Lots of good work on open source projects gets funded by tech companies. It seems like kind of a weird purity test? Especially since in other circumstances, people complain that that big...
Lots of good work on open source projects gets funded by tech companies. It seems like kind of a weird purity test?
Especially since in other circumstances, people complain that that big businesses don't pay enough for the code they depend on. Sometimes they do fund them and rather generously, too. This is one of the ways it happens.
I mostly judge open source projects by the software they produce, not their governance. To the extent that governance matters, I think the team doing the work matters more than their financial...
I mostly judge open source projects by the software they produce, not their governance. To the extent that governance matters, I think the team doing the work matters more than their financial backing. For example, I think the Go team is pretty good and that’s largely independent of all the AI stuff that Google is doing? (This is assuming that the corporation pays their salaries but otherwise largely leaves them alone, which is only true of some teams at some companies.)
If the Go team somehow got worse then it’s nice that forking is an option.
So whatever other stuff Anthropic is doing, the relevant question is whether they will leave Bun alone to do their thing. That’s not easily predicted and is largely independent of whether Anthropic is a good company overall.
Okay, lots of tech companies have their issues but you cannot be collapsing the distinction between "AI company" and "tech company" so easily here, I'm sure you're familiar with plenty of...
Okay, lots of tech companies have their issues but you cannot be collapsing the distinction between "AI company" and "tech company" so easily here, I'm sure you're familiar with plenty of AI-company-specific reasons why people might actively not use their products!
One relevant reason here might be: how stable are Anthropic's finances? If finances become a problem a small non-priority team might go poof, and that's not a great outcome for anyone else using Bun's software.
The future seems hard to predict, especially for AI companies. Anthropic does have rapidly growing revenue, which seems promising. I think it would be weird to rule out Bun in advance based on...
The future seems hard to predict, especially for AI companies. Anthropic does have rapidly growing revenue, which seems promising.
I think it would be weird to rule out Bun in advance based on what might happen? Worst case, you have whatever Bun releases they already made and can migrate to something else.
Pretty much, the article mentions they would’ve had four more years to figure out a path to monetization, or raise more money, otherwise the product would just… end.
Pretty much, the article mentions they would’ve had four more years to figure out a path to monetization, or raise more money, otherwise the product would just… end.
“Generous” might not be quite the right word since it’s self-interested, but they did get a lot of funding for an open source project and apparently they didn’t have to think too hard about...
“Generous” might not be quite the right word since it’s self-interested, but they did get a lot of funding for an open source project and apparently they didn’t have to think too hard about revemue. When an important project gets funded that way, I think it counts as more good than bad.
I had heard good stuff about Bun without understanding what exactly it was till now. It sounds cool technically, but yeah the acquisition makes me pause a bit.
I had heard good stuff about Bun without understanding what exactly it was till now. It sounds cool technically, but yeah the acquisition makes me pause a bit.
Yeah, I also found that line of reasoning to be a bit strange. All dependencies can break, so why not write every single LoC in-house then from here on out? Apart from that though, I totally get...
Yeah, I also found that line of reasoning to be a bit strange. All dependencies can break, so why not write every single LoC in-house then from here on out?
Apart from that though, I totally get the acquisition. Bun is not only awesome software, but “owning the stack” is also a cool appeal for Anthropic (if they have the funds for such a move without hurting their core R&D investments, which I’m not doubting in the current hype market/funding situation).
Claude Code ships as a Bun executable to millions of users. If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent.
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Bun's single-file executables turned out to be perfect for distributing CLI tools. You can compile any JavaScript project into a self-contained binary—runs anywhere, even if the user doesn't have Bun or Node installed. Works with native addons. Fast startup. Easy to distribute.
Claude Code, FactoryAI, OpenCode, and others are all built with Bun.
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Over the last several months, the GitHub username with the most merged PRs in Bun's repo is now a Claude Code bot. We have it set up in our internal Discord and we mostly use it to help fix bugs. It opens PRs with tests that fail in the earlier system-installed version of Bun before the fix and pass in the fixed debug build of Bun. It responds to review comments. It does the whole thing.
This feels approximately a few months ahead of where things are going. Certainly not years.
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We've been prioritizing issues from the Claude Code team for several months now. I have so many ideas all the time and it's really fun. Many of these ideas also help other AI coding products.
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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.
Eh yuck. I'll stay away from anything supported by a AI company.
Lots of good work on open source projects gets funded by tech companies. It seems like kind of a weird purity test?
Especially since in other circumstances, people complain that that big businesses don't pay enough for the code they depend on. Sometimes they do fund them and rather generously, too. This is one of the ways it happens.
One of these situations leaves the open source thing independent and one of them doesn't. Do those hold equal weight for you?
I mostly judge open source projects by the software they produce, not their governance. To the extent that governance matters, I think the team doing the work matters more than their financial backing. For example, I think the Go team is pretty good and that’s largely independent of all the AI stuff that Google is doing? (This is assuming that the corporation pays their salaries but otherwise largely leaves them alone, which is only true of some teams at some companies.)
If the Go team somehow got worse then it’s nice that forking is an option.
So whatever other stuff Anthropic is doing, the relevant question is whether they will leave Bun alone to do their thing. That’s not easily predicted and is largely independent of whether Anthropic is a good company overall.
Okay, lots of tech companies have their issues but you cannot be collapsing the distinction between "AI company" and "tech company" so easily here, I'm sure you're familiar with plenty of AI-company-specific reasons why people might actively not use their products!
One relevant reason here might be: how stable are Anthropic's finances? If finances become a problem a small non-priority team might go poof, and that's not a great outcome for anyone else using Bun's software.
The future seems hard to predict, especially for AI companies. Anthropic does have rapidly growing revenue, which seems promising.
I think it would be weird to rule out Bun in advance based on what might happen? Worst case, you have whatever Bun releases they already made and can migrate to something else.
Bun was already VC funded, does this still count as a big business generously funding open source? In my opinion, no.
Pretty much, the article mentions they would’ve had four more years to figure out a path to monetization, or raise more money, otherwise the product would just… end.
“Generous” might not be quite the right word since it’s self-interested, but they did get a lot of funding for an open source project and apparently they didn’t have to think too hard about revemue. When an important project gets funded that way, I think it counts as more good than bad.
Same. Being owned by an AI corp is yuckier than VC funding.
I had heard good stuff about Bun without understanding what exactly it was till now. It sounds cool technically, but yeah the acquisition makes me pause a bit.
So since Bun is a Zig project, Claude Code depends on Zig now? 🙃
Maybe Anthropic could shell out a million or two to the ZSF then.
Yeah, I also found that line of reasoning to be a bit strange. All dependencies can break, so why not write every single LoC in-house then from here on out?
Apart from that though, I totally get the acquisition. Bun is not only awesome software, but “owning the stack” is also a cool appeal for Anthropic (if they have the funds for such a move without hurting their core R&D investments, which I’m not doubting in the current hype market/funding situation).
From the article:
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Claude code’s CLI client UI is one of the most, idk, fancy CLI’s I’ve ever used, so if they did use buns that’s a solid endorsement.