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I am worried about Bun

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Re: I am worried about Bun

#201

Post by troupo »

remote-dev wrote: post #22
AntonyGarand wrote: post #11

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: C…

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.

Anthropic bought actual engineers to undo the slop their vibe-coders produce with reckless abandon: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987

However, these engineers, too, now start to vibe-code with reckless abandon https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2048434628248359284 and https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2049780223311548729

Re: I am worried about Bun

#202

Post by NetMageSCW »

namuol wrote: post #146

I see the word “enshittify” being thrown around casually about Claude Code. We’re far from that part of the Enshittification cycle still. This is just a mismanaged product and the result of an extremely competitive market that moves too fast. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence, etc.

Their third part harness move seems like more than incompetence.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#203

Post by zem »

ethin wrote: post #187
zem wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

This is also assuming that AGI is even possible. So far there is no evidence that this is actually doable over anything but billions of years (and even then we have no idea how nature really managed it). Edit: Meant to say AGI (superintelligence didn't make sense). Superintelligence is undefinable at the moment so even considering if it's possible or not is more of a philosophical thing/si-fi thought experiment than…

oh absolutely, no argument there, the case for AGI is pretty weak. I was just saying that I am even more sceptical that any of this is a "first or nothing" scenario - that is one of my biggest pet peeves about the entire tech sector.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#204

Post by animuchan »

smcl wrote: post #39
AntonyGarand wrote: post #11

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: C…

> 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 ou…

It's a bit insane, but the cost of switching to regular NodeJS is low (for all but most bun-specific projects).

All valid points though, I'm pessimistic about Anthropic still actively diverting resources to these side quests when tough times hit (which might be in a week for all we know).

Re: I am worried about Bun

#205

Post by AussieWog93 »

stkdump wrote: post #109
AntonyGarand wrote: post #11

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: C…

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 har…

>Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed.

Honestly, I don't think it's that cut and dry. Their bet is that the marginal utility of having a smarter model more than makes up for the cost of the additional high-end hardware.

And honestly, if you look at their frankly insane revenue growth since Opus 4.5 released, they were right.

>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.

I think we're already past this point, honestly. They lowered usage limits, blocked OpenClaw then tried to remove Claude Code from the $20/mo plan. They have always had low market share for the consumer chatbot market and don't seem to care about catching up to OpenAI there.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#206

Post by inbx0 »

jazzypants wrote: post #87
ericyd wrote: post #72

The author closes by enumerating some of the things they like about Bun which are not included in pnpm. The list is basically: native TS support, a vite-style bundler and a vitest/jest style test runner. 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…

To be fair, Node didn't have any of these things until Deno & Bun challenged it. Deno didn't seem to move the needle by itself very much for whatever reason, but Bun's existence has had a tangible effect on the Node Technical Steering Committee. I would even argue that much of the current impetus has been driven by Jarred Sumner's savvy social media marketing. It got people talking, and Node is better because of it.…

Reminds me of the back and forth competition between Node.js and io.js that we had to endure back in the day. Worked out for the best in the end.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#209

Post by moritzwarhier »

silverwind wrote: post #110
hootz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is type stripping and is incompatible with syntax that requires transpilation, so it is not native TypeScript support.

Modern Typescript does not need runtime features.

Your comment might lack explanation, but indeed the TS team has mentioned multiple times that they don't want to add any more features that require transpilation (as opposed to "dumb" type stripping and being a strict superset of JS).

IIRC they "almost" recommend against using them (the last part, I haven't researched again now).

But the usage of many features has reached a sort of point of no return, so I hope Node will go the route of making the experimental transpilation the default for TS files at some point.

Goes to show how strong the appeal of syntax is, especially enums.

To people coming from languages with enum support, it just looks so much more organized to use them, compared to union types, despite all of the (many) drawbacks.

Re: I am worried about Bun

#210

Post by aylmao »

crote wrote: post #171
aylmao wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 hurtin…

Because they need it to work, so that everything built on it works too.

Building developers sell you the apartment, not the elevator room, the electrical room, mechanical room, etc. They will make all sorts of controversial decisions with the apartments; odd layouts, ugly flooring, weird pricing, tacky finishes, etc. The "core product" is the money-maker, that's where the egos clash, priorities change, and where they try to charge as much as possible while they cut costs as much they can.

No one is buying the electrical room though. It just has to work. Yes, you'll make it as cheaply as possible; no flooring, no paint on the walls, no interior designer meetings to argue what's the right tone beige for the walls. But it'll do what it needs to do. It'll keep the lights on. Otherwise you can't sell any of the apartments.

Same thing with Facebook; there's active incentive to introduce all sorts of dark patterns over their app, to ignore certain bugs, to unnecessarily change things, etc. But none of those incentives are present with React. The incentive is to keep React reliable and performant, and to keep the team lean. I'm sure it's similar with Bun in Anthropic.

And to be clear, Anthropic definitely spends most of it's engineering effort making sure their core product "functions properly". This "functions properly" is just different for us as clients vs them as a corporation. There is high overlap, since they need to keep us clients happy. But a well-functioning product at a company is one that leads to money. I'm sure very capable engineers pushing the okrs they care about.

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