I do agree there is a considerable improvement comparing from a year ago but definitely not ground shaking as it was from the year before to the last. Many of the promises turns out to be empty or at least having huge number of asterisks to it. I think there are flags everywhere. From minor things such as everyone using different benchmarks or plotting performance differences on weird choices os axis and ordering. Other mild things such as promoting the "system" created a compiler from scratch when such compiler does not even do a hello world and runs and gave output binaries running 300x then the counterparts. (I am aware there was a misusage of the agentic benchmark to build a compiler but there was an active choice on how to tell the story. Given other movements I am not quite sure if I believe it was an accident) There are other red flags such as people rolling back to previous versions of models because they can't get the new one to work properly. Other situations such as the affirmations that they have such "dangerous" model that apparently seems to be more of a benchmark trick than real results with <100B models being able to replicate the benchmark results only by changing the methodology. I don't think we are yet in the turning point where everything will collapse but my feeling is that we are going in that direction unless something that makes these models much more intelligent AND efficient. It makes sense to not hire a person when you can have a machine for the same job for the same price. But AI prices are getting higher than the returns do the margins for it to be a sensible choice are getting smaller. That all said, I say again that I think that they are completely aware of this effect. Not because they understand the technology but because this happens more frequently than not. Because of this, I don't think they care to be sustainable. All of them,smell that they will take the money and leave the ship to sink.
jmspring 5mo ago
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.
dandellion 5mo ago
> it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse For me it's far from a stretch, in fact it matches closely a pattern that I've seen repeated many times over at this point.
CharlieDigital 5mo ago
You might be underestimating the effect that corporate policies and culture have on the product. Some teams have a push now to go all in on AI; don't even look at the code. I've seen this in action and the results are probably what you'd expect. Works great at some level, but as complexity accumulates (especially across a team with different "technical vocabularies"), the end result is compounding complexity and mistakes and no person or team knows how the software actually works. No human testing of software or QA; unit + integration + give AI control over the browser/tool. Yes, this how some teams are moving forward now. So some of this may be that Anthropic's culture will end up causing shifts in how the Bun team operates and thinks. If this type of culture and mindset becomes the norm, I think either the models have to get a lot better or the software quality is going to decline. Matt Pocock has a great talk here: https://youtu.be/v4F1gFy-hqg https://youtu.be/v4F1gFy-hqg "Code is not cheap. Bad code is the most expensive it's ever been. Because if you have a codebase that's hard to change, you're not able to take advantage of all of the bounty that AI can offer. Because AI in a good codebase actually does really, really well." Once bad code starts to compound on itself, it's going to be really hard to break out of it.
- shimman 5mo ago
  I don't disagree with the notion, but what is up with the dev community championing influencers that work no real jobs and just sell courses where they reread the docs to you at $500 a pop (this gent, $1k a pop)?
  - jazzypants 5mo ago
    I'm not the biggest fan of the influencer community, but I think that it mostly boils down to many learners preferring video content over written material. I've gotten used to reading documentation now, but I remember it being extremely intimidating when I was first learning. It was nice to have someone break stuff down into simple terms for me. To be fair to Matt Pocock, I know he worked for Vercel and Stately for a while before doing content full time. I can't say anything about his AI content, but I did some of his free lessons when I was learning TypeScript. They included interactive editor lessons and such, so it wasn't just empty videos and fluff like some of the influencers.
saghm 5mo ago
> Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Can you point to any examples of a company with shitty practices buying one without shitty practices that didn't end up with the shitty practices diffusing through the newly-acquired company within a couple of years?
- atonse 5mo ago
  I'm not the parent poster which is why I still stick to looking at the people... If you start seeing the people that created bun leaving Anthropic, then I'd probably start to worry. And I haven't seen any sign of that yet.
  - htrp 5mo ago
    6 month earnouts..... wait until july
  - saghm 5mo ago
    I feel like you're overestimating how much power the people who sell their company have to prevent anything that gets pushed from the top
    - atonse 5mo ago
      That's why I mentioned them leaving. Because something about the culture didn't work, and they left. Especially true if they leave before they're fully vested.
pton_xd 5mo ago
> Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Anthropic acquired Bun for their own benefit, to protect and grow their investment in Claude Code. Not for the benefit the JavaScript community at large. Sounds obvious but I guess that has to be pointed out. Outcomes will follow incentives in the long run.
- aylmao 5mo ago
  Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products. IMO as long as it remains that way, the incentives for its developers will remain fairly aligned with the incentives of people who use it outside the company. A good example is React. Facebook's interest is that React be performant (website performance is correlated with time spent on said website), reliable (also correlated to time spent), quick to build on (features ship faster) and popular (helps new recruits hit the ground running). That's fairly well aligned with what developers outside of Facebook want too. Sure, since Facebook's server is written in Hack it means we'll never get a truly full-stack React, and instead we'll need third parties for the back-end (Next.js, Tanstack Start, etc). But Facebook building react also means it will always be someone's job to make sure this Framework works well in codebases with millions of modules. This is all independent of any shitty practices with their other software. And this has been for decades at this point.
  - crote 5mo ago
    > Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products. Doesn't that just make it even worse? If Anthropic can't even afford to spend the engineering effort on making sure their core product functions properly, why should we assume that they'll be investing serious resource into what is essentially some upper manager's loss-leader pet project? If Anthropic is financially hurting, why shouldn't they put Bun on the bare minimum of life support?
    - aylmao 5mo ago
stkdump 5mo ago
It's interesting how quickly people buy the "abuse" line of thinking. We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription. That is independent of which agent/harness is used. The fair/real price for profitable use is the pay per use token pricing. These labs play the game of trying to kill competition in the harness game (because third party harnesses risk commoditizing the underlying LLMs once they are all good enough), while playing a game of chicken with each other how long they can burn money that way before they have to give up. At some point they have to price their product fairly, and the only hope they have is to have killed all competition by then, which is of course a game that they seem to be loosing. Useful models are getting smaller and cheaper to run every year and it has hit a threshold at which we will see continued development of third party harnesses even without the userbase of subscription users. Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed. The secondary bet that they can lock users into their ecosystem (which requires them to subsidize their harness via unprofitable subscriptions burning their capital) and be able to monetize that later will also fail. They will have to compete on merit alone, and that is much less profitable.
- ashdksnndck 5mo ago
  > Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed. I thought the prime bet was that the winning lab who reaches takeoff through recursive self improvement will make a galactic superintelligence. Not saying I believe this but the people running the labs do. Under this scenario if you are a few months behind at the pivotal time you might as well not exist at all.
  - zem 5mo ago
    only if said galactic superintelligence takes immediate steps to kill all its potential competitors, or hoover up all the world's resources, or some other aggressively zero sum thing. otherwise I don't see what difference it makes down the line of you have the second superintelligence rather than the first. and that's under the assumption that you can create a superintelligence that will continue to slavishly serve your agenda rather than establishing and following its own goals.
andai 5mo ago
What came to my mind is Windows. Regardless of what else is going on, kernel is a separate team, and has very strong incentives to remain competent and sane.
semiquaver 5mo ago
I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, GitHub had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, MS Windows), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making GitHub worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about GitHub.
- raincole 5mo ago
  I think you have some nostalgia about Github's stability before the acquisition.
- oasisaimlessly 5mo ago
  You dropped this: </sarcasm>
- htrp 5mo ago
  1 9 of uptime later
- stingraycharles 5mo ago
  This is a joke, right?
- ivolimmen 5mo ago
  I am asuming you are European as I (I live in the Netherlands) have not seen any outage of GitHub as well...
overgard 5mo ago
> I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Incidentally, Anthropic needs to figure out how to monetize at some point too.
- antonvs 5mo ago
  It’s organizations figuring out how to monetize all the way up.
  - lelanthran 5mo ago
    The view from the bottom is turtle asses all the way to the top.
tabbott 5mo ago
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.). 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. 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). 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.

mawadev 5mo ago

Just 3 days later from the blog post, a branch with a potential vibe rewrite from zig to rust surfaced in the bun repo

lelanthran 5mo ago
This looks like a vanity project: the value gained switching from zig to Rust is likely to be negative at best, without even the usual caveat devs use of "learned a new skill".

remote-dev 5mo ago

This is a good take, and I hope you're right. One favorable way to phrase it for Anthropic is they acquired Bun because CC and other internal tooling depended on it so heavily and they questioned it's future as purely OSS. It remains to be seen how things will actually unfold.

sroussey 5mo ago
Own your supply chain. Reduces risk.
troupo 5mo ago
Anthropic bought actual engineers to undo the slop their vibe-coders produce with reckless abandon: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 However, these engineers, too, now start to vibe-code with reckless abandon https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284 and https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2049780223311548729 https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2049780223311548729
htrp 5mo ago
you can own your upstream supply chain while simultaneously being less responsive to user pain points

smcl 5mo ago

> Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". It is also bizarre that some people are still hopeful despite it being acquired by one of the most enormously unprofitable companies in the most enormously unprofitable sectors of our industry.

motbus3 5mo ago
I know people say it is unprofitable but I wonder if there is a way to verify it is truly is. I will not say any details but I worked for a giant company which was barely making money YoY but somehow the bonuses for heads were bigger and bigger given a proxy metric related to profit. There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.
- bombcar 5mo ago
  "Profitable" is the wrong metric, really, it's whether it is sustainable - can development continue indefinitely given the current financial situation?
  - motbus3 5mo ago
    I'm thinking about your comment... It put many wheels to spin... Tldr; I think the don't care about what will happen to the company in medium or long term. --- Are any of those companies looking for stability or sustainability? I have the impression they are completely aware of the diminished return effects and they will explore the moment to the fullest of their capabilities promising even more absurd things when the results are even smaller. I do agree there is a considerable improvement comparing from a year ago but definitely not ground shaking as it was from the year before to the last. Many of the promises turns out to be empty or at least having huge number of asterisks to it. I think there are flags everywhere. From minor things such as everyone using different benchmarks or plotting performance differences on weird choices os axis and ordering. Other mild things such as promoting the "system" created a compiler from scratch when such compiler does not even do a hello world and runs and gave output binaries running 300x then the counterparts. (I am aware there was a misusage of the agentic benchmark to build a compiler but there was an active choice on how to tell the story. Given other movements I am not quite sure if I believe it was an accident) There are other red flags such as people rolling back to previous versions of models because they can't get the new one to work properly. Other situations such as the affirmations that they have such "dangerous" model that apparently seems to be more of a benchmark trick than real results with <100B models being able to replicate the benchmark results only by changing the methodology. I don't think we are yet in the turning point where everything will collapse but my feeling is that we are going in that direction unless something that makes these models much more intelligent AND efficient. It makes sense to not hire a person when you can have a machine for the same job for the same price. But AI prices are getting higher than the returns do the margins for it to be a sensible choice are getting smaller. That all said, I say again that I think that they are completely aware of this effect. Not because they understand the technology but because this happens more frequently than not. Because of this, I don't think they care to be sustainable. All of them,smell that they will take the money and leave the ship to sink.

jmspring 5mo ago

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.

dandellion 5mo ago

> it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse For me it's far from a stretch, in fact it matches closely a pattern that I've seen repeated many times over at this point.

CharlieDigital 5mo ago

You might be underestimating the effect that corporate policies and culture have on the product. Some teams have a push now to go all in on AI; don't even look at the code. I've seen this in action and the results are probably what you'd expect. Works great at some level, but as complexity accumulates (especially across a team with different "technical vocabularies"), the end result is compounding complexity and mistakes and no person or team knows how the software actually works. No human testing of software or QA; unit + integration + give AI control over the browser/tool. Yes, this how some teams are moving forward now. So some of this may be that Anthropic's culture will end up causing shifts in how the Bun team operates and thinks. If this type of culture and mindset becomes the norm, I think either the models have to get a lot better or the software quality is going to decline. Matt Pocock has a great talk here: https://youtu.be/v4F1gFy-hqg https://youtu.be/v4F1gFy-hqg "Code is not cheap. Bad code is the most expensive it's ever been. Because if you have a codebase that's hard to change, you're not able to take advantage of all of the bounty that AI can offer. Because AI in a good codebase actually does really, really well." Once bad code starts to compound on itself, it's going to be really hard to break out of it.

shimman 5mo ago
I don't disagree with the notion, but what is up with the dev community championing influencers that work no real jobs and just sell courses where they reread the docs to you at $500 a pop (this gent, $1k a pop)?
- jazzypants 5mo ago
  I'm not the biggest fan of the influencer community, but I think that it mostly boils down to many learners preferring video content over written material. I've gotten used to reading documentation now, but I remember it being extremely intimidating when I was first learning. It was nice to have someone break stuff down into simple terms for me. To be fair to Matt Pocock, I know he worked for Vercel and Stately for a while before doing content full time. I can't say anything about his AI content, but I did some of his free lessons when I was learning TypeScript. They included interactive editor lessons and such, so it wasn't just empty videos and fluff like some of the influencers.

saghm 5mo ago

> Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Can you point to any examples of a company with shitty practices buying one without shitty practices that didn't end up with the shitty practices diffusing through the newly-acquired company within a couple of years?

atonse 5mo ago
I'm not the parent poster which is why I still stick to looking at the people... If you start seeing the people that created bun leaving Anthropic, then I'd probably start to worry. And I haven't seen any sign of that yet.
- htrp 5mo ago
  6 month earnouts..... wait until july
- saghm 5mo ago
  I feel like you're overestimating how much power the people who sell their company have to prevent anything that gets pushed from the top
  - atonse 5mo ago
    That's why I mentioned them leaving. Because something about the culture didn't work, and they left. Especially true if they leave before they're fully vested.

pton_xd 5mo ago

> Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun. Anthropic acquired Bun for their own benefit, to protect and grow their investment in Claude Code. Not for the benefit the JavaScript community at large. Sounds obvious but I guess that has to be pointed out. Outcomes will follow incentives in the long run.

aylmao 5mo ago
Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products. IMO as long as it remains that way, the incentives for its developers will remain fairly aligned with the incentives of people who use it outside the company. A good example is React. Facebook's interest is that React be performant (website performance is correlated with time spent on said website), reliable (also correlated to time spent), quick to build on (features ship faster) and popular (helps new recruits hit the ground running). That's fairly well aligned with what developers outside of Facebook want too. Sure, since Facebook's server is written in Hack it means we'll never get a truly full-stack React, and instead we'll need third parties for the back-end (Next.js, Tanstack Start, etc). But Facebook building react also means it will always be someone's job to make sure this Framework works well in codebases with millions of modules. This is all independent of any shitty practices with their other software. And this has been for decades at this point.
- crote 5mo ago
  > Bun is not a "product" at Anthropic though, it's a tool for its developers to build products. Doesn't that just make it even worse? If Anthropic can't even afford to spend the engineering effort on making sure their core product functions properly, why should we assume that they'll be investing serious resource into what is essentially some upper manager's loss-leader pet project? If Anthropic is financially hurting, why shouldn't they put Bun on the bare minimum of life support?
  - aylmao 5mo ago

stkdump 5mo ago

It's interesting how quickly people buy the "abuse" line of thinking. We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription. That is independent of which agent/harness is used. The fair/real price for profitable use is the pay per use token pricing. These labs play the game of trying to kill competition in the harness game (because third party harnesses risk commoditizing the underlying LLMs once they are all good enough), while playing a game of chicken with each other how long they can burn money that way before they have to give up. At some point they have to price their product fairly, and the only hope they have is to have killed all competition by then, which is of course a game that they seem to be loosing. Useful models are getting smaller and cheaper to run every year and it has hit a threshold at which we will see continued development of third party harnesses even without the userbase of subscription users. Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed. The secondary bet that they can lock users into their ecosystem (which requires them to subsidize their harness via unprofitable subscriptions burning their capital) and be able to monetize that later will also fail. They will have to compete on merit alone, and that is much less profitable.

ashdksnndck 5mo ago
> Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed. I thought the prime bet was that the winning lab who reaches takeoff through recursive self improvement will make a galactic superintelligence. Not saying I believe this but the people running the labs do. Under this scenario if you are a few months behind at the pivotal time you might as well not exist at all.
- zem 5mo ago
  only if said galactic superintelligence takes immediate steps to kill all its potential competitors, or hoover up all the world's resources, or some other aggressively zero sum thing. otherwise I don't see what difference it makes down the line of you have the second superintelligence rather than the first. and that's under the assumption that you can create a superintelligence that will continue to slavishly serve your agenda rather than establishing and following its own goals.

andai 5mo ago

What came to my mind is Windows. Regardless of what else is going on, kernel is a separate team, and has very strong incentives to remain competent and sane.

semiquaver 5mo ago

I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, GitHub had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, MS Windows), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making GitHub worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about GitHub.

raincole 5mo ago
I think you have some nostalgia about Github's stability before the acquisition.
oasisaimlessly 5mo ago
You dropped this: </sarcasm>
htrp 5mo ago
1 9 of uptime later
stingraycharles 5mo ago
This is a joke, right?
ivolimmen 5mo ago
I am asuming you are European as I (I live in the Netherlands) have not seen any outage of GitHub as well...

overgard 5mo ago

> I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Incidentally, Anthropic needs to figure out how to monetize at some point too.

antonvs 5mo ago
It’s organizations figuring out how to monetize all the way up.
- lelanthran 5mo ago
  The view from the bottom is turtle asses all the way to the top.

tabbott 5mo ago

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.). 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. 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). 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.