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Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropi

Interesting to see this when the current top post on HN is someone worrying about Bun as it was acquired by Anthropic. The top comment there describes “Anthropic does experiments on their own codebase, the Bun team is not gonna do the same vibe coding experiments”. Yet here we are, what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding. Time will tell how this will turn out. Would be nice if the Bun maintainers could give some clarification about what they’re doing here, and why they’re doing this.

pstuart 6mo ago
Porting from one typed language to another seems like a perfect use for LLMs. I can see the appeal of both languages and why to consider such an action (e.g., rust is a mainstream PL vs zig's cult status (no slight intended)).
- rtpg 6mo ago
  I think the big difficulty here is that Rust's ownership model in particular tends to require certain kinds of control flow to avoid a bunch of weird churning/copying, which makes it not as straightforward of a port target from other imperative languages. Like maybe you get the LLM to try _really hard_ to churn through everything, but this feels like a big case of "perils of the lack of laziness". Of course if you have a good idea for how to deal with allocations etc "idiomatically" already maybe that works out well. And to the credit of the port guide writer bun seems to have its explicit allocations that are already mapping pretty well to Rust.
  - pstuart 6mo ago
    This is all wild conjecture, but I'd assume that teaching the LLM to do that mapping is an achievable goal and then it get's close to automatic -- effectively slurp the source AST into a rust AST and render. My only experience with ports so far is Python to Go, and it's been near flawless (just enough stupid shit to make me feel justified to be in the loop).
    - spem-in-allium 6mo ago
      I'm porting a large-ish delphi application to c sharp. It's been pretty hands-off except for converting to async and some language capability mismatch.
    - rtpg 6mo ago
      It really isn't if you don't have the right abstractions. Especially for memory management the right and wrong abstractions in Rust can lead to a factor of 5 or 10 extra amount of difficulty. The right memory management abstraction and your code can be a straight line port (or even cleaner!), the wrong one and you're going to just be spending a lot of tokens to have a machine spin around in circles trying to untie itself GC'd languages don't have this problem, though obviously you can still generate stupid amount of pain for yourself by doing something wrong
Avicebron 6mo ago
I imagine claude is better at Rust than Zig?
- fcarraldo 6mo ago
  Contributors and maintainers will also be easier to find in Rust than Zig. Zig is a great language and I want to see it succeed, but this is a prudent move for Bun.
  - versecafe 6mo ago
    This is likely irrelevant given bun has stopped taking community PR's entirely and Jarred is pitching that human contributors should be banned.
    - etoxin 6mo ago
      There is like 1,713 open PR's on the Bun repo. I'm assuming all are from Claude or robobun?. I guess this gives us an insight on what the claude-code workflow look likes. Crazy times.
      - ModernMech 6mo ago
        https://lobste.rs/s/otxkjw/bun_js_runtime_is_being_vibe_ported_from#c_qfia71 https://lobste.rs/s/otxkjw/bun_js_runtime_is_being_vibe_port... > The regular pull requests for bun are wild too: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls?q=is%3Apr+ https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls?q=is%3Apr+ > Most are created autonomously by @robobun, checked for duplicates with a GitHub action (powered by Claude), reviewed by @coderabbitai and @claude. Meanwhile the CI is broken and @robobun finally closes a portion of its own PRs because they duplicate other PRs it has written. (Merging into main is still done by a human.)
    - jabedude 6mo ago
      Where is a source for either of these extraordinary claims?
nailer 6mo ago
> what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding It doesn’t look like that at all. Do you think that all use of AI is vibe coding?
- MarsIronPI 6mo ago
  It depends on what you mean by "vibe coding". Is AI coding based on an existing implementation vibe coding? What about only from a natural-language spec? How does manual reviewing affect whether or not it's vibe coding?
  - matt_kantor 6mo ago
    > How does manual reviewing affect whether or not it's vibe coding? I think the most commonly-accepted definition of "vibe coding" is when you "forget that the (generated) code even exists"[0]. So vibe-ness entirely hinges upon whether you're manually reviewing. If you make/prompt changes based on what you observe in the generated code (rather than only based on runtime behavior), then you're not "vibe coding". I think the other things you mentioned are orthogonal to vibe-ness. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding#Definition
- lmm 6mo ago
  In practice all use of AI rapidly becomes vibe coding. Even if someone says they're going to carefully manually review everything that's generated, within a couple of days they get bored and just click approve.
  - p-e-w 6mo ago
    Not to mention that manually writing code is itself a process of understanding. It cannot be replicated by reading code, no matter how carefully.
  - jmull 6mo ago
    While I'm sure you're speaking for many, this is definitely not true across the board.
NewsaHackO 6mo ago
But why should they? This just seems like the groundwork for an initial refactor and moving from one language to another. They haven't actually committed to switching from Zig to Rust yet. I mean, I get if you are an investor and you want to see if they are using their time effectively, but why would it matter to anyone else?
- SergeAx 6mo ago
  Lots of people, me included, heavily invested their time and expertise into Bun, using it as a daily driver, to bundle production code or even using it in production as a JS/TS runtime. Of course, we are interested in Bun to stay a useful tool. The Anthropic acquisition was worrying enough on its own.
  - NewsaHackO 6mo ago
    But there isn't any change in someone's expertise in Bun though, currently, just in development. Why would they have to dive you into a daily stand-up about their development process?
    - SergeAx 6mo ago
      Bun may become unusable after Antropic meddling with it. In that case the expertise would be wasted. It's not a great deal for most of users, but still.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  They’re not required to do so, but like I said, it would be nice, because it removes a lot of speculation. And development is in the open, so people notice what they’re doing.
mroche 6mo ago
I do not know if there's any overlap between these teams, but it seems like Anthropic itself is fairly invested in the Rust ecosystem. They recently proposed some of their internal tools to be the official Rust implementation[0] of Connect RPC[1]. As a protobuf based library set, this includes a new Rust-based protobuf compiler, Buffa[2]. [0]: https://github.com/orgs/connectrpc/discussions/7#discussioncomment-16279691 https://github.com/orgs/connectrpc/discussions/7#discussionc... [1]: https://connectrpc.com/ https://connectrpc.com/ [2]: https://github.com/anthropics/buffa https://github.com/anthropics/buffa
splittydev 6mo ago
Honestly, this kind of thing seems to work quite well with vibe coding. If I remember correctly, the Ladybird JS engine was "vibe-ported" to Rust as well, and it passed 100% of the original test suite, in addition to new Rust tests.
malisper 6mo ago
> what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding fwiw, I suspect it's less of an undertaking than you may think. I've been playing with AI to rewrite Postgres in Rust[0] over the past couple of weeks and I found the AI to be exceptional at doing rewrites. Having an existing codebase you can reference prevents a lot of the problems you have with vibecoding. You have an existing architecture that works well and have a test suite that you can test against Over the course of a month I've gone from nothing to passing over 95% of the Postgres test suite. Given Jarred built Bun, I bet he'll be able to go much faster [0] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust https://github.com/malisper/pgrust
- nailer 6mo ago
  > I suspect it's less of an undertaking than you may think... having an existing codebase you can reference prevents a lot of the problems you have with vibecoding. That's because it's not vibe coding - stingraycharles doesn't seem to understand what vibe coding is. Vibe coding was defined here https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 > There's a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. This is very far from Anthropic's migration plans.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - andai 6mo ago
    Yeah, it's a distinction worth making, and the language for making it kind of sucks. Vibe coding means "AI does the whole thing", or "I use tab autocomplete" depending on who you ask. It's not a very useful term anymore, we need better ones. My benchmark is basically, "are you letting the AI drive." In this case, an AI appears to have written the migration guide...
    - wrs 6mo ago
      It was and is a perfectly good term, but people started using it without regard for its definition. I don't know why people wouldn't misuse a "better" term the same way.
andkenneth 6mo ago
They recently tried to upstream an improvement to zig, but were prevented from doing so because zig has a hard and fast "no AI code" rule. Whether you think this response is trying to put pressure on zig or whether they're just moving for practical reasons is up to you. It's probably a bit of both.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- pton_xd 6mo ago
  Anthropic just needs to buy Zig! Problem solved.
  - xeonmc 6mo ago
    Take off every Zig
    - ratioprosperous 6mo ago
      It's time! https://xkcd.com/286/ https://xkcd.com/286/
      - kelnos 6mo ago
        Wow. That xkcd was written in 2007, and part of the dialog is "didn't that [meme] die like five years ago?" Which means All Your Base, as a meme, was already getting somewhat stale by around 2002. It's hard to believe it's been that long.
        vaylian 6mo ago
        Relevant XKCDs: * https://xkcd.com/647/ https://xkcd.com/647/ * https://xkcd.com/1477/ https://xkcd.com/1477/
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
simultsop 6mo ago
The industry does not shape bases on HN top posts, nor media buzz. Remember youtube birth. Necessity, available tech, fresh talent. I believe now we have all but we fail at choosing.
debarshri 6mo ago
I think itnis ok to use or build vibe coded tools if it is built by experts in the domain and they take the ownership.
- andkenneth 6mo ago
  I think if it's well built by experts it doesn't deserve the "vibe coded" label even if it was built with agentic tools.
faangguyindia 6mo ago
anthropic just wanted to "codex" like bragging rights of codex being developed in rust. so they are now going to write bun in rust, and then claudecode can use claim to be built on rust.
elktown 6mo ago
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" is usually the overarching law of software dev/design/arch.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  What do you mean with that in this context?
  - elktown 6mo ago
    That the incentives have changed after being bought by Anthropic. So don't be surprised by a sudden change of heart.
    - stingraycharles 6mo ago
      Change of heart about what? Sorry if I’m being pedantic, but I’m not aware of Bun having made any statements about AI assisted coding before.
sureglymop 6mo ago
To be fair, this seems to be Buns original creator themselves experimenting. Unclear if there's any relation to the Anthropic acquisition. But I think it's best we refrain from prematurely speculating if we just don't know.

pstuart 6mo ago

Porting from one typed language to another seems like a perfect use for LLMs. I can see the appeal of both languages and why to consider such an action (e.g., rust is a mainstream PL vs zig's cult status (no slight intended)).

rtpg 6mo ago
I think the big difficulty here is that Rust's ownership model in particular tends to require certain kinds of control flow to avoid a bunch of weird churning/copying, which makes it not as straightforward of a port target from other imperative languages. Like maybe you get the LLM to try _really hard_ to churn through everything, but this feels like a big case of "perils of the lack of laziness". Of course if you have a good idea for how to deal with allocations etc "idiomatically" already maybe that works out well. And to the credit of the port guide writer bun seems to have its explicit allocations that are already mapping pretty well to Rust.
- pstuart 6mo ago
  This is all wild conjecture, but I'd assume that teaching the LLM to do that mapping is an achievable goal and then it get's close to automatic -- effectively slurp the source AST into a rust AST and render. My only experience with ports so far is Python to Go, and it's been near flawless (just enough stupid shit to make me feel justified to be in the loop).
  - spem-in-allium 6mo ago
    I'm porting a large-ish delphi application to c sharp. It's been pretty hands-off except for converting to async and some language capability mismatch.
  - rtpg 6mo ago
    It really isn't if you don't have the right abstractions. Especially for memory management the right and wrong abstractions in Rust can lead to a factor of 5 or 10 extra amount of difficulty. The right memory management abstraction and your code can be a straight line port (or even cleaner!), the wrong one and you're going to just be spending a lot of tokens to have a machine spin around in circles trying to untie itself GC'd languages don't have this problem, though obviously you can still generate stupid amount of pain for yourself by doing something wrong

Avicebron 6mo ago

I imagine claude is better at Rust than Zig?

fcarraldo 6mo ago
Contributors and maintainers will also be easier to find in Rust than Zig. Zig is a great language and I want to see it succeed, but this is a prudent move for Bun.
- versecafe 6mo ago
  This is likely irrelevant given bun has stopped taking community PR's entirely and Jarred is pitching that human contributors should be banned.
  - etoxin 6mo ago
    There is like 1,713 open PR's on the Bun repo. I'm assuming all are from Claude or robobun?. I guess this gives us an insight on what the claude-code workflow look likes. Crazy times.
    - ModernMech 6mo ago
      https://lobste.rs/s/otxkjw/bun_js_runtime_is_being_vibe_ported_from#c_qfia71 https://lobste.rs/s/otxkjw/bun_js_runtime_is_being_vibe_port... > The regular pull requests for bun are wild too: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls?q=is%3Apr+ https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pulls?q=is%3Apr+ > Most are created autonomously by @robobun, checked for duplicates with a GitHub action (powered by Claude), reviewed by @coderabbitai and @claude. Meanwhile the CI is broken and @robobun finally closes a portion of its own PRs because they duplicate other PRs it has written. (Merging into main is still done by a human.)
  - jabedude 6mo ago
    Where is a source for either of these extraordinary claims?

nailer 6mo ago

> what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding It doesn’t look like that at all. Do you think that all use of AI is vibe coding?

MarsIronPI 6mo ago
It depends on what you mean by "vibe coding". Is AI coding based on an existing implementation vibe coding? What about only from a natural-language spec? How does manual reviewing affect whether or not it's vibe coding?
- matt_kantor 6mo ago
  > How does manual reviewing affect whether or not it's vibe coding? I think the most commonly-accepted definition of "vibe coding" is when you "forget that the (generated) code even exists"[0]. So vibe-ness entirely hinges upon whether you're manually reviewing. If you make/prompt changes based on what you observe in the generated code (rather than only based on runtime behavior), then you're not "vibe coding". I think the other things you mentioned are orthogonal to vibe-ness. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding#Definition
lmm 6mo ago
In practice all use of AI rapidly becomes vibe coding. Even if someone says they're going to carefully manually review everything that's generated, within a couple of days they get bored and just click approve.
- p-e-w 6mo ago
  Not to mention that manually writing code is itself a process of understanding. It cannot be replicated by reading code, no matter how carefully.
- jmull 6mo ago
  While I'm sure you're speaking for many, this is definitely not true across the board.

NewsaHackO 6mo ago

But why should they? This just seems like the groundwork for an initial refactor and moving from one language to another. They haven't actually committed to switching from Zig to Rust yet. I mean, I get if you are an investor and you want to see if they are using their time effectively, but why would it matter to anyone else?

SergeAx 6mo ago
Lots of people, me included, heavily invested their time and expertise into Bun, using it as a daily driver, to bundle production code or even using it in production as a JS/TS runtime. Of course, we are interested in Bun to stay a useful tool. The Anthropic acquisition was worrying enough on its own.
- NewsaHackO 6mo ago
  But there isn't any change in someone's expertise in Bun though, currently, just in development. Why would they have to dive you into a daily stand-up about their development process?
  - SergeAx 6mo ago
    Bun may become unusable after Antropic meddling with it. In that case the expertise would be wasted. It's not a great deal for most of users, but still.
stingraycharles 6mo ago
They’re not required to do so, but like I said, it would be nice, because it removes a lot of speculation. And development is in the open, so people notice what they’re doing.

mroche 6mo ago

I do not know if there's any overlap between these teams, but it seems like Anthropic itself is fairly invested in the Rust ecosystem. They recently proposed some of their internal tools to be the official Rust implementation[0] of Connect RPC[1]. As a protobuf based library set, this includes a new Rust-based protobuf compiler, Buffa[2]. [0]: https://github.com/orgs/connectrpc/discussions/7#discussioncomment-16279691 https://github.com/orgs/connectrpc/discussions/7#discussionc... [1]: https://connectrpc.com/ https://connectrpc.com/ [2]: https://github.com/anthropics/buffa https://github.com/anthropics/buffa

splittydev 6mo ago

Honestly, this kind of thing seems to work quite well with vibe coding. If I remember correctly, the Ladybird JS engine was "vibe-ported" to Rust as well, and it passed 100% of the original test suite, in addition to new Rust tests.

malisper 6mo ago

> what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding fwiw, I suspect it's less of an undertaking than you may think. I've been playing with AI to rewrite Postgres in Rust[0] over the past couple of weeks and I found the AI to be exceptional at doing rewrites. Having an existing codebase you can reference prevents a lot of the problems you have with vibecoding. You have an existing architecture that works well and have a test suite that you can test against Over the course of a month I've gone from nothing to passing over 95% of the Postgres test suite. Given Jarred built Bun, I bet he'll be able to go much faster [0] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust https://github.com/malisper/pgrust

nailer 6mo ago
> I suspect it's less of an undertaking than you may think... having an existing codebase you can reference prevents a lot of the problems you have with vibecoding. That's because it's not vibe coding - stingraycharles doesn't seem to understand what vibe coding is. Vibe coding was defined here https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 > There's a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. This is very far from Anthropic's migration plans.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- andai 6mo ago
  Yeah, it's a distinction worth making, and the language for making it kind of sucks. Vibe coding means "AI does the whole thing", or "I use tab autocomplete" depending on who you ask. It's not a very useful term anymore, we need better ones. My benchmark is basically, "are you letting the AI drive." In this case, an AI appears to have written the migration guide...
  - wrs 6mo ago
    It was and is a perfectly good term, but people started using it without regard for its definition. I don't know why people wouldn't misuse a "better" term the same way.

andkenneth 6mo ago

They recently tried to upstream an improvement to zig, but were prevented from doing so because zig has a hard and fast "no AI code" rule. Whether you think this response is trying to put pressure on zig or whether they're just moving for practical reasons is up to you. It's probably a bit of both.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
pton_xd 6mo ago
Anthropic just needs to buy Zig! Problem solved.
- xeonmc 6mo ago
  Take off every Zig
  - ratioprosperous 6mo ago
    It's time! https://xkcd.com/286/ https://xkcd.com/286/
    - kelnos 6mo ago
      Wow. That xkcd was written in 2007, and part of the dialog is "didn't that [meme] die like five years ago?" Which means All Your Base, as a meme, was already getting somewhat stale by around 2002. It's hard to believe it's been that long.
      - vaylian 6mo ago
        Relevant XKCDs: * https://xkcd.com/647/ https://xkcd.com/647/ * https://xkcd.com/1477/ https://xkcd.com/1477/
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]

simultsop 6mo ago

The industry does not shape bases on HN top posts, nor media buzz. Remember youtube birth. Necessity, available tech, fresh talent. I believe now we have all but we fail at choosing.

debarshri 6mo ago

I think itnis ok to use or build vibe coded tools if it is built by experts in the domain and they take the ownership.

andkenneth 6mo ago
I think if it's well built by experts it doesn't deserve the "vibe coded" label even if it was built with agentic tools.

faangguyindia 6mo ago

anthropic just wanted to "codex" like bragging rights of codex being developed in rust. so they are now going to write bun in rust, and then claudecode can use claim to be built on rust.

elktown 6mo ago

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" is usually the overarching law of software dev/design/arch.

stingraycharles 6mo ago
What do you mean with that in this context?
- elktown 6mo ago
  That the incentives have changed after being bought by Anthropic. So don't be surprised by a sudden change of heart.
  - stingraycharles 6mo ago
    Change of heart about what? Sorry if I’m being pedantic, but I’m not aware of Bun having made any statements about AI assisted coding before.

sureglymop 6mo ago

To be fair, this seems to be Buns original creator themselves experimenting. Unclear if there's any relation to the Anthropic acquisition. But I think it's best we refrain from prematurely speculating if we just don't know.