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 a runtime where your agent can work inside of cloud services as fluently as it currently does with a local filesystem. Claude will be able to leverage these capabilities to extend its reach across the cloud and add more value in enterprise use cases
They discussed how running generated code is better for context management in many cases. The AI can generate code to retrieve, process, and filter the data it needs rather than doing it in-context, thus reducing context needs. Furthermore, if you can run the code right next to the server where the data is, it's all that much faster.
I see Bun like a Skynet: if it can run anywhere, the AI can run anywhere.
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.
> 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.
To be honest, that sounds more like a pitch for deno than for bun, especially the “paranoidly sandboxed” part.
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.
TS is enormous, has endless training data, and can interact with virtually anything on the Internet these days.
Also, strong typing is very very useful for AI coding context.
The answer is typescript is a much simpler and more pleasant developer experience than any other language. These are products they need to, and often originate from, fast churn of code/features.
Otherwise they’d be building these types of things in Rust.
I'm not confused about the acquisition but about the investment. What were the investors thinking? This is an open source development tool with (to date), 0$ of revenue and not even the beginnings of a plan for getting such a thing.
The acquisition makes more sense. A few observations:
- no acquisition amount was announced. That indicates some kind of share swap where the investors change shares for one company into another. Presumably the founder now has some shares in Anthropic and a nice salary and vesting structure that will keep him on board for a while.
- The main investor was Kleiner Perkins. They are also an investor in Anthropic. 100M in the last round, apparently.
Everything else is a loosely buzzword compatible thingy for Anthropic's AI coding thingy and some fresh talent for their team. All good. But it's beside the point. This was an investor bailout. They put in quite a bit of money in Bun with exactly 0 remaining chance of that turning into the next unicorn. Whatever flaky plan there once might have been for revenue that caused them to invest, clearly wasn't happening. So, they liquidated their investment through an acquihire via one of their other investments.
Kind of shocking how easy it was to raise that kind of money with essentially no plan whatsoever for revenue. Where I live (Berlin), you get laughed away by investors (in a quite smug way typically) unless you have a solid plan for making them money. This wouldn't survive initial contact with due diligence. Apparently money still grows on trees in Silicon Valley.
I like Bun and have used it but from where I'm sitting there was no unicorn lurking there, ever.
They don't need Bun to make revenue, but they need Bun to continue existing and growing for their products to make revenue. Now they can ensure its survival, push for growth, and provide resources so that Bun can build the best product rather than focus on making money.
Could also be a way to expand the customer for Claude Code from coding assistant to vibe coding, a la Replit creating a hosted app. CC working more closely with Bun could make all that happen much faster:
> Our default answer was always some version of "we'll eventually build a cloud hosting product.", vertically integrated with Bun’s runtime & bundler.
The writeup makes it sound like an acquihire, especially the "what changes" part.
ChatGPT is feeling the pressure of Gemini [0]. So it's a bit strange for Anthropic to be focusing hard on its javascript game. Perhaps they see that as part of their advantage right now.
>Claude will be able to leverage these capabilities to extend its reach across the cloud and add more value in enterprise use cases
100%. even more robust if paired with an overlay network which provides identity based s3 access (rather than ip address/network based). else server may not have access to s3/cloud resource, at least for many enterprises with s3 behind vpn/direct connect.
ditto for cases when want agent/client side to hit s3 directly, bypassing the server, and agent/client may not have permitted IP in FW ACL, or be on vpn/wan.
Java was doing "cloud-native, stripped down (jlink) image, self-contained runtime with batteries included" long before Bun existed. There's also GraalVM for one executable binary if one's ambitious.
if I would guess Anthropic is (rightly) frustrated with the state of the js ecosystem and is taking the best attempt so far to make the js experience much more streamlined for their developers. Convention over configuration might finally be coming to the js ecosystem?
That's a really cool use case and seems super helpful. working cloud native is a chore sometimes. having to fiddle with internal apis, acl/permissions issues.
They want to make sure the runtime they depend on continues to be maintained. It's still niche and new, so its continued existence isn't as sure as something like Go.
As a commandline end user who prefers to retreive data from the www as text-only, I see deno and bun as potential replacements (for me, not necessarily for anyone else) for the so-called "modern" browser in those rare cases where I need to interpret Javascript^1
At present the browser monstrosity is used to (automatically, indiscriminantly) download into memory and run Javascripts from around the web. At least with a commandline web-capable JS runtime monstrosity the user could in theory exercise more control over what scripts are downloaded and if and when to run them. Perhaps more user control over permissions to access system resources as well (cf. corporate control)
1. One can already see an approach something like this being used in the case of
> At the time of writing, Bun's monthly downloads grew 25% last month (October, 2025), passing 7.2 million monthly downloads. We had over 4 years of runway to figure out monetization. We didn't have to join Anthropic.
I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.
> 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.
I believe this a bit less. It'll be nice to not have some weird monetization shoved into bun, but their focus will likely shift a bit.
> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.
Did they? I see a $7MM seed round in 2022. Now to be clear that's a great seed round and it looks like they had plenty of traction. But it's unclear to me how they were going to monetize enough to justify their $7MM investment. If they continued with the consultancy model, they would need to pay back investors from contracts they negotiate with other companies, but this is a fraught way to get early cashflow going.
Though if I'm not mistaken, Confluent did the same thing?
> They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.
This isn't really true. It's more about who wanted them to join. Maybe it was Anthropic who really wanted to take over Bun/hire Jarred, or it was Jarred who got sick of Bun and wanted to work on AI.
I don't really know any details about this acquisition, and I assume it's the former, but acquihires are also done for other reasons than "it was the only way".
Given the worries about LLM focused companies reaching profitability I have concerns that Bun's runway will be hijacked... I'd hate for them to go down with the ship when the bubble pops.
At least Anthropic itself has the stated goal of creating ethical AI that benefits humanity. That’s more than can be said for any other AI companies. Time will tell though. Google‘s motto used to be “don’t be evil” and now it’s basically the opposite.
Yeah, now they are part of Anthropic, who haven't figured out monetization themselves. Shikes!
I'm a user of Bun and an Anthropic customer. Claude Code is great and it's definitely where their models shine. Outside of that Anthropic sucks,their apps and web are complete crap, borderline unusable and the models are just meh. I get it, CC's head got probably a powerplay here given his department is towing the company and his secret sauce, according to marketing from Oven, was Bun. In fact VSCode's claude backend is distributed in bun-compiled binary exe, and the guy is featured on the front page of the Bun website since at least a week or so. So they bought the kid the toy he asked for.
Anthropic needs urgently, instead, to acquire a good team behind a good chatbot and make something minimally decent. Then make their models work for everything else as well as they do with code.
> Yeah, now they are part of Anthropic, who haven't figured out monetization themselves.
Anthropic are on track to reach $9BN in annualised revenue by the end of the year, and the six-month-old Claude Code already accounts for $1BN of that.
How is their Web app any different than any other AI? I feel like it’s on par with all of them. It works great for me. Although I mostly use Claude code.
I am more shocked about the origin story compared to the acquisition.
> Almost five years ago, I was building a Minecraft-y voxel game in the browser. The codebase got kind of large, and the iteration cycle time took 45 seconds to test if changes worked. Most of that time was spent waiting for the Next.js dev server to hot reload.
Why in the hell would anyone be using Next.js to make a 3D game... Jarred has always seemed pretty smart, but this makes no sense. He could've saved so much time and avoided building a whole new runtime by simply not using the completely wrong tool for the job.
These are completely different. Agents (aside from the model inference) are not CPU bound. You gain much more by having a wider user base than whatever marginal CPU cycles you would gain in Rust/Go.
My thinking is that they’re trying to capture that market for JavaScript before another AI company does. To put it bluntly they want to capture the revenue generated by writing JavaScript code, which is currently being captured by independent JavaScript developers. The reason for a JavaScript is that is the most ubiquitous language, and id guess there are more jobs available for JS/node than any other language.
Of course, as a JavaScript developer, this may just be my paranoia. <sweats profusely>
I’m guessing he was probably a JavaScript developer that wanted to make a game. He began building it using what he knew and then he hit the limitations of it. Rather than switching to something else, he tried to figure out why fast compile times weren’t possible and determined that they were possible and started to build a solution for it.
This take is interesting given we're all here congratulating Jarred for seeing that there was no tool to solve x so made it, and is now enjoying a likely nice payday. Be the change you want to see in the world?
It kinda reads like a case of survivorship bias. He is the one in a million to reach the good ending, despite starting with the wrong choice; though in this case, the wrong choice brought him on the road to the good ending.
Now the real question is, does the game loads significant better now, or does the performance still suck? In which case it might be more an excessive case of yak-shaving. And if yes, when can we except the release?
That’s kind of the opposite though. I guess if you’re saying that there’s an art to building things using the least efficient means possible just as there’s an art to being maximally efficient (like the 4k demo scene) then your point stands.
That's super strange since React by its nature assumes that controls are stateless - which games definitely are not. If you render your game inside a canvas then React decides it wants to recreate your control, then your whole game restarts.
He may have been serving a game in a canvas hosted in a Next.js app, but have done all the actual game (rendering, simulation, etc.) in something else. That’s a decent approach - Next can handle the header of the webpage and the marketing blog or whatever just fine.
But like... so can an index.html with a script tag? Am I missing something, where did you read that there was a lot of work involving the header or an attached marketing blog?
I'm sort of surprised to see that you used Claude Code so much. I had a vague idea that "Zig people" were generally "Software You Can Love" or "Handmade Software Movement" types, about small programs, exquisitely hand-written, etc, etc. And I know Bun started with an extreme attention to detail around performance.
I would have thought LLM-generated code would run a bit counter to both of those. I had sort of carved the world into "vibe coders" who care about the eventual product but don't care so much about the "craft" of code, and people who get joy out of the actual process of coding and designing beautiful abstractions and data structures and all that, which I didn't really think worked with LLM code.
But I guess not, and this definitely causes me to update my understanding of what LLM-generated code can look like (in my day to day, I mostly see what I would consider as not very good code when it comes from an LLM).
Would you say your usage of Claude Code was more "around the edges", doing things like writing tests and documentation and such? Or did it actually help in real, crunchy problems in the depths of low level Zig code?
I am not your target with this question (I don't write Zig) but there is a spectrum of LLM usage for coding. It is possible to use LLMs extensively but almost never ship LLM generated code, except for tiny trivial functions. One can use them for ideation, quick research, or prototypes/starting places, and then build on that. That is how I use them, anyway
Culturally I see pure vibe coders as intersecting more with entrepreneurfluencer types who are non-technical but trying to extend their capabilities. Most technical folks I know are fairly disillusioned with pure vibe coding, but that's my corner of the world, YMMV
> I had a vague idea that "Zig people" were generally "Software You Can Love" or "Handmade Software Movement" types, about small programs, exquisitely hand-written, etc, etc.
I feel like an important step for a language is when people outside of the mainline language culture start using it in anger. In that respect, Zig has very much "made it."
That said, if I were to put on my cynical hat, I do wonder how much of that Anthropic money will be donated to the Zig Software Foundation itself. After all, throwing money at maintaining and promoting the language that powers a critical part of their infrastructure seems like a mutually beneficial arrangement.
We never associated with Bun other than extending an invitation to rent a job booth at a conference: this was years ago when I had a Twitter account, so it's fair if Jarred doesn't remember.
If Handmade Cities had the opportunity to collaborate with Bun today, we would not take it, even prior to this acquisition. HMC wants to level up systems while remaining performant, snappy and buttery smooth. Notable examples include File Pilot [0] or my own Terminal Click (still early days) [1], both coming from bootstrapped indie devs.
I'll finish with a quote from a blog post [2]:
> Serious Handmade projects, like my own Terminal Click, don’t gain from AI. It does help at the margins: I’ve delegated website work since last year, and I enjoy seamless CI/CD for my builds. This is meaningful.
However, it fails at novel problems and isn’t practical for my systems programming work.
All that said, I congratulate Bun even as we disagree on philosophy. I imagine it's no small feat getting acquired!
> I had a vague idea that "Zig people" were generally "Software You Can Love" or "Handmade Software Movement" types, about small programs, exquisitely hand-written, etc, etc.
In my experience, the extreme anti-LLM people and extreme pro-vibecoding people are a vocal online minority.
If you get away from the internet yelling match, the typical use case for LLMs is in the middle. Experienced developers use them for some small tasks and also write their own code. They know when to switch between modes and how to make the most of LLMs without deferring completely to their output.
Most of all: They don't go around yelling about their LLM use (or anti-use) because they're not interesting in the online LLM wars. They just want to build things with the tools available.
It goes completely contrary to a lot of what I think is good software engineering. There is very little reuse, everything is ad-hoc, NIH-heavy, verbose, seemingly fragile (there's a lot of memory manipulation interwoven with business logic!), with relatively few tests or assurances.
And yet it works on many levels: as a piece of software, as a project, as a business. Therefore, how can it be anything but good engineering? It fulfils its purpose.
I can also see why it's a very good fit for LLM-heavy workflows.
I love zig, in my experience claude code is extremely good with the language if you invest lots of time on design sessions, to the point where I spend >90% of my time only discussing design with claude. The fact it has easy access to sources of the whole stdlib by just downloading the zig tarball makes it really simple to have a feedback loop where it implement most of the boilerplate on its own. The quality of AI code is really something that can be well controlled with clear guidelines, strict reviews, comprehensive design sessions, and a great test infrastructure
I interviewed for the Bun guys and totally flopped because I was not prepared for the interview format. It was "here's a task, do whatever you need to including AI to get it done". From that, I'd infer that the usage is pretty substantial.
Thanks, Jarred. Seeing what you built with Bun has been a real inspiration, the way one focused engineer can shift an entire ecosystem. It pushed me back into caring about the lower-level side of things again, and I’m grateful for that spark. Congrats on the acquisition, and excited to see what’s next
This is an interesting question; not to be too naive, but are there examples in the wild about this scenario? First I’ve heard of private APIs for something open source like this and my interest is piqued!
Amazing news, congrats! Been using Bun for a long while now and I love it.
Is there anything I could do to improve this PR/get a review? I understand you are def very busy right now with the acquisition, but wanted to give my PR the best shot:
You said elsewhere that there were many suitors. What is the single most important thing about Anthropic that leads you to believe they will be dominant in the coming years?
No idea about his feelings but believing that they will be dominant wouldn't have to be the reason he chose them. I could easily imagine that someone would decide based on (1) they offered enough money and (2) values alignment.
I love Bun and use it daily, but I'm still very frustrated by all the configuration that one needs ATM when working in the js ecosystem. Do you guys see yourself integrating more and more, and moving more and more towards a "convention over configuration", to bring a more streamlined dev experience (that languages like Golang and Rust have, for example)
on Bun's website, the runtime section features HTTP, networking, storage -- all are very web-focused. any plans to start expanding into native ML support? (e.g. GPUs, RDMA-type networking, cluster management, NFS)
Probably not. When we add new APIs in Bun, we generally base the interface off of popular existing packages. The bar is very high for a runtime to include libraries because the expectation is to support those APIs ~forever. And I can’t think of popular existing JS libraries for these things.
I've never personally used Bun. I use node.js I guess. What makes Bun fundamentally better at AI than, say, bundling a node.js app that can run anywhere?
If the answer is performance, how does Bun achieve things quicker than Node?
How much of your day-to-day is spent contributing code to the Bun codebase and do you expect it to decrease as Anthropic assigns more people to work on Bun?
I contributed to Bun one time for SQLite. I've a question about the licensing.
Will each contributor continue to retain their copyright, or will a CLA be introduced?
With Bun's existing OSS license and contribution model, all contributors retain their copyright and Bun retains the license to use those contributions. An acquisition of this kind cannot change the terms under which prior contributions were made without explicit agreement from all contributors. If Bun did switch to a CLA in the future, just like with any OSS project, that would only impact future contributions made after that CLA went into effect and it depends entirely on the terms established in that hypothetical CLA.
I know that one thing you guys are working on or are at least aware of is the size of single-file executables. From a technical perspective, is there a path forward on this?
I'm not familiar with Bun's internals, but in order to get the size down, it seems like you'd have to somehow split up/modularize Bun itself and potentially JavaScriptCore as well (not sure how big the latter is). That way only the things that are actually being used by the bundled code are included in the executable.
Is this even possible? Is the difficulty on the Bun/Zig side of things, or JSC, or something else? Seems like a very interesting (and very difficult) technical problem.
I have a PR that’s been sitting for awhile that exposes the extra options from the renameat2 and renameatx_np syscalls which is a good way to implement self-updaters that work even when multiple processes are updating the same path on disk at the same time. These syscalls are supported on Linux & macOS but I don’t think there’s an equivalent on Windows. We use these syscalls internally for `bun install` to make adding packages into the global install cache work when multiple `bun install` processes are running simultaneously
No high-level self updater api is planned right now, but yes for at least the low level parts needed to make a good one
I wonder if this is a sign of AI companies trying to pivot?
> Bun will ship faster.
That'll last until FY 2027. This is an old lie that acquirers encourage the old owner to say because they have no power to enforce it, and they didn't actually say it so they're not on the hook. It's practically a cheesy pickup line, and given the context, it kinda is.
On your first point: It doesn't read like that to me. It seems like they built one of their key products (Claude Code) on top of Bun, and want to have a say in it's development.
> Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent.
Huh, this feels very odd to read and buying a company outright is definitely not the only way to push Bun to be excellent. Contributing to Bun from their developers, becoming a sponsor, donating through other means, buying 'consulting services' or similar, or even forking it and keeping it up to date would all be also steps towards keeping the Bun excellent.
This is vendoring a dependency on steroids, and first moment interests of community are not aligned with what Antropic needs, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds. History has thought us that this will end up with claims in the blog post not holding much weight.
since Anthropic is one of the only companies using the Bun Runtime, not just the bundler like most do, they want to make sure the runtime stays the focus. This is good for both companies and us tbh since they wont switch focus to whats popular at the moment
I find it a little sad, that there is almost no pushback on what a few people with deep pockets are trying to sell here. Normaly on HN an article on balcon gardening would be met with more critical thinking than this piece. Maybe instead of staring to the screen all day long take a break, think about what people with lots of money care about. And I don't judge, making money is nothing illegal. But Anthropic would be absolutely NOTHING without OSS. And then to see the kind of this effusive, submissive admiration and gratitude for their js wrapper thing makes me sick to my stomach.
I’ll be honest, while I have my doubts about the match of interests and cohesion between an AI company and a JS runtime company I have to say this is the single best acquisition announcement blog post I’ve seen in 20 years or so.
Very direct, very plain and detailed. They cover all the bases about the why, the how, and what to expect. I really appreciate it.
Best of luck to the team and hopefully the new home will support them well.
But how is another company that is also VC backed and losing money providing stability for Bun?
How long before we hear about “Our Amazing Journey”?
On the other hand, I would rather see someone like Bun have a successful exit where the founders seem to have started out with a passion project, got funding, built something out they were excited about and then exit than yet another AI company by non technical founders who were built with the sole purpose of getting funding and then exit.
Often it happens that VCs buy out companies from funds belonging to a fresh because the selling fund wants to show performance to their investors until "the big one", or move cash one from wealthy pocket to another one.
"You buy me this, next time I save you on that", etc...
"Raised $19 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures + $7 million"
"Today, Bun makes $0 in revenue."
Everything is almost public domain (MIT) and can be forked without paying a single dollar.
Questionable to claim that the technology is the real reason this was bought.
The real risk is not that Anthropic will run out of money, but that they will change their strategy to something that isn't Bun-based, and supporting Bun won't make sense for them any more.
I admit, it is a good acquisition announcement. I can’t remember the last acquisition announcement that was kept for more than 1-2 years. Leadership changes, priorities shift…
One thing I like about this, despite it meaning Bun will be funded, is Anthropic is a registered public benefit corporation. While this doesn't mean Anthropic cant fuck over the users of Bun, it at least puts in some roadblocks. The path of least-resistance here should be to improve Bun for users, not to monetize it to the point where it's no longer valuable.
Readit News
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use
They discussed how running generated code is better for context management in many cases. The AI can generate code to retrieve, process, and filter the data it needs rather than doing it in-context, thus reducing context needs. Furthermore, if you can run the code right next to the server where the data is, it's all that much faster.
I see Bun like a Skynet: if it can run anywhere, the AI can run anywhere.
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.
To be honest, that sounds more like a pitch for deno than for bun, especially the “paranoidly sandboxed” part.
Otherwise they’d be building these types of things in Rust.
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?
The acquisition makes more sense. A few observations:
- no acquisition amount was announced. That indicates some kind of share swap where the investors change shares for one company into another. Presumably the founder now has some shares in Anthropic and a nice salary and vesting structure that will keep him on board for a while.
- The main investor was Kleiner Perkins. They are also an investor in Anthropic. 100M in the last round, apparently.
Everything else is a loosely buzzword compatible thingy for Anthropic's AI coding thingy and some fresh talent for their team. All good. But it's beside the point. This was an investor bailout. They put in quite a bit of money in Bun with exactly 0 remaining chance of that turning into the next unicorn. Whatever flaky plan there once might have been for revenue that caused them to invest, clearly wasn't happening. So, they liquidated their investment through an acquihire via one of their other investments.
Kind of shocking how easy it was to raise that kind of money with essentially no plan whatsoever for revenue. Where I live (Berlin), you get laughed away by investors (in a quite smug way typically) unless you have a solid plan for making them money. This wouldn't survive initial contact with due diligence. Apparently money still grows on trees in Silicon Valley.
I like Bun and have used it but from where I'm sitting there was no unicorn lurking there, ever.
> Our default answer was always some version of "we'll eventually build a cloud hosting product.", vertically integrated with Bun’s runtime & bundler.
ChatGPT is feeling the pressure of Gemini [0]. So it's a bit strange for Anthropic to be focusing hard on its javascript game. Perhaps they see that as part of their advantage right now.
[0] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/goo...
100%. even more robust if paired with an overlay network which provides identity based s3 access (rather than ip address/network based). else server may not have access to s3/cloud resource, at least for many enterprises with s3 behind vpn/direct connect.
ditto for cases when want agent/client side to hit s3 directly, bypassing the server, and agent/client may not have permitted IP in FW ACL, or be on vpn/wan.
Deleted Comment
I mean would it have made sense to acquire golang if it were on sale?
Dead Comment
At present the browser monstrosity is used to (automatically, indiscriminantly) download into memory and run Javascripts from around the web. At least with a commandline web-capable JS runtime monstrosity the user could in theory exercise more control over what scripts are downloaded and if and when to run them. Perhaps more user control over permissions to access system resources as well (cf. corporate control)
1. One can already see an approach something like this being used in the case of
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
where a commandline JS runtime is used without the need for any graphics layer (advertising display layer)
What about people who do not own a TV
I believe this completely. They didn't have to join, which means they got a solid valuation.
> 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.
I believe this a bit less. It'll be nice to not have some weird monetization shoved into bun, but their focus will likely shift a bit.
Did they? I see a $7MM seed round in 2022. Now to be clear that's a great seed round and it looks like they had plenty of traction. But it's unclear to me how they were going to monetize enough to justify their $7MM investment. If they continued with the consultancy model, they would need to pay back investors from contracts they negotiate with other companies, but this is a fraught way to get early cashflow going.
Though if I'm not mistaken, Confluent did the same thing?
I don't really know any details about this acquisition, and I assume it's the former, but acquihires are also done for other reasons than "it was the only way".
Sounds like "monetizing Bun is a distraction, so we're letting a deep-pocketed buyer finance Bun moving forward".
And kept their fraudulent name.
They weren’t acquired and got paid just to build tooling as before and now completely ignoring monetization until the end of times.
I'm a user of Bun and an Anthropic customer. Claude Code is great and it's definitely where their models shine. Outside of that Anthropic sucks,their apps and web are complete crap, borderline unusable and the models are just meh. I get it, CC's head got probably a powerplay here given his department is towing the company and his secret sauce, according to marketing from Oven, was Bun. In fact VSCode's claude backend is distributed in bun-compiled binary exe, and the guy is featured on the front page of the Bun website since at least a week or so. So they bought the kid the toy he asked for.
Anthropic needs urgently, instead, to acquire a good team behind a good chatbot and make something minimally decent. Then make their models work for everything else as well as they do with code.
Anthropic are on track to reach $9BN in annualised revenue by the end of the year, and the six-month-old Claude Code already accounts for $1BN of that.
like when a political leader says they have full faith in one of their ministers, you know said minister will be gone by next week.
> Almost five years ago, I was building a Minecraft-y voxel game in the browser. The codebase got kind of large, and the iteration cycle time took 45 seconds to test if changes worked. Most of that time was spent waiting for the Next.js dev server to hot reload.
Why in the hell would anyone be using Next.js to make a 3D game... Jarred has always seemed pretty smart, but this makes no sense. He could've saved so much time and avoided building a whole new runtime by simply not using the completely wrong tool for the job.
Video games are of course a different story.
True, but where is the fun in that?
Now the real question is, does the game loads significant better now, or does the performance still suck? In which case it might be more an excessive case of yak-shaving. And if yes, when can we except the release?
Happy to answer any questions
I would have thought LLM-generated code would run a bit counter to both of those. I had sort of carved the world into "vibe coders" who care about the eventual product but don't care so much about the "craft" of code, and people who get joy out of the actual process of coding and designing beautiful abstractions and data structures and all that, which I didn't really think worked with LLM code.
But I guess not, and this definitely causes me to update my understanding of what LLM-generated code can look like (in my day to day, I mostly see what I would consider as not very good code when it comes from an LLM).
Would you say your usage of Claude Code was more "around the edges", doing things like writing tests and documentation and such? Or did it actually help in real, crunchy problems in the depths of low level Zig code?
Culturally I see pure vibe coders as intersecting more with entrepreneurfluencer types who are non-technical but trying to extend their capabilities. Most technical folks I know are fairly disillusioned with pure vibe coding, but that's my corner of the world, YMMV
I feel like an important step for a language is when people outside of the mainline language culture start using it in anger. In that respect, Zig has very much "made it."
That said, if I were to put on my cynical hat, I do wonder how much of that Anthropic money will be donated to the Zig Software Foundation itself. After all, throwing money at maintaining and promoting the language that powers a critical part of their infrastructure seems like a mutually beneficial arrangement.
We never associated with Bun other than extending an invitation to rent a job booth at a conference: this was years ago when I had a Twitter account, so it's fair if Jarred doesn't remember.
If Handmade Cities had the opportunity to collaborate with Bun today, we would not take it, even prior to this acquisition. HMC wants to level up systems while remaining performant, snappy and buttery smooth. Notable examples include File Pilot [0] or my own Terminal Click (still early days) [1], both coming from bootstrapped indie devs.
I'll finish with a quote from a blog post [2]:
> Serious Handmade projects, like my own Terminal Click, don’t gain from AI. It does help at the margins: I’ve delegated website work since last year, and I enjoy seamless CI/CD for my builds. This is meaningful. However, it fails at novel problems and isn’t practical for my systems programming work.
All that said, I congratulate Bun even as we disagree on philosophy. I imagine it's no small feat getting acquired!
[0] https://filepilot.tech
[1] https://terminal.click
[2] https://handmadecities.com/news/summer-update-2025/
This sounds so cringe. We are talking about computer code here lol
In my experience, the extreme anti-LLM people and extreme pro-vibecoding people are a vocal online minority.
If you get away from the internet yelling match, the typical use case for LLMs is in the middle. Experienced developers use them for some small tasks and also write their own code. They know when to switch between modes and how to make the most of LLMs without deferring completely to their output.
Most of all: They don't go around yelling about their LLM use (or anti-use) because they're not interesting in the online LLM wars. They just want to build things with the tools available.
Bun genuinely made me doubt my understanding of what good software engineering is. Just take a look at their code, here are a few examples:
- this hand-rolled JS parser of 24k dense, memory-unsafe lines: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/c42539b0bf5c067e3d085646... (this is a version from quite a while ago to exclude LLM impact)
- hand-rolled re-implementation of S3 directory listing that includes "parsing" XML via hard-coded substrings https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/main/src/s3/list_objects...
- MIME parsing https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/main/src/http/MimeType.z...
It goes completely contrary to a lot of what I think is good software engineering. There is very little reuse, everything is ad-hoc, NIH-heavy, verbose, seemingly fragile (there's a lot of memory manipulation interwoven with business logic!), with relatively few tests or assurances.
And yet it works on many levels: as a piece of software, as a project, as a business. Therefore, how can it be anything but good engineering? It fulfils its purpose.
I can also see why it's a very good fit for LLM-heavy workflows.
Do you think Anthropic might request you implement private APIs?
Is there anything I could do to improve this PR/get a review? I understand you are def very busy right now with the acquisition, but wanted to give my PR the best shot:
https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24514
If the answer is performance, how does Bun achieve things quicker than Node?
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I contributed to Bun one time for SQLite. I've a question about the licensing. Will each contributor continue to retain their copyright, or will a CLA be introduced?
Thanks
I know that one thing you guys are working on or are at least aware of is the size of single-file executables. From a technical perspective, is there a path forward on this?
I'm not familiar with Bun's internals, but in order to get the size down, it seems like you'd have to somehow split up/modularize Bun itself and potentially JavaScriptCore as well (not sure how big the latter is). That way only the things that are actually being used by the bundled code are included in the executable.
Is this even possible? Is the difficulty on the Bun/Zig side of things, or JSC, or something else? Seems like a very interesting (and very difficult) technical problem.
No high-level self updater api is planned right now, but yes for at least the low level parts needed to make a good one
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asking the real questions
Congratulations.
> Bun will ship faster.
That'll last until FY 2027. This is an old lie that acquirers encourage the old owner to say because they have no power to enforce it, and they didn't actually say it so they're not on the hook. It's practically a cheesy pickup line, and given the context, it kinda is.
Huh, this feels very odd to read and buying a company outright is definitely not the only way to push Bun to be excellent. Contributing to Bun from their developers, becoming a sponsor, donating through other means, buying 'consulting services' or similar, or even forking it and keeping it up to date would all be also steps towards keeping the Bun excellent.
This is vendoring a dependency on steroids, and first moment interests of community are not aligned with what Antropic needs, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds. History has thought us that this will end up with claims in the blog post not holding much weight.
Very direct, very plain and detailed. They cover all the bases about the why, the how, and what to expect. I really appreciate it.
Best of luck to the team and hopefully the new home will support them well.
How long before we hear about “Our Amazing Journey”?
On the other hand, I would rather see someone like Bun have a successful exit where the founders seem to have started out with a passion project, got funding, built something out they were excited about and then exit than yet another AI company by non technical founders who were built with the sole purpose of getting funding and then exit.
"You buy me this, next time I save you on that", etc...
"Raised $19 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures + $7 million"
"Today, Bun makes $0 in revenue."
Everything is almost public domain (MIT) and can be forked without paying a single dollar.
Questionable to claim that the technology is the real reason this was bought.
Reminds me of when Tron, the crypto company, bought BitTorrent.
If Bun embraces the sweet spot around edge computing, modern JS/TS and AI services, I think their future ahead looks bright.
Bun seems more alive than Deno, FWIW.
Does that mean anything at all?
OpenAI is a public benefit corporation.