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Anthropic acquires Bun

bun.com

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Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#511

Post by rprend »

ctoth wrote: post #50

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 ...…

“Port it to a different language” a language that’s more out of distribution? Bad devex. Store data as an unreadable binary file? Bad devex.

Stay in distribution and in the wave as much as possible.

Good devex is all you need. Claude code team iterates and ships fast, and these decisions make total sense when you realize that dev velocity is the point.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#512

Post by davnicwil »

dts wrote: post #395

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…

Isn't what you're describing just a set of APIs with native bindings that the LLM can call?

I'm not sure I understand why it's necessary to even couple this to a runtime, let alone own the runtime?

Can't you just do it as a library and train/instruct the LLM to prefer using that library?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#513

Post by awesome_dude »

piskov wrote: post #493

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.

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)

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#514

Post by otterley »

chatmasta wrote: post #501
hoppp wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine but why is Js a good language for agents? I mean sure its faster than python but wouldn't something that compiles to native be much better?

JS has the fastest, most robust and widely deployed sandboxing engines (V8, followed closely by JavaScriptCore which is what Bun uses). It also has TypeScript which pairs well with agentic coding loops, and compiles to the aforementioned JavaScript which can run pretty much anywhere.

Note that "sandboxing" in this case is strictly runtime sandboxing - it's basically like having a separate process per event loop (as if you ran separate Node processes). It does not sandbox the machine context in which it runs (i.e. it's not VM-level containment).

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#515

Post by int_19h »

shrubble wrote: post #503

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.

Agents already do this exact thing, except that the go-to language for Claude to write one-off scripts in is usually Python.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#516

Post by fishmicrowaver »

ojame wrote: post #483
fishmicrowaver wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

An AI company scoops up frontend tech. Do you really think it was because of s3?

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#517

Post by s-mon »

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.

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#518

Post by johnfn »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #238
johnfn wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI writes about 90% of my code.

What languages and frameworks? What is the domain space you're operating in? I use Cursor to help with some tasks, but mainly only use the autocomplete. It's great; no complaints. I just don't ever see being able to turn over anywhere close to 90% with the stuff we work on.

My stack is React/Express/Drizzle/Postgres/Node/Tailwind. It's built on Hetzner/AWS, which I terraformed with AI.

You can see my site here, if you'd like: https://chipscompo.com/

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#519

Post by johnfn »

samdoesnothing wrote: post #305
sinatra wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

Show us your repos.

My stack is React/Express/Drizzle/Postgres/Node/Tailwind. It's built on Hetzner/AWS, which I terraformed with AI.

It's a private repo, and I won't make it open source just to prove it was written with AI, but I'd be happy to share the prompts. You can also visit the site, if you'd like: https://chipscompo.com/

Re: Anthropic acquires Bun

#520

Post by btown »

dts wrote: post #395

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…

Yea - if you want a paranoidly-sandboxed, instant-start, high-concurrency environment, not just on beefy servers but on resource-constrained/client devices as well, you need experts in V8 integration shenanigans.

Cloudflare Workers had Kenton Varda, who had been looking at lightweight serverless architecture at Sandstorm years ago. Anthropic needs this too, for all the reasons above. Makes all the sense in the world.

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