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58% Positive
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#bun#code#don#claude#anthropic#more#node#why#using#users
Discussion (173 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
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.
I look at superintelligence this way: software engineering used to be considered amoung the most mentally demanding jobs one can have. And in this field more and more people give up large parts of their job and become approximately product managers to let the machine do the engineering part. So we are about there. Who cares that there are some puzzles in some "synthetic" benchmark in which humans outsmart AIs?
Lots of businesses have subscription programs in which a small number of users are money losers, but which in aggregate make money.
It's not even obvious that the labs are losing a lot of money on even a minority of users; the rate use caps are fairly aggressive for Anthropic, and a cursory analysis of likely actual cost of serving tokens shows they are high margin products at the API level and unlikely to be unprofitable within the usage constraints provided to subscribers.
I do think subscription models make commercial sense because users want predictable costs, and it's a club good in which marginal token cost is zero which helps consolidate their customers' purchasing volume to one provider. But that's a different claim than them serving it unprofitably to kill competition.
Also, they (Anthropic) are transitioning many of their enterprise customers to API consumption billing anyway.
I dont think this is "understood" or "known" to anyone except Ed Zitron. Subscription plans like Claude Code also have rolling usage limits, it could be profitable. Inference is very cheap and unless you're using OpenClaw no one is actually maxing out the usage window at all times. I'm sure in aggregate the subs are not money furnaces.
I think there were reasons to doubt that heavy subscription users are unprofitable before they did that. OpenClaw was just the tip of the iceberg.
Why don't they make token pricing dynamic if that was the case? It should then allow heavy user to get even more for their money than with the current subscription model where they can't adjust to current infra availability.
It may be that "in aggregate" sub users are (not yet) a loosing business. But in all fairness, the more useful AI gets, the more it will be used. And the more it will be used, the harder it will be to make subs cheaper than token pricing. The only counter-weight are new light users, but those will also become heavy users over time, the more useful it will be for them. And at some point it will be hard to onboard light users in the first place, because the laggards will require even more intelligence and value to get them over.
Anthropic and Google are arguably playing that game. OpenAI's Codex CLI is open source and entirely optional for use of the GPT Codex models.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
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.
To me, the obvious comparison seems to be Docker. Their tooling revolutionized software development and made cgroups and containerization accessible to the masses. Yet they generally seem to have failed to extract payment from users, even with managed service opportunities.
It seems to me that there are substantial obstacles to monetizing a project licensed with even a weaker OSS license like MIT. I think this is especially true for projects that don’t have managed service / “open core” potential.
Any gratis project you rely on runs the risk that it will no longer be provided gratis. That alone is not a strong basis for making decisions.
Maybe we should stop trying to build so many billion dollar/year businesses and work on more sustainable models.
The ones that were first to market went all bankrupt, or were acquired by others that came later into the scene.
Why? What's the risk? It's open source. Also, speaking of open source, we are happy to commit to open source projects that have no monetization, nor any plans to ever monetize.
It's not great that the search for profit will usually corrupt projects, but the other most common option is that the projects don't exist at all. It's very rare (or it used to be before this year) that someone can do something like this on their own with no compensation. So now at least Bun exists.
There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.
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
Once bad code starts to compound on itself, it's going to be really hard to break out of it.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.
I consider this a hard rule, like ad-blocking (this is exactly that, blocking ads as each talk is an ad (or ad in disguise).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Regardless of what else is going on, kernel is a separate team, and has very strong incentives to remain competent and sane.
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?
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.
They released more major features and breaking changes in their last patch release than most software sees in two major versions.
I've been using it just as a script runner and npm package manager basically, and it's incredible the amount of work you have to do to find "good" versions. We've had patch versions suddenly freeze on install more than once, we couldn't upgrade for quite a while due to this. I think they broke postinstall scripts with trustedDependencies entirely two minor versions ago - not a mention in release notes, and somehow no one reporting it in GH issues. In 1.1 or so you could get Bun to do trustedDependency builds in postinstall, and then after that you couldn't. I looked around for release notes and saw nothing mentioned. It's been broken for months.
We live in a vastly different world than before, where people are more conscious of ethical concerns and willing to stand on their ground to avoid repeating past mistakes.
It might be premature from a tech standard, but it makes sense from an ethical concern. I don't think misconduct is as easily backtracked as it was before and preemptive measures are needed to avoid the large impact that those decisions make.
Would be interested to hear what makes you say that. I don't see anyone being conscious of ethical concerns more than they were before. I can see slightly more BDS people, for example, but outside of that not much.
Other than a bundler, Node already has all of these. Different test runner syntax maybe but otherwise TS "just works" out of the box and their built in test runner is totally capable. Not sure I see the need for such a lament over Bun.
Additionally, Bun's push for covering as much of the Node API as possible has pushed Deno towards the same level of compatibility, and now most code is basically runtime agnostic. I'm not sure if I'll ever actually use Bun in production, but I'm glad it exists because the JavaScript ecosystem has been much improved simply due to its existence.
https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v23.6.0
[1]: https://github.com/PerryTS/perry
For their first year two of existence, bun tried to do npm, but better. For the first year or two of their existence, Deno tried to reinvent npm.
The key result is that after that first year or two Deno had to walk back their decisions, to create a Node-ecosystem-compatible tool .. and as a result, they're now significantly behind bun (at least by all metrics I've seen).
https://github.com/PerryTS/perry/issues/139
:vomit:
Then you could have been using Deno, like many of us, for years.
They are not a runtime, but they do seem to be interested in wrapping a lot of tools with simple top-level commands
The main issue is side effects of effort/thinking it seems. It hallucinates at a much higher rate and skips research in a ton of edge cases even with effort of MAX and disabling adaptive thinking, even on 4.6. Ive said before, but using opus today feels like using sonnet from ~October timeframe. Its not anywhere near what opus 4.5 in January felt like, or even opus 4.6 on release (notably 4.6 on release _really_ over-researched even simple tasks and that behavior is almost entirely gone now even with max effort so they are definitely re-tuning these things on the fly and degrading the experience as a result).
EDIT: I also have a very high suspicion that the way they hydrate thinking is buggy and/or lossy (or maybe unintentionally lossy which leads to bugs). So many behaviors just make no sense at the level I have my setup tuned (I have everything set to "just charge me the most money to hopefully get the best results") and the fact that I havent changed anything while using it daily for months and months on end, but have been getting worse and worse results.
Not a single one has yet to compare to Claude Code in terms of ergonomics and critical daily function.
I don't care what the Twitter hype is with a bunch of parrot tech bros across the land.
Claude code has significantly gotten better. And the little things have stacked up and make it very hard to change my daily workflows & use other harnesses. It's painful using them in comparison.
I say this as somebody who has been fairly verbal in adverse situations like the A/B testing they run in the harness.
The key question is how much unique tooling you're relying on. If you can switch to Node tomorrow, great. If you can't, make sure you have a contingency plan.
If not VC funding, then what? Volunteer work? So other people can make money off it?
Our industry has no answer how to fund infrastructure.
You've got FAANG companies using open source projects built by volunteers and doing meagre grants every once in a while, not nearly enough to pay a SWE salary. A smattering of hard to get grants from NLnet, etc. And then places like Anthropic or Grok or OpenAI "buying" open source teams to pull them inside, which inevitably leads to drama.
I don't know what the answer is, but there's a serious issue here. Similar situations in the 80s were why the FSF was founded and the GPL established. (Not to fund, but to protect the rights of authors and users)
I tried using bun for a project earlier this year and learned that you can't use testcontainers(works fine w/ Deno).
I've never used Claude Code, but this person doesn't understand what "textbook enshittification" means. "Enshittification" is a feature of certain kinds of business models, progressing through the following stages:
1. Giving away a product free to users, subsidized by venture capital, to gain a monopoly
2. Switching to advertising, then abusing users on behalf of the real customers, advertisers
3. Using monopoly power to abuse real customers (advertisers) to extract as much money as possible
Anthropic's business model doesn't have a "user / customer" dichotomy; their paid users are their customers. And they don't have a monopoly they can use to extract money yet.
ETA: In other words, "Enshittification" isn't just random; you're making the user experience worse in order to make advertiser experience better; and then making advertiser experience worse in order to extract maximum profit. The only complaint that could vaguely be related to profit is the OpenClaw stuff, and that's entirely due to trying to keep the "all-you-can-eat" model for non-OpenClaw users, rather than having to switch everything to metered.
Always appreciated nuance.
Only company that would survive the AI race - the one where the current wave was actually invented along with the research paper, the libraries and even specialised hardware: Google.
Google has a serious problem with its product management culture (long list of products and projects, people even skeptical of Flutter) otherwise they would have surpassed Anthropic long ago.
It's fine for other purposes though. Which are arguably a much larger and lucrative market.
For my projects I don’t even need any additional dependencies. I use vanilla dom and sqlite
Switching to Go or Rust would only make sense if performance were the main priority, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Their current setup lets them ship quickly. A rewrite in Go would likely slow that down.
Codex moved to Rust, and you can see the trade-off. Performance improved, but release velocity dropped. They’re also still catching up to Claude Code, so they don’t face the same pressure to ship as fast.
The bun people likely have some fucked up incestial business relationship with some >dev manager at Anthropic and the same pattern is repeating. Only this cycle it's going straight to acquisitions, which honestly seems like a worse strategy and Anthropic will def can the bun engineers in less than <3 years or whenever they face an actual budget crunch that they can't stave off with more gulf money.
I only use Cursor through the CLI, and while the UX of the CLI is pretty bad, I've found their harness (the prompts they use and orchestration of LLMs) to be nothing short of incredible. I can't comment on their agent development environment given I haven't spent a lot of time with it.
The reason I'm moving away from Cursor is cost. Unfortunately, if you want to use the SOTA models from both OpenAI and Anthropic you basically have to go direct through their subsidized plans.
Admittedly, with Opus 4.6+, GPT 5.5 I just haven't used them much and as I gain more experience I can see what the hype is all about. But to me, the answer isn't $200 max plan, it's bifurcating the work. Call me a spendthrift!
Otherwise if you are looking for and IDE first approach with great AI integration it's the best product out there. I prefer it over CC/Codex.
You see this all over the place with other programming languages.
The ones that have bleeding edge features do so, because there are companies, or universities (for their PhD and Msc thesis), that invest into those ecosystems.
In the end nodejs will keep improving, with Microsoft and Google's baking, and that will be it.
I sympathize with the general premise. The reaction to move away seems pre-mature though.
It sounds like `bun` is still performing just as well as before, and this sentiment isn't based on concrete changes. I also wouldn't expect infrastructure like `bun` to evolve in the way a consumer-facing product, especially one scaling as quickly as Claude Code, can.
Plus it’s not a huge lift right now
If Bun stays great, you saved yourself some time for switching, and got to keep using Bun.
If Bun worsens, you spend the same time for switching, just moved a bit later, and got to use Bun for a little longer.
bun run is <1s for my projects, while watching for file changes. So the iteration speed is quite pleasant.
bun file.ts
And it’s been this way for years.
Don’t care about what’s in a package.json file or if there is one. Can do this without tsconfig file as well.
Might as well just open our pants and wave our wangers, hoping for a better world
Personally my experience with Bun has been 100% positive so far.
I'm aware full Node support is not there yet and may never happen but with dependencies that support Bun it's been a smooth ride for me.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence, etc.
:(
Their product focus, roadmap, or execution is likely a rounding error in the face of that tsunami.
Frankly, it’s shocking they’re doing so well relative to, say, GitHub.
"I want a serious Node.js alternative."
So you ignore the one developed by the same guy?
If as claimed everyone and his malnourished cellar rat can whip up a SaaS on a whim, then why that SaaS should be built upon chromium+js+http instead of tcp+native ui?
Remember, choice of ui is no longer a constraint. Nothing is a constraint or so they say.
So it follows that all this javascript stuff can at last die.
Node.js is also more stable, and it has started supporting TypeScript out of the box. I don’t think Bun will have many advantages after Node 26.
Node only does type stripping though. If you want proper TS support you still need a compiler.
> I don’t think Bun will have many advantages after Node 26
There are tons of advantages. For instance, Bun includes a lot of features that would need a third party dependency in Node: db driver, S3 client, watch mode, bundler, JSX support, etc.
That being said I’ve been worried about the future of Bun anyway. Especially if the AI bubble pops. Then again, it’s open source.
Otherwise it's just FUD.
It's annoying, but I don't see this as a bad thing at all for Bun.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/04/13/anthropic-revenue-growth-ai
[1] https://youtu.be/J8O9LLpJNrg?t=1201
I still use bun, but I think that there are some other pathways so I am not that worried about myself personally. But that's also because I most often than not code in golang rather than typescript/javascript
[0]: https://aube.en.dev/
The funniest part to me is that 10–15 years ago, companies were stuck in the development process due to binary (closed) dependencies. Now they're jumping into the same trap under a different name.
Maybe I’ve missed some scandals, but so far OpenJS Foundation is the best thing that has happened for the JavaScript ecosystem.
> Claude Code appears to be enshittifying. So now I have to worry that Bun could enshittify too