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: 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.
> 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 our industry.
I know people say it is unprofitable but I wonder if there is a way to verify it is truly is.
I will not say any details but I worked for a giant company which was barely making money YoY but somehow the bonuses for heads were bigger and bigger given a proxy metric related to profit.
There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.
"Profitable" is the wrong metric, really, it's whether it is sustainable - can development continue indefinitely given the current financial situation?
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.
> it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse
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.
Nope. The need to monotize and the fact that an acquihire cost some money is exactly why relying on a specific runtime is where people should have concern.
I agree with OP, and understand why to some it feels premature.
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.
Regardless of Anthropic/ClaudeCode, PerryTS[1] looks like a very promising competitor to Bun.
This is cool! But AFAIK bun promises to be a one-stop-shop for all your JS/TS dev needs, while Perry is "just" a compiler from Typescript to native executables.
I wonder why Anthropic chose to spend money on Bun when they could have easily spend that resource on Go which is fairly easy to use and fast. I'm sure their SWEs could easily everything things in Go. Anyone have insight on why?
Is Claude better with Javascript than it is with Go code? Seems like it could be true.
One of them is a much more efficient but obscure programming language from a competitor, the other is what the web is built on.
My guess: JavaScript runs in the Browser as well as on the OS. That way you can train a model to be able to interact with both fairly simple. You can also see that their harness, claude-code is also written in js. So I guess they are quite invested in that language anyway.
How would Go help with their electron app? With TS they can consolidated on one language and share code between claude code and the claude app.
OpenAI and Anthropic both are destined to doom for sure. There's no way around it and it is all in the math. Bun would be a causality. It is only a matter of time.
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.
Doesn't seem that bad if you're convinced they're the only viable market dominator.
I don't know, I've been using Claude Code since it came out and it really doesn't seem to be getting worse.
I envy your experience. Its driving me crazy on a near daily basis now.
They are not a runtime, but they do seem to be interested in wrapping a lot of tools with simple top-level commands
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Does bun have a formal roadmap? I occasionally see some the changes that Jarred posts on X, and I wonder if they're really meaningful or not (perf improvements are always good). It also seems like a lot of the recent contributions are ai authored.
I tried using bun for a project earlier this year and learned that you can't use testcontainers(works fine w/ Deno).
I dont think so, but recent release includes a terminal markdown renderer built-in which means, even if handy, most of the focus is to make Claud Code great. I am not worried though, at least no yet.
Why did you have to stop using Cursor? I ask this as someone that uses Cursor, but recently at a conference I heard it referred to negatively several times - but in a very vague sense. I don't really have a dog in the fight, I'm using it because thats what the other dev I work with is using.
There is the SpaceX acquisition rumor, but that's not why.
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.
I personally switched back to vscode as I started using Claude and Opencode more for the AI flow, and I didn't see much added value any longer. Also, I was incredibly frustrated that they decided to hide the close button and finally, there were weird issues with editor groups spawning at unwanted times. They might be able to fix it, but I felt that they were starting to reach the limits of what you can do with a "live fork".
The main complaint about Cursor I see online is that it's expensive.
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.
just conjecture but possibly because of the rumored acquisition plans from SpaceX (that's why i stopped using it)
ah ok, yeah that would give me pause as well.
I made this exact same decisions (bun -> pnpm) for similar reasons, mostly bc I didn’t like how haphazardly a core part of the stack was being vibe coded. Too many changes too quickly for something that’s supposed to be stable
>Even though I personally am moving some projects away from Bun, don't take my advice as gospel.
Always appreciated nuance.
These are just my opinions man :)
> Will we see issues start popping up in Bun that make it seem like the team doesn't even dogfood their own product? I don't know, but I'm not sure I want to continue using it just in case.
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.
Disagree, you definitely don’t want to be looking back saying “hm I knew it, I saw the signs, should have trusted myself”
Plus it’s not a huge lift right now
Genuine question: why not just wait?
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.
vite and it's ecosystem is actually becoming the unified toolchain with vite+. IIRC pnpm will also be the preferred package manager in the tool
For my projects I don’t even need any additional dependencies. I use vanilla dom and sqlite
The built-in sqlite and testing functionality is the reason I started using it over pnpm/Node.
[deleted]
I use Bun and I'm concerned too but it's still too early to tell.
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.
Let them cook. Anything that they can do to get rid of the absolute hell that is dependencies in the JS ecosystem is worthwhile. I really don't care what they add as long as it's maintained
I’m confident that any unhappiness with Claude Code is at least 95% downstream of Anthropic seeing demand scale their revenue by ~3X in 6 months from a $multi-billion annual base.
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 still don't think Bun is production ready.
We just ripped bun out of a bunch of our production sevices. CPU runaway and memory leaks. All solved by switching back to nodejs.
Just look at the "new" documentation. It's full on AI slop.
I used to be a fan of Bun, but the way it keeps adding bloat makes me seriously doubt its future. Also, it seems like they are doing a lot of vibe coding without taking enough time, which raises other questions.
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.
> and it has started supporting TypeScript out of the box
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.
Mostly in my day to day routine, where is use Claude Code maybe 90% of the time, I don’t see that it’s become that bad. Yes they’ve made some questionable decisions on API usage and OpenClaw but I feel like this post is making it out to be worse than it is.
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.
Aube[0] seems interesting to me, I have submitted it as show HN after hearing about your post. Its created by the same person who has made mise and I actually discovered it when I was browsing through on mise.en.dev website
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
The issues with Claude Code lately look to me like symptoms of being part of a service that is experiencing insane growth (fastest growth in history, by far [1]), while being severely constrained on adding capacity (GPUs are hard to get quickly right now, even if you have the money). I assume they're constantly fighting fires trying to keep the core use cases of Claude Code working, even if that means limiting OpenClaw usage in somewhat draconian ways.
It's annoying, but I don't see this as a bad thing at all for Bun.
No, all the issues are symptoms of trying to slop-code a functional product. Anthropic has admitted they dogfood heavily, and issues like [1] from the article could only be caused by a text generator.. I refuse to believe Anthropic employees are that stupid.
Personally, I suspect that Bun is a Silicon Valley attempt to lock some companies into its stack (similar to what cloud providers, Next.js + Vercel do). Especially now that Anthropic has become an owner, I'll be keeping Bun at a considerable distance.
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.
what a nice way to write an article!
[dead]
Look at them! They're like loaves of bread that hop.
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: 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.
> 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 our industry.
I know people say it is unprofitable but I wonder if there is a way to verify it is truly is. I will not say any details but I worked for a giant company which was barely making money YoY but somehow the bonuses for heads were bigger and bigger given a proxy metric related to profit.
There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.
"Profitable" is the wrong metric, really, it's whether it is sustainable - can development continue indefinitely given the current financial situation?
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.
> it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse
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.
Nope. The need to monotize and the fact that an acquihire cost some money is exactly why relying on a specific runtime is where people should have concern.
I agree with OP, and understand why to some it feels premature.
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.
Regardless of Anthropic/ClaudeCode, PerryTS[1] looks like a very promising competitor to Bun.
[1]: https://github.com/PerryTS/perry
This is cool! But AFAIK bun promises to be a one-stop-shop for all your JS/TS dev needs, while Perry is "just" a compiler from Typescript to native executables.
I wonder why Anthropic chose to spend money on Bun when they could have easily spend that resource on Go which is fairly easy to use and fast. I'm sure their SWEs could easily everything things in Go. Anyone have insight on why?
Is Claude better with Javascript than it is with Go code? Seems like it could be true.
One of them is a much more efficient but obscure programming language from a competitor, the other is what the web is built on.
My guess: JavaScript runs in the Browser as well as on the OS. That way you can train a model to be able to interact with both fairly simple. You can also see that their harness, claude-code is also written in js. So I guess they are quite invested in that language anyway.
How would Go help with their electron app? With TS they can consolidated on one language and share code between claude code and the claude app.
OpenAI and Anthropic both are destined to doom for sure. There's no way around it and it is all in the math. Bun would be a causality. It is only a matter of time.
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.
Doesn't seem that bad if you're convinced they're the only viable market dominator.
I don't know, I've been using Claude Code since it came out and it really doesn't seem to be getting worse.
I envy your experience. Its driving me crazy on a near daily basis now.
[dead]
Maybe look at https://void.cloud/ (Edit: sorry, meant https://viteplus.dev/, not Void cloud)
They are not a runtime, but they do seem to be interested in wrapping a lot of tools with simple top-level commands
Does bun have a formal roadmap? I occasionally see some the changes that Jarred posts on X, and I wonder if they're really meaningful or not (perf improvements are always good). It also seems like a lot of the recent contributions are ai authored.
I tried using bun for a project earlier this year and learned that you can't use testcontainers(works fine w/ Deno).
I dont think so, but recent release includes a terminal markdown renderer built-in which means, even if handy, most of the focus is to make Claud Code great. I am not worried though, at least no yet.
Why did you have to stop using Cursor? I ask this as someone that uses Cursor, but recently at a conference I heard it referred to negatively several times - but in a very vague sense. I don't really have a dog in the fight, I'm using it because thats what the other dev I work with is using.
There is the SpaceX acquisition rumor, but that's not why.
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.
I personally switched back to vscode as I started using Claude and Opencode more for the AI flow, and I didn't see much added value any longer. Also, I was incredibly frustrated that they decided to hide the close button and finally, there were weird issues with editor groups spawning at unwanted times. They might be able to fix it, but I felt that they were starting to reach the limits of what you can do with a "live fork".
The main complaint about Cursor I see online is that it's expensive.
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.
just conjecture but possibly because of the rumored acquisition plans from SpaceX (that's why i stopped using it)
ah ok, yeah that would give me pause as well.
I made this exact same decisions (bun -> pnpm) for similar reasons, mostly bc I didn’t like how haphazardly a core part of the stack was being vibe coded. Too many changes too quickly for something that’s supposed to be stable
>Even though I personally am moving some projects away from Bun, don't take my advice as gospel.
Always appreciated nuance.
These are just my opinions man :)
> Will we see issues start popping up in Bun that make it seem like the team doesn't even dogfood their own product? I don't know, but I'm not sure I want to continue using it just in case.
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.
Disagree, you definitely don’t want to be looking back saying “hm I knew it, I saw the signs, should have trusted myself”
Plus it’s not a huge lift right now
Genuine question: why not just wait?
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.
vite and it's ecosystem is actually becoming the unified toolchain with vite+. IIRC pnpm will also be the preferred package manager in the tool
There's a VC behind that too.
Don't fret; the creator of mise released a faster alternative: https://github.com/endevco/aube
I love coding with bun. It comes with everything.
For my projects I don’t even need any additional dependencies. I use vanilla dom and sqlite
The built-in sqlite and testing functionality is the reason I started using it over pnpm/Node.
I use Bun and I'm concerned too but it's still too early to tell.
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.
Let them cook. Anything that they can do to get rid of the absolute hell that is dependencies in the JS ecosystem is worthwhile. I really don't care what they add as long as it's maintained
I’m confident that any unhappiness with Claude Code is at least 95% downstream of Anthropic seeing demand scale their revenue by ~3X in 6 months from a $multi-billion annual base.
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 still don't think Bun is production ready. We just ripped bun out of a bunch of our production sevices. CPU runaway and memory leaks. All solved by switching back to nodejs.
Just look at the "new" documentation. It's full on AI slop.
I used to be a fan of Bun, but the way it keeps adding bloat makes me seriously doubt its future. Also, it seems like they are doing a lot of vibe coding without taking enough time, which raises other questions.
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.
> and it has started supporting TypeScript out of the box
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.
Mostly in my day to day routine, where is use Claude Code maybe 90% of the time, I don’t see that it’s become that bad. Yes they’ve made some questionable decisions on API usage and OpenClaw but I feel like this post is making it out to be worse than it is.
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.
Aube[0] seems interesting to me, I have submitted it as show HN after hearing about your post. Its created by the same person who has made mise and I actually discovered it when I was browsing through on mise.en.dev website
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 issues with Claude Code lately look to me like symptoms of being part of a service that is experiencing insane growth (fastest growth in history, by far [1]), while being severely constrained on adding capacity (GPUs are hard to get quickly right now, even if you have the money). I assume they're constantly fighting fires trying to keep the core use cases of Claude Code working, even if that means limiting OpenClaw usage in somewhat draconian ways.
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
No, all the issues are symptoms of trying to slop-code a functional product. Anthropic has admitted they dogfood heavily, and issues like [1] from the article could only be caused by a text generator.. I refuse to believe Anthropic employees are that stupid.
[1] https://youtu.be/J8O9LLpJNrg?t=1201
[dead]
Personally, I suspect that Bun is a Silicon Valley attempt to lock some companies into its stack (similar to what cloud providers, Next.js + Vercel do). Especially now that Anthropic has become an owner, I'll be keeping Bun at a considerable distance.
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.
what a nice way to write an article!
[dead]
Look at them! They're like loaves of bread that hop.