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consumer451 9 hours ago [-]
I have to say, this whole saga is extremely interesting. Not just from a popcorn-enjoyer's point of view, but as a bit of a bell weather for 2026 software dev.
Cpoll 7 hours ago [-]
Trivia: The term is "bellwether," i.e. a wether (castrated sheep) wearing a bell, used to guide the flock.
consumer451 7 hours ago [-]
I kept checking the thread for responses and finally realized it, but too late to edit. I will probably wake up in a few days from a nightmare about this misspelling on HN. Happens all the time, no joke.
I think that in my mind, it was always some sort of weather related bell, like you ring it, when the weather changes.
Hopefully the sheep reference will help me remember.
eichin 15 minutes ago [-]
I'd suggest reading the Connie Willis novel by that name - no idea if it will actually help, it's just really good writing :-)
giancarlostoro 7 hours ago [-]
What's funnier to me is none of them seem to want to abandon npm which keeps getting exploited and hacked. NPM has been the source of just how many industry wide hacks? Three major ones, and a massive supply-chain industry wide campaign against npm. But yeah, bun is the real concern here.
I think we need to smell the coffee and review npm and scrutinize it because it is getting dangerously out of hand.
zoogeny 2 hours ago [-]
Who do you mean when you say "none of them"?
At the least, my interpretation of deno lore is that they tried to ditch npm and found this limited their adoption so significantly that they had to patch it back in. That would provide sufficient warning to me that attempting to move away from npm was unwise.
> none of them seem to want to abandon npm which keeps getting exploited and hacked
Do you know of a better alternative for JS/TS that has all the popular packages?
rglover 3 hours ago [-]
Not perfect, but I use Verdaccio to run my own npm server and for third party deps, I clone, eval, and then if it's clean, push a safe copy to my own server (not for everything, just the most sensitive, hardcore stuff but eyeballing building a tool to semi-automate it due to recent chaos). You can even clone from remote URLs (point to a tarball from package.json instead of a version) so I've considered just using a private bucket.
Tedious, but makes the "npm hacked again" posts mostly moot.
Eufrat 2 hours ago [-]
I really think the actual problem is not the vibe coded aspect, nor questions about supply chain security. It is the apparently reckless and rushed nature of the rewrite which eroded user trust. In the span of about 2 weeks the narrative went from being an experimental branch to be being deployed as a canary ready for public testing. All the while the Jarred from Bun was posting here, promising blog posts and more transparency about what was going on. All that I can find is a single AI generated post (https://bun.com/bun-unsafe-audit) after people raised concerns about the quantity of unsafe calls in the Rust rewrite.
This is ridiculous and the response is entirely expected, it’s not about the code anymore, it’s about people. If you claim that doesn't matter, then I think the user response tells you otherwise. It signaled that Bun was not being transparent while asking people to trust it as a core runtime system. Why would I trust a runtime that actively would just do major changes so callously? There’s a balance between all of this. You don’t need to be as methodical as Python is now with PEPs. I think Swift got similar crap, though, nowhere as bad when it rolled out major language changes out of the blue to support Apple’s own product needs a few years back. This was kept secret and released in one burst, bypassing the entire Language Evolution process they crafted for Swift. Apple’s actions are more understandable by the nature of the company wanting to keep some things under wraps, even though it did erode trust somewhat. Apple is now a 50+ year old Fortune 100 company and Apple engineers really just kinda demurred on the bad taste it left in the community’s mouth, but at the same time, what do you expect from a company with a long history of being rather tight-lipped on major product changes. Bun has not really built this reputation nor has their parent company, but they are asking for that here and I just don’t think they have the leverage to do it.
They could have done this more methodically, made sure that the community and industry were okay with it. Maybe they actually did this more thoughtfully behind the scenes and this entirely a marketing stunt, but their lack of transparency at this moment makes it difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt. Trust is currently in short supply, burning it up on stunts like this is stupid.
buu700 16 minutes ago [-]
Sounds about right. I think the response is a bit of an overreaction at this point, but an understandable and easily preventable one. It would have saved a lot of grief to have been more transparent and set clearer expectations: rather than yolo the experimental code into main, put it in a "v2" branch, publish an expected release timeline with 2.0.0 projected for ~Q4 2026 - Q1 2027, and announce a transition of 1.x to maintenance mode with only security fixes. The technical execution and release planning may or may not be excellent, but the political execution so far feels like an unforced error.
fragmede 56 minutes ago [-]
9 days just wasn't enough burn in. In an alternate reality, rust-bun ran in parallel for a least a month, if not three or six, before being merged.
TiredOfLife 5 hours ago [-]
Also Rubygems, Packagist, PyPi
ghusto 2 hours ago [-]
pip install pulls in what I've listed in my package list, plus their dependencies which are at most 2 levels deep. The dependency's dependencies are reviewable.
npm install pulls in my dependencies plus god knows what else at god knows how many levels. 500MB of dependencies? The dependency's dependecies are not reviewable.
I wish people would stop trying to compare NPM to PyPi and others. NPM is an unfixable disaster because of the entire mindset and ecosystem around JavaScript.
baggy_trough 4 hours ago [-]
What's the worst hack to affect users of rubygems?
pwdisswordfishs 3 hours ago [-]
DHH, of course.
tankenmate 7 hours ago [-]
From my perspective it is a synthesis of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." and "but npm is the source of all the shiny shiny!".
christophilus 9 hours ago [-]
Time will tell. I predict this is just the same 20 year pattern of: people on the internet are irate about $latest_thing, and everyone will move on to some other hot topic.
jakobnissen 8 hours ago [-]
But surely, whether or not the Internet mob moves on has no bearing on what actual lessons to learn from this saga. Will the vibe rewrite turn out to be a disaster or are LLMs already capable of writing human level code at this scale? That question is interesting no matter the level of attention this gets.
stephbook 8 hours ago [-]
I'm believe projects that pin old versions or maintain their own shoddy fork will be left behind. Deprecation is fine.
consumer451 8 hours ago [-]
For some reason, when thinking about this, the visual of all the scientists at CERN camping out for the results of the Higgs Boson experiment jumped into my mind.
This is not as big an experiment as that. But, for software dev, it feels very significant.
9 hours ago [-]
zoogeny 2 hours ago [-]
I think a more apt analogy (or cliche) is canary in the coalmine.
MuffinFlavored 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many "behind the curve/not super modern" corporations were using Bun or Deno to begin with.
Part of me thinks it's a mild overreaction. It's not like people audit every line of kernel/driver/BIOS/EFI code before running Linux? As long as the tests pass and the performance doesn't regress and it's secure... why are people so mad that it was vibe coded? Is it because it was an irresponsible thing to do? Maybe?
I don't know, I see both sides.
nicoburns 48 minutes ago [-]
> As long as the tests pass and the performance doesn't regress and it's secure... why are people so mad that it was vibe coded?
Because the chances that they had a test suite that was actually comprehensive enough to guarantee correctness through this kind of refactor are approximately zero.
Normally we combine tests with careful "correctness by construction" design work and code review because we know that tests aren't sufficient.
worble 2 hours ago [-]
> It's not like people audit every line of kernel/driver/BIOS/EFI code before running Linux?
That's basically Torvolds full time job?
dahs12 3 hours ago [-]
It isn't about users auditing Linux. The Bun developers don't audit "their own" (stolen) vibe code output. How would anyone know if it is secure?
fallenscope 9 hours ago [-]
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ibejoeb 8 hours ago [-]
People are going to be using a lot less software if the selection criteria include not being no agents.
skeeter2020 8 hours ago [-]
This is a very uncharitable interpretation of the twitter post: "It’s a combination of anthropic’s stance of not doing human reviews or any kind of rational roll out and stabilization."
They mention nothing about agents being used, rather focus on humans in the review cycle and some sort of gated roll-out process. Why we would bin these practices in the name of a faster release cycle is an important question & debate.
ibejoeb 8 hours ago [-]
I kind of agree, but it goes both ways. Has Jarred said that there was no review? I know that he stated that rust bun passes tests. Now, I don't know the amount or quantity of coverage, but as a thought experiment, let's assume they are good. What does that count for?
riffraff 4 hours ago [-]
I think most people believe it unlikely that one million line of codes can be reviewed in one week, and the fact that tests pass does not imply good code.
I have no idea whether the new or old code is/was good, just pointing out what seems like a plausible thought process for people who object to this rewrite.
zoogeny 2 hours ago [-]
I think it is interesting, using your framing, to consider why people may or may not believe that one million lines of code could be reviewed.
I mean, until very recently, the idea that one million lines of code could be written (rather than mechanically translated) in a month was unbelievable.
It is clearly the case that times have changed since the tools have been updated. So if we challenge one assumption, why not also challenge the other?
Bun presumably will have access to Mythos, which is purportedly reviewing million line code-bases (Mozilla, etc.) and uncovering real value for the devs of those projects.
I find it hard to deny extrapolating these trends to this Bun rewrite.
nicoburns 45 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps it will happen, but I am yet to see good results from AI code review (it can be useful as an additional review, but not (yet) as the sole source of review).
5 hours ago [-]
conartist6 8 hours ago [-]
yes, because as we know from history without agents there is no internet or technology or anything
ibejoeb 7 hours ago [-]
What do you mean?
I'm saying that AI is going to develop software from here on. I don't think you can expect that a human is going to review every line of code. Not that it's good, but that's just how it is. It's not so different from manufacturing. A human is not reviewing every weld. I see a lot of sloppy beads, but in a lot of cases, it's good enough.
tmp10423288442 4 hours ago [-]
> A human is not reviewing every weld.
On civil engineering projects, I’m pretty sure a human reviews each weld. For mass-produced things, maybe not, although a company would not look good in a lawsuit if they had inadequate inspection procedures which allowed a fault causing injury or death to occur.
youre-wrong3 4 hours ago [-]
> On civil engineering projects, I’m pretty sure a human reviews each weld.
Nope. It’s sampled.
geraneum 21 minutes ago [-]
Yeah because they are not auto regressively generated!
conartist6 4 hours ago [-]
I'm saying that's self-evidently ludicrous. Software is not like welding. Do you think Notch could have become rich and famous by welding? How about Bill Gates, famous as a really consistent welder?
bigstrat2003 4 hours ago [-]
There's no way that AI develops software from now on. It isn't remotely good enough for that, nor has it really gotten better in the past few years. We're going to see a push to use AI, then a move away from it once the dreadful quality of AI slop becomes too obvious to ignore.
ibejoeb 1 hours ago [-]
It hasn't gotten better in the past few years? Come on...
conartist6 1 hours ago [-]
in some ways it remains exactly the same technology with the same critical weaknesses
dahs12 4 hours ago [-]
There was enough software that powered the Internet before 2023. We don't need laundered slop from criminals.
> Electrobun aims to be a complete solution-in-a-box for building, updating, and shipping ultra fast, tiny, and cross-platform desktop applications written in Typescript. Under the hood it uses bun to execute the main process and to bundle webview typescript, and has native bindings written in Objc, C++, and several core parts written in zig.
qsera 9 hours ago [-]
I think it makes sense to stay away from large code bases built using LLMs until it is proven that it is possible to also maintain such code bases using LLMs or using reasonable human effort.
Zakis1 9 hours ago [-]
It's alarming how people instantly jump to conclusions that Bun is now "AI slop".
Bun has been almost entirely worked on by LLM's for ~6 months now, long before the Rust re-write (source: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2054525268296118363). It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
nicce 9 hours ago [-]
> It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
Is it? Seems like bugs in Claude Code are getting out of hands. That project has a bit more lifetime.
sibeliuss 1 hours ago [-]
Is it that, or is it just that every software developer, enterprise, dev and non-dev alike has their eyes on Claude Code as the most popular software project ever? Software in general has tons of bugs. People need to understand scale here, and what this looks like in practice. They're doing an incredible job given the circumstances.
nicoburns 43 minutes ago [-]
> Claude Code as the most popular software project ever
I don't think that's true? The likes of Chrome, Linux, curl, sqlite, etc, are much more widely used.
sibeliuss 35 minutes ago [-]
I'm not being literal. Revolutionary technology arrives on the scene, is extremely visible, changes a whole industry and frankly creates an entirely new economy. All eyes on Anthropic.
They don't get enough credit for being right in the middle of a revolution, yet still managing to ship something that largely works incredibly well, because this thing is a workhorse.
kikimora 9 hours ago [-]
Bun never was great in terms of stability. It has been vibe coded for 6 month but code was reviewed by a person.
>It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
Proven is a strong word. In my experience AI fails miserably at anything beyond junior level tasks. We will see soon, once bun goes into production.
esperent 9 hours ago [-]
> Bun never was great in terms of stability
It's very easy to throw shade like this on software if you've got a bugbear with it. I'm sure you can even come up with a bunch of these "stability" problems when challenged on it. I know I could, for basically any large piece of software that I've ever used.
But really, is bun worse in this regard than any other similarly ambitious open source software within it's first few years?
conartist6 8 hours ago [-]
see that's fine with me if they want to take a year or two of human time and do the rewrite properly
this is a piece of software with no architecture, and whose owners have no regard or respect for architecture. I can virtually guarantee that on average every bug they fix will create one new bug, because that's what it's like to work on software with no intentional architecture
brabel 7 hours ago [-]
What are you talking about?? Bun in Rust is a port, almost exactly the same code base on a different syntax. The architecture did not change at all. Amazing how people comment without even knowing what they are talking about.
kikimora 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody reviewed resulting code. Maybe all tests are empty and this is why they pass. Maybe tests were modified to pass because this is the only thing LLM could do to make them pass. Maybe it hallucinated something in the process. We have no idea.
Zig and Rust are significantly different languages. If bun has a good architecture in zig (which I don't know if it does or not), that doesn't necessarily mean it had a good architecture for rust. A direct translation of zig code would probably result in pretty unusual rust code, and probably a lot more unsafe usage than if it had been originally written in rust.
adampunk 3 hours ago [-]
I don’t really understand this objection. For every tool that I use, am I supposed to divine the best underlying language for it and then determine whether or not it is written in that language? Don’t I have better things to do?
thayne 9 minutes ago [-]
I'm not saying that bun shouldn't be written in rust. I'm saying that since it was originally written in zig, there were undoubtedly architecture and design decisions that were made that made sense in zig, but not so much in rust. When rewriting something in a different language, especially one significantly different than the original it is common to need to re-architect some things, and mechanically translating line by line from one language is probably going to result in some low quality code, even if the original was decent.
I think that using AI to translate bun from zig to rust might produce a good starting point. But it was done one file at a time, with minimal human review, and I'm skeptical that the result is quality maintainable code.
kikimora 2 hours ago [-]
Because of borrow checker you would build data structures differently in Rust compared to Zig. Automated translation simply maps Zig constructs onto unsafe Rust code. I have no idea how feasible it is to go from totally unique way of using Rust to mimic Zig to idiomatic Rust.
adampunk 1 hours ago [-]
I understand that. That’s a specific example of an inaptness moving from one language to another. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I am asking if we are expected to understand this hypothetical condition about all possible tools that we use. Should I have to worry that something is written in Python when it should’ve been written in C? It just seems like that in order to have a big concern here, I had to be really invested in what language Bun used. I guess the whole matter makes more sense if people are REALLY mad about something else and the choice of language is supposed to serve as a more respectable thing to be mad about.
fragmede 1 hours ago [-]
What is that tool in relation to the rest of your workshop though? If it's a simple hammer that you can swap out for $20 and you only use it once a month, who cares what kind of metal it's made out of, as long as it works. But if the $6,000 4-axis CNC machine that's at the heart of your machine shop and every minute of downtime on it costs you money, if it's starting to rust, no, you don't have better things to do than to look into what it's made of.
adampunk 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah what if the tool is a JavaScript runner released for free?
What is being expressed here about Bun is using the language of due diligence but doesn’t seem to adhere to any of the sensibilities. Should we all be auditing our toolchains to understand internal decisions that each toolmaker undertakes? Maybe! DO WE? Absolutely not. The level of scrutiny bun is getting is *unusual*. They just did an unusual and dramatic thing, so it’s not surprising. But I just don’t believe that bun is being deprecated due to normal engineering discipline that we are constantly carrying and applying everywhere. That’s…just hard to buy.
soraminazuki 6 hours ago [-]
Very amazing indeed. Here you are making bold assumptions about a huge pile of code not a single human being has ever read in any meaningful amount.
brabel 3 hours ago [-]
The only assumption you need to make is how the process went about, which was described by Jarred on a HN comment when the PR was first discussed: they had prompt that described exactly how things should be translated, for each "pattern" they were using in Zig, an appropriate equivalent was described in Rust. Zig and Rust are not that different, both are system languages and things can be done similarly in both languages, so architecture-wise I would think the exact same thing would work fine. I am not sure whether the LLM actually wrote a transpiler which just followed the rules, or if it did the job itself, since that information is not public yet, as far as I know, but my guess is that the LLM wrote a transpiler to do the job, then reviewed/fixed compilation issues, then fixed tests. And I'm pretty sure some human interaction was part of that as well.
ramon156 9 hours ago [-]
Worked on by LLMs is fine, but the rust pr proved no one is reviewing anymore. You cannot review 1M LOC in 5 days.
fallenscope 9 hours ago [-]
> It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
It hasn't. Those are two different scenarios. The first is individual PRs into an existing, majority human-authored and understood codebase where the PRs are initiated and merged by humans even if the code is AI generated. The second is AI rewriting AI written code that no human eye has seen. Bun took a conservative, transliteration file-by-file approach so they still understand the data structures and architecture so they will probably be okay though.
wiseowise 8 hours ago [-]
> Bun has been almost entirely worked on by LLM's for ~6 months now
So what you’re saying is that this boycot is 6 months overdue?
skeledrew 7 hours ago [-]
I think what they're is all is well as long as they aren't told that LLMs are doing most of the work. Being in the know is the issue here IMO as they would've continued using without a word otherwise.
lazzlazzlazz 21 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, bizarre and sad. And, unsurprisingly, Hacker News seems sympathetic. They are getting very old.
lioeters 8 hours ago [-]
It's alarming how people are willing to overlook the obvious in-your-face sloppiness of the Bun rewrite. A million lines of code in 9 days, pushed to main branch, forced on the existing userbase irresponsibly.
Nobody understands the code, nor will they be able to maintain it without AI service as an external dependency. Give me a break, I'm not running that monstrosity on my machine. Everyone running production software should move away from Bun purely as a technical decision.
j_bum 8 hours ago [-]
Do you use Claude code on your machine? That seems mostly vibe coded
sleples 8 hours ago [-]
1. I don't use Claude Code, no.
2. It's amazing that a CLI wrapper is as buggy as it is.
3. Nevertheless, it's useable, and maybe for a CLI that's enough. I don't want a JS runtime running production to be the same mess.
wiseowise 8 hours ago [-]
Claude Code isn’t a runtime that I use to execute my code with.
brabel 7 hours ago [-]
If you use it to write code for you, then it kind of is, indirectly.
dbalatero 3 hours ago [-]
That is quite the stretch you're making.
yen223 54 minutes ago [-]
I run my code on Emacs as nature intended
skeeter2020 8 hours ago [-]
that seems comparable to taking a dev-time dependency, while bun is a runtime dependency. THey need to be treated very differently.
j_bum 50 minutes ago [-]
Fair point, wasn’t considering it from this angle.
RiOuseR 9 hours ago [-]
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contextcost 9 hours ago [-]
I have an idea on how to tell if a codebase is rotting under AI Agent maintenance.
We can collect and analyze how the coding agent reads code during programming tasks, and see if the code access and token consumption are steadily increasing for similar development tasks. If the code readability doesn't degrade for the agent, the maintainability of the codebase should be fine.
sheeshkebab 8 hours ago [-]
Mist of human written codebases are unusable for llm dev by that definition.
giancarlostoro 8 hours ago [-]
Turns out that if they're unusable by LLMs they're likely unusable by human devs. If you follow sane clean coding principles (like not having godclasses) it turns out coding agents (and humans!) can understand and navigate your codebase, especially if you use recognizable patterns, even with very light documentation.
sheeshkebab 7 hours ago [-]
One of these days you’ll learn about “enterprise” code
giancarlostoro 5 hours ago [-]
I have seen good enterprise code and bad enterprise code. Clean Code suggests progressive rewriting of bad code.
When you touch a file you have an opportunity for code clean up, add unit tests to ensure your changes break nothing, and refine the code.
skeeter2020 8 hours ago [-]
We judge long-term quality of human codebases (at least OS) by ongoing activity; for LLM codebases maybe a consistent or increasing level of activity is a bad smell?
bobajeff 9 hours ago [-]
This is my first time hearing about Electrobun it sounds like it could be a good alternative to electron. Their site mention CEF bundling as an option has anyone tried this?
mentalgear 9 hours ago [-]
While I'm certainly sceptical of pure LLM (re)-written software, I would have to assume in the case of the cyberattack vector that Anthropic used their new Mythos model to adequately test against.
Maybe someone has more info of them mentioning that.
bastawhiz 3 hours ago [-]
> to adequately test against
How does one determine what "adequate" looks like for a million lines of code?
You can't fit a million lines of code in a 1M token context window unless every line of code is one token. So you're just sort of praying you spend enough time/money burning tokens to shake out all the stuff that's bad or wrong.
InsideOutSanta 8 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised if the kinds of security issues LLMs tend to create are the exact types of security issues LLMs are bad ar detecting.
skeeter2020 8 hours ago [-]
so they are defending the LLM-generated code using another one of their LLMs, against attacks from yet other LLMs? So regardless of the outcome and impact on us, they win?
impulser_ 9 hours ago [-]
Jarred said this had nothing to do with Mythos or Anthropic.
conartist6 8 hours ago [-]
I have a very, very hard time believing that. Surely the acquisition left his wealth largely in the form of Anthropic stock, so his personal definition of success is "rep Anthropic so my stock goes up" and at that point he has succeeded.
Me, I still have to be competent to succeed. I don't just get to declare that because I used AI the effort was a success, and I have 0 desire to work with those kinds of people.
shimman 8 hours ago [-]
The concept of a "useful fool" is apt here.
Squarex 4 hours ago [-]
They should probably change the name then.
ksec 5 hours ago [-]
At this point I am wondering if anyone will be forking the Zig Bun to something else.
avinassh 8 hours ago [-]
TIL electrobun. How does it compare against electron?
wartywhoa23 4 hours ago [-]
The diff is +bu.
ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago [-]
Related:
yt-dlp - Bun support is now limited and deprecated
For example, we (and many others) depend heavily on numpy. It's been around for decades and heavily battle tested. If someone came out with a new version of numpy vibe-code rewritten in a week, with assurances that "all tests pass", do you think we would adopt it? Absolutely not. We would have no confidence that there aren't some latent bugs or that we can fully trust the results.
It has nothing to do with AI having rewritten it, it has to do with being battle tested over time. If a team of humans had rewritten it in a week, I wouldn't trust or use it either.
sigmar 7 hours ago [-]
>it has to do with being battle tested over time. If a team of humans had rewritten it in a week, I wouldn't trust or use it either.
"it was made in a week" gets repeated a lot on HN, but the PR wasn't a release. They've been working on the rust rewrite for more than a month and it hasn't shipped.
bastawhiz 3 hours ago [-]
One week to four weeks doesn't make it better.
antonvs 3 hours ago [-]
Did you miss the part where they said "it hasn't shipped"?
ghusto 2 hours ago [-]
That's like saying "It took me a month to hand-make this cupboard. If someone made a cupboard in just one day using a machine, do you think I'd trust it?".
happytoexplain 49 minutes ago [-]
Only you can prevent tangential arguments about analogies.
krzyk 8 hours ago [-]
That name is quite near the infamous Electron, is it similar?
throwatdem12311 9 hours ago [-]
It’s really only a matter of time until someone forks the Zig version of Bun.
What a slap in the face to all the Zig developers that spent their time, effort and probably even some money contributing to it.
jdw64 9 hours ago [-]
Realistically speaking, when Anthropic acquired Bun, they naturally would have needed a narrative showcasing that their AI excels even at relatively new languages like Zig. But since the Zig camp explicitly declared an anti-AI stance, it makes perfect sense why things played out this way. It's a understandable business realit
asdfsa32 9 hours ago [-]
Add todo item: learn zig.
8 hours ago [-]
u_fucking_dork 9 hours ago [-]
Chill dog, it’s a programming language not a religion
pessimizer 8 hours ago [-]
To upper-middle class people, their job is a religion. Investing in a programming language is a decision to gamble thousands of hours of your life for a programmer. At some point of projects shifting away from your language, your mortgage and your children's tuition will be affected.
newtonianrules 5 hours ago [-]
I’m so glad as a Python developer none of this religious bullshit enters into the equation. Exactly why I left Scala behind.
antonvs 3 hours ago [-]
Your comment is just as religious as any other advocate of a programming language. You're giving reasons why the programming language you chose is the right choice. Kind of like explaining why Yahweh is the one true god, and why you left other gods behind.
newtonianrules 33 minutes ago [-]
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ramon156 9 hours ago [-]
What a weird take. Might as well give up on anything you care about, as its only an "x"
u_fucking_dork 8 hours ago [-]
You shouldn’t feel slapped in the face if someone chooses a programming language you don’t like. Full stop.
3as-123 9 hours ago [-]
Great, the author speaks out what everyone thinks but cannot say, either due to being invested in the hype or due to effectively having a gag order from their employers:
The bun rewrite was Anthropic's Vietnam and the open source community needs to react and and build resistance.
asdfsa32 9 hours ago [-]
In many a brand name company now tokenmaxxing is the name of the game; CryptoBase, FacePaper, AntiqueOptics, tinyflacid, they all use AI usage metrics as part of their perf review these days.
8 hours ago [-]
5 hours ago [-]
chuckadams 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not joining the chorus condemning Bun for the vibe-rewrite, and I think it's fascinating whether it turns out to be a complete trainwreck or not. But FFS, it should have been a separate repo.
tln 8 hours ago [-]
What? Why? Git has branches...
punchmesan 8 hours ago [-]
They're two completely different codebases... even if they are 100% feature parity, it's 100% different code. They should absolutely be separate from each other, with different issues lists. Clean separation of two different codebases isn't a strange concept...
tln 5 hours ago [-]
Its not 100% different code though. Docs, build instructions, C++, Typescript...
The issues should absolutely be kept. The rewrite was file by file translation so logic bugs would remain. It's valuable to ensure the memory bugs are in fact fixed. Starting the issues from nothing does not make any sense to me.
wiseowise 8 hours ago [-]
Judging by the comments, Bun as a company doesn’t give a single shit about community. The only reason it is in the same repo is tracking down issues, discussions, etc. Those would be hard to migrate.
chuckadams 8 hours ago [-]
Right, but it's my understanding that it was done as a PR that was merged to `main`. Sure, anyone could find the last Zig commit and branch off of that, so I guess it's all po-tay-to po-tah-to.
pessimizer 8 hours ago [-]
This whole thing of shunning bun is a goofy protest against AI in general by a bunch of programmers about to transition from vastly overpaid to mostly unemployed, sometimes thinly disguised as quality concerns and piggybacking a little bit on the anti-"rewrite it in rust" train.
Still, I can't help but entirely support it. I don't want hard dependencies on gigantic megacorps, or on any single provider who can go rogue. Should have always been able to switch between them, and any of them who made that difficult should have been the ones to be shunned. Completely dropping support for bun is equally bad imo, because now your choices are limited to Microsoft and deno, making deno close to a single point of failure.
Although I have to wonder what would happen if Anthropic threw a couple of bucks at electrobun (lol, not really.)
wiseowise 8 hours ago [-]
> This whole thing of shunning bun is a goofy protest against AI in general by a bunch of programmers about to transition from vastly overpaid to mostly unemployed, sometimes thinly disguised as quality concerns and piggybacking a little bit on the anti-"rewrite it in rust" train.
It is interesting how you find millions of people put on the street “goofy”, all while concentrating wealth in the hands of a couple of hyperscalers.
I think that in my mind, it was always some sort of weather related bell, like you ring it, when the weather changes.
Hopefully the sheep reference will help me remember.
I think we need to smell the coffee and review npm and scrutinize it because it is getting dangerously out of hand.
At the least, my interpretation of deno lore is that they tried to ditch npm and found this limited their adoption so significantly that they had to patch it back in. That would provide sufficient warning to me that attempting to move away from npm was unwise.
Do you know of a better alternative for JS/TS that has all the popular packages?
Tedious, but makes the "npm hacked again" posts mostly moot.
This is ridiculous and the response is entirely expected, it’s not about the code anymore, it’s about people. If you claim that doesn't matter, then I think the user response tells you otherwise. It signaled that Bun was not being transparent while asking people to trust it as a core runtime system. Why would I trust a runtime that actively would just do major changes so callously? There’s a balance between all of this. You don’t need to be as methodical as Python is now with PEPs. I think Swift got similar crap, though, nowhere as bad when it rolled out major language changes out of the blue to support Apple’s own product needs a few years back. This was kept secret and released in one burst, bypassing the entire Language Evolution process they crafted for Swift. Apple’s actions are more understandable by the nature of the company wanting to keep some things under wraps, even though it did erode trust somewhat. Apple is now a 50+ year old Fortune 100 company and Apple engineers really just kinda demurred on the bad taste it left in the community’s mouth, but at the same time, what do you expect from a company with a long history of being rather tight-lipped on major product changes. Bun has not really built this reputation nor has their parent company, but they are asking for that here and I just don’t think they have the leverage to do it.
They could have done this more methodically, made sure that the community and industry were okay with it. Maybe they actually did this more thoughtfully behind the scenes and this entirely a marketing stunt, but their lack of transparency at this moment makes it difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt. Trust is currently in short supply, burning it up on stunts like this is stupid.
npm install pulls in my dependencies plus god knows what else at god knows how many levels. 500MB of dependencies? The dependency's dependecies are not reviewable.
I wish people would stop trying to compare NPM to PyPi and others. NPM is an unfixable disaster because of the entire mindset and ecosystem around JavaScript.
This is not as big an experiment as that. But, for software dev, it feels very significant.
Part of me thinks it's a mild overreaction. It's not like people audit every line of kernel/driver/BIOS/EFI code before running Linux? As long as the tests pass and the performance doesn't regress and it's secure... why are people so mad that it was vibe coded? Is it because it was an irresponsible thing to do? Maybe?
I don't know, I see both sides.
Because the chances that they had a test suite that was actually comprehensive enough to guarantee correctness through this kind of refactor are approximately zero.
Normally we combine tests with careful "correctness by construction" design work and code review because we know that tests aren't sufficient.
That's basically Torvolds full time job?
They mention nothing about agents being used, rather focus on humans in the review cycle and some sort of gated roll-out process. Why we would bin these practices in the name of a faster release cycle is an important question & debate.
I have no idea whether the new or old code is/was good, just pointing out what seems like a plausible thought process for people who object to this rewrite.
I mean, until very recently, the idea that one million lines of code could be written (rather than mechanically translated) in a month was unbelievable.
It is clearly the case that times have changed since the tools have been updated. So if we challenge one assumption, why not also challenge the other?
Bun presumably will have access to Mythos, which is purportedly reviewing million line code-bases (Mozilla, etc.) and uncovering real value for the devs of those projects.
I find it hard to deny extrapolating these trends to this Bun rewrite.
I'm saying that AI is going to develop software from here on. I don't think you can expect that a human is going to review every line of code. Not that it's good, but that's just how it is. It's not so different from manufacturing. A human is not reviewing every weld. I see a lot of sloppy beads, but in a lot of cases, it's good enough.
On civil engineering projects, I’m pretty sure a human reviews each weld. For mass-produced things, maybe not, although a company would not look good in a lawsuit if they had inadequate inspection procedures which allowed a fault causing injury or death to occur.
Nope. It’s sampled.
> Electrobun aims to be a complete solution-in-a-box for building, updating, and shipping ultra fast, tiny, and cross-platform desktop applications written in Typescript. Under the hood it uses bun to execute the main process and to bundle webview typescript, and has native bindings written in Objc, C++, and several core parts written in zig.
Bun has been almost entirely worked on by LLM's for ~6 months now, long before the Rust re-write (source: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2054525268296118363). It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
Is it? Seems like bugs in Claude Code are getting out of hands. That project has a bit more lifetime.
I don't think that's true? The likes of Chrome, Linux, curl, sqlite, etc, are much more widely used.
They don't get enough credit for being right in the middle of a revolution, yet still managing to ship something that largely works incredibly well, because this thing is a workhorse.
>It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
Proven is a strong word. In my experience AI fails miserably at anything beyond junior level tasks. We will see soon, once bun goes into production.
It's very easy to throw shade like this on software if you've got a bugbear with it. I'm sure you can even come up with a bunch of these "stability" problems when challenged on it. I know I could, for basically any large piece of software that I've ever used.
But really, is bun worse in this regard than any other similarly ambitious open source software within it's first few years?
this is a piece of software with no architecture, and whose owners have no regard or respect for architecture. I can virtually guarantee that on average every bug they fix will create one new bug, because that's what it's like to work on software with no intentional architecture
I think that using AI to translate bun from zig to rust might produce a good starting point. But it was done one file at a time, with minimal human review, and I'm skeptical that the result is quality maintainable code.
I am asking if we are expected to understand this hypothetical condition about all possible tools that we use. Should I have to worry that something is written in Python when it should’ve been written in C? It just seems like that in order to have a big concern here, I had to be really invested in what language Bun used. I guess the whole matter makes more sense if people are REALLY mad about something else and the choice of language is supposed to serve as a more respectable thing to be mad about.
What is being expressed here about Bun is using the language of due diligence but doesn’t seem to adhere to any of the sensibilities. Should we all be auditing our toolchains to understand internal decisions that each toolmaker undertakes? Maybe! DO WE? Absolutely not. The level of scrutiny bun is getting is *unusual*. They just did an unusual and dramatic thing, so it’s not surprising. But I just don’t believe that bun is being deprecated due to normal engineering discipline that we are constantly carrying and applying everywhere. That’s…just hard to buy.
It hasn't. Those are two different scenarios. The first is individual PRs into an existing, majority human-authored and understood codebase where the PRs are initiated and merged by humans even if the code is AI generated. The second is AI rewriting AI written code that no human eye has seen. Bun took a conservative, transliteration file-by-file approach so they still understand the data structures and architecture so they will probably be okay though.
So what you’re saying is that this boycot is 6 months overdue?
Nobody understands the code, nor will they be able to maintain it without AI service as an external dependency. Give me a break, I'm not running that monstrosity on my machine. Everyone running production software should move away from Bun purely as a technical decision.
2. It's amazing that a CLI wrapper is as buggy as it is.
3. Nevertheless, it's useable, and maybe for a CLI that's enough. I don't want a JS runtime running production to be the same mess.
When you touch a file you have an opportunity for code clean up, add unit tests to ensure your changes break nothing, and refine the code.
Maybe someone has more info of them mentioning that.
How does one determine what "adequate" looks like for a million lines of code?
You can't fit a million lines of code in a 1M token context window unless every line of code is one token. So you're just sort of praying you spend enough time/money burning tokens to shake out all the stuff that's bad or wrong.
Me, I still have to be competent to succeed. I don't just get to declare that because I used AI the effort was a success, and I have 0 desire to work with those kinds of people.
yt-dlp - Bun support is now limited and deprecated
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238789
For example, we (and many others) depend heavily on numpy. It's been around for decades and heavily battle tested. If someone came out with a new version of numpy vibe-code rewritten in a week, with assurances that "all tests pass", do you think we would adopt it? Absolutely not. We would have no confidence that there aren't some latent bugs or that we can fully trust the results.
It has nothing to do with AI having rewritten it, it has to do with being battle tested over time. If a team of humans had rewritten it in a week, I wouldn't trust or use it either.
"it was made in a week" gets repeated a lot on HN, but the PR wasn't a release. They've been working on the rust rewrite for more than a month and it hasn't shipped.
What a slap in the face to all the Zig developers that spent their time, effort and probably even some money contributing to it.
https://xcancel.com/YoavCodes/status/2058170216408813583#m
The bun rewrite was Anthropic's Vietnam and the open source community needs to react and and build resistance.
The issues should absolutely be kept. The rewrite was file by file translation so logic bugs would remain. It's valuable to ensure the memory bugs are in fact fixed. Starting the issues from nothing does not make any sense to me.
Still, I can't help but entirely support it. I don't want hard dependencies on gigantic megacorps, or on any single provider who can go rogue. Should have always been able to switch between them, and any of them who made that difficult should have been the ones to be shunned. Completely dropping support for bun is equally bad imo, because now your choices are limited to Microsoft and deno, making deno close to a single point of failure.
Although I have to wonder what would happen if Anthropic threw a couple of bucks at electrobun (lol, not really.)
It is interesting how you find millions of people put on the street “goofy”, all while concentrating wealth in the hands of a couple of hyperscalers.