I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Bun has never really been well run. Every feature it had was full of bugs and gaps. And every release fixed a few but broke others.<p>They released more major features and breaking changes in their last <i>patch</i> release than most software sees in two major versions.<p>I've been using it just as a script runner and npm package manager basically, and it's incredible the amount of work you have to do to find "good" versions. We've had patch versions suddenly freeze on install more than once, we couldn't upgrade for quite a while due to this. I think they broke postinstall scripts with trustedDependencies entirely two minor versions ago - not a mention in release notes, and somehow no one reporting it in GH issues. In 1.1 or so you could get Bun to do trustedDependency builds in postinstall, and then after that you couldn't. I looked around for release notes and saw nothing mentioned. It's been broken for months.

Why people use Deno and Bun over Node? I think it's neat that there are competitors for JS runtimes, but I really don't understand what advantages I'd get by swapping to one of these over Node. Bun has no REPL and worse JS engine, Deno is just Node with a restrictive, annoying permission system and no sqlite. Both claim better performance, but that only seems true in cherrypicked benchmarks, and in my tests (granted about a year ago at this point) both alternatives under-performed Node in my workloads. What am I missing?<p>EDIT: Actually I just remembered I delivered a small ERP tool to a business a while back and I did opt to use I think Bun for that because it had the most robust tools to wrap a project into an `*.exe`, that was definitely a better experience than Node. Though since that was dependency-less JS I did the whole thing using Node and then just shipped it with Bun.

I work on Bun, and this post is confusing to me. Me personally and the Bun team continues to dogfood & make Bun better everyday. Our development pace has only gotten faster. Bun's stability has improved significantly since joining Anthropic.<p>Here are some things shipping in the next version of Bun:<p>- 17 MB smaller Windows x64 binaries [0]<p>- 8 MB smaller Linux binaries [1]<p>- `--no-orphans` CLI flag to recursively kill any lingering processes spawned [3]<p>- SSL context caching for client TCP & unix sockets, which significantly reduces memory usage for database clients like Mongoose/MongoDB [4]<p>- Experimental HTTP/3 & HTTP/2 client in fetch [5]<p>- Experimental HTTP/3 support in Bun.serve() [6]<p>- Bun.Image, a builtin image processing library [7]<p>(Along with several reliability improvements to node:fs, Worker, BroadcastChannel, and MessagePort)<p>The Anthropic acquisition also means Bun no longer needs to become a revenue-generating business. We are very incentivized to make Bun better because Claude Code depends on it, and so many software engineers depend on Claude Code to help get their work done.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30219" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30219</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30098" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30098</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/WebKit/pull/211" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/WebKit/pull/211</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29930" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29930</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29932" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29932</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29863" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29863</a><p>[6]: <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30032" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30032</a>

I just spent a couple hours migrating my knife sharpening website backend from Bun to Node. Feels good to avoid that lock-in. I was initially gung-ho for Bun but increasingly unsure about it. Things I'll miss for sure:<p>- Querying sqlite with tagged template literals<p>- Bun.password.verify being argon2 is a better default<p>- HTML imports<p>- JSX transpilation<p>- Auto loading .env file<p><a href="https://burlyburr.com" rel="nofollow">https://burlyburr.com</a>, which hits <a href="https://backend.burlyburr.com" rel="nofollow">https://backend.burlyburr.com</a>

I agree with OP, and understand why to some it feels premature.<p>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.<p>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.

I don't think bun worked well before the acquisition. Don't get me wrong, i used it all the time for little scripts, but i would never ship a service at work on bun. Between memory issues and incompatibilities that never get fixed, it is a nice toy to me that did a great job of exposing room for improvement in nodejs.<p>For example, i'd been following this issue <a href="https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/14102" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/14102</a> and eventually all the libraries shipped "if bun do x" into them, which is the opposite of compatibility.

The author closes by enumerating some of the things they like about Bun which are not included in pnpm. The list is basically: native TS support, a vite-style bundler and a vitest/jest style test runner.<p>Other than a bundler, Node already has all of these. Different test runner syntax maybe but otherwise TS "just works" out of the box and their built in test runner is totally capable. Not sure I see the need for such a lament over Bun.

Regardless of Anthropic/ClaudeCode, PerryTS[1] looks like a very promising competitor to Bun.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/PerryTS/perry" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/PerryTS/perry</a>

Bun is basically a lost case in the same way that claude code is. Many people love both and thats fine as long it is their personal choice. But freedom loving orgs can never ever depend on either for anything ever or build anything on top. The main problem in this picture is projects who don’t understand or remember the internet explorer hell are using bun only features to a degree that you cannot just switch. Even opencode who should have the biggest aversion to depend on anthropic is doing this and it drives me insane. Have you all lost your mind or let your agents blindly lock you into whatever hell wants to own you?

> team ships constantly<p>Why do people want this? Shipping constantly is how software breaks. You want tools that are good and stable, not constantly churning. I wish software developers would wake up to the idea that velocity is not a marker of quality.

I don't know, I've been using Claude Code since it came out and it really doesn't seem to be getting worse.

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.<p>I tried using bun for a project earlier this year and learned that you can't use testcontainers(works fine w/ Deno).

This post seems to "throw doubt" on Bun, based on the OP's experience of Claude Code. But this seems unnecessary indirect. It's not like Bun is hidden software: it's open source and actively developed.<p>So the more direct question would be: How has Bun actually been since the acquisition?<p>From what I can tell they have been responding to users as fast as before, and improving the product as well as before.

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.<p>Always appreciated nuance.

"I want a serious Node.js alternative."<p>Then you could have been using Deno, like many of us, for years.

A former engineer at Bun said that "there was too much vibe coding, but my opinion wasn't taken into consideration."<p><a href="https://paperclover.net/q+a/2506010139" rel="nofollow">https://paperclover.net/q+a/2506010139</a><p>> - too much ai chatter. so many examples of it failing to work. ill prove it by showing the most recent ai-generated pull request. yep, it’s failing. i will admit that my feedback on the above items were not very loud, but there has been no attempts to correct this vision.

Maybe look at <a href="https://void.cloud/" rel="nofollow">https://void.cloud/</a> (Edit: sorry, meant <a href="https://viteplus.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://viteplus.dev/</a>, not Void cloud)<p>They are not a runtime, but they do seem to be interested in wrapping a lot of tools with simple top-level commands

I love coding with bun. It comes with everything.<p>For my projects I don’t even need any additional dependencies. I use vanilla dom and sqlite

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.

That's a lot of very large jumps to come to the conclusion that Bun isn't going to turn out well.

TBF, I really haven't done much of anything with Bun other than occasional module testing. I mostly use Deno for my day to day, including a lot of shell scripts the past few years. I liked the newer ergonomics a lot, direct module references in repositories is really nice for shell scripts.<p>That said, I'm worried about them having good enough monetization while keeping features open... or at least able to be replicated by others. So I can understand some of the concerns.

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.<p>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.<p>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.

Bun is basically a wrapper over JSCore. I don't think it's that big of a feat. Furthermore they are heavily invested in vendor specific APIs which I think is not good.

This isn't anything new and I feel the same way about Deno. We can argue about exactly how much trouble any runtime is in today vs yesterday vs tomorrow but VC funding of a <i>javascript runtime</i> feels inherently unstable to me.<p>The key question is how much unique tooling you're relying on. If you can switch to Node tomorrow, great. If you can't, make sure you have a contingency plan.

pnpm is even worse. There is no way to bootstrap it without binary blobs making it an easy target supply chain attack waiting to happen that could hide in plain sight indefinitely.

I think the motion that Claude Code and Anthropic has is trying to force-hide stuff from you. Some hopefully remember the shitstorm that happened, when they changed. Reading xxx.yy to reading 1 file or reading 2 files.<p>More changes like this came and they were not or very hard to configure. I understand the business idea behind it. Make them to use AI as much as possible, get the human out of the loop. More training data. More Token Usage JUHUU.<p>However I think that made Claude Code so much worse and so much more untrusthworthy. It’s a sneaky attempt to take away the driving wheel from you. And if you follow that logic, way more and way more things seem reasonable.<p>But mainly for now it just generated a lot of distrust for me

Nothing to worry about anymore, the ship has sailed the moment it was acquired.

Ugh. I hate these "guilt by association" hit pieces. Nothing is wrong and yet we must signal our virtue.<p>Might as well just open our pants and wave our wangers, hoping for a better world

vite and it's ecosystem is actually becoming <i>the</i> unified toolchain with vite+. IIRC pnpm will also be the preferred package manager in the tool

I still see no monetization with Bun and Deno to keep them going.<p>You see this all over the place with other programming languages.<p>The ones that have bleeding edge features do so, because there are companies, or universities (for their PhD and Msc thesis), that invest into those ecosystems.<p>In the end nodejs will keep improving, with Microsoft and Google's baking, and that will be it.

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All these complaints about Claude code are mostly resolved if you pay for your usage with direct API pay as you go. It’s not cheap but nearly all the complaints I see about Claude code are due to the fact the subscription plans seem unsustainable from a cost perspective.

I use Bun and I'm concerned too but it's still too early to tell.<p>Personally my experience with Bun has been 100% positive so far.<p>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.

> But from the outside, Claude Code looks like a tool moving in the wrong direction. More restrictions, billing weirdness, surprise behavior based on text in commits. That is textbook enshittification.<p>I've never used Claude Code, but this person doesn't understand what "textbook enshittification" means. "Enshittification" is a feature of certain kinds of business models, progressing through the following stages:<p>1. Giving away a product free to users, subsidized by venture capital, to gain a monopoly<p>2. Switching to advertising, then abusing users on behalf of the real customers, advertisers<p>3. Using monopoly power to abuse real customers (advertisers) to extract as much money as possible<p>Anthropic's business model doesn't have a "user / customer" dichotomy; their paid users are their customers. And they don't have a monopoly they can use to extract money yet.<p>ETA: In other words, "Enshittification" isn't just random; you're making the user experience worse <i>in order to make advertiser experience better</i>; and then making advertiser experience worse <i>in order to extract maximum profit</i>. The only complaint that could vaguely be related to profit is the OpenClaw stuff, and that's entirely due to trying to keep the "all-you-can-eat" model for non-OpenClaw users, rather than having to switch everything to metered.

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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.<p>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.

Are Bun and Deno in the room with us right now?

> 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.<p>I sympathize with the general premise. The reaction to move away seems pre-mature though.<p>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.

+1 I'll stick with pnpm for now

One thing is sure. Claude has become terrible. Criticize any code Opus 4.7 created and it starts a blame game. Also. It denies that a version 4.7 even exists. Will look into moving back to ChatGPT that I quit because the mandatory spyware bs they added which I believe they nuked.

Don't fret; the creator of mise has released a faster alternative: <a href="https://github.com/endevco/aube" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/endevco/aube</a>

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.

So who controls NodeJS? <a href="https://openjsf.org/governance" rel="nofollow">https://openjsf.org/governance</a> has Microsoft as the chair. And Microsoft owns npm. It's kinda hard to avoid a corp controlling these tools.<p>The author seems more focused on the thing where Anthropic fights OpenClaw usage unless you have the right billing set up for that. Frankly I just don't care about those complaints, all the LLM services want you to set up a non-subsidized billing method to use OpenClaw because it uses lots of tokens. It doesn't mean they're going to crap on Bun.<p>The only reason I don't use Bun is I never ran into a situation where Node didn't cut it. Even though my least favorite tech corp controls Node.

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.<p>Their product focus, roadmap, or execution is likely a rounding error in the face of that tsunami.<p>Frankly, it’s shocking they’re doing so well relative to, say, GitHub.

"Friendship ended with Bun, now pnpm is my best friend" the post...

Umm, just use Deno? Everything author seems to love about Bun exists in Deno.

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?

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

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

This is all so speculative and whatevs

> That is textbook enshittification.<p>Technically, no, not <i>textbook</i> enshittification. Enshittification was originally meant to refer to companies squeezing two-sided markets, not products just getting kinda worse.

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.<p>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.<p>Maybe I’ve missed some scandals, but so far OpenJS Foundation is the best thing that has happened for the JavaScript ecosystem.

Why do people use bun? Would like an answer from an actual experienced / staff tier or higher engineer.

Bun does great on their own benchmarks.

The term “enshittification” really ruins (one might say “enshittifies”) any article it’s in.

Millenials of the redditor class desperately need a moratorium on the word enshittifying.

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.<p>It's annoying, but I don't see this as a bad thing at all for Bun.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/04/13/anthropic-revenue-growth-ai" rel="nofollow">https://www.axios.com/2026/04/13/anthropic-revenue-growth-ai</a>

Here's how I evaluate whether I'm going to use a given bit of OSS:<p>- Is the project important to me or can I replace it? If the latter, I'm more likely to allow failures of other criteria. If not, I need to be more strict. Bun is easy enough to replace if something were to happen to the project. Easy come, easy go.<p>- Are there any red flags in financing that could become problematic? Many VC funded OSS companies fail this test for me. What happens when they don't make it? What happens post IPO if they do? What happens when they get acquihired? Mostly that's up to share holders, not developers. Most VC funded companies actually don't make it and that's normal in the VC world. A few companies make it, everything else fails quickly. And there are a few examples of projects that have changed licenses under pressure of shareholders. That's why this is a red flag to me. I've used Redis and Elasticsearch, for example. And I switched away from Mongo before they changed the license. I used Terraform before they open sourced. All negative examples here.<p>Bun initially wasn't great on this. But the Anthropic acquisition has improved things a bit. It's still a risk. But it's unlikely they have any plans for Bun other than just keeping it alive by employing the main people working on it. Anthropic itself might still fail of course.<p>- Has the project been around for a long time. If so, it likely has a stable community and funding. There are no guarantees but the older the better. Bun is pretty newish still.<p>- Is the project stable and under active development? If it's stable because nobody makes changes anymore that's usually not a great sign. If it is stable despite a lot of active development, that's really positive. It means somebody competent is in charge. Bun seems pretty good on that front.<p>- Is the project otherwise structured right to be future proof. For me future proof is a combination of contributor community, commercial activity, and licensing. The more diverse the contributor community the better. If there are multiple companies sponsoring and making money of a project, that makes it less likely that a single one can hijack it for their own good. This is more common with permissively licensed software (but there are exceptions). Bun doesn't have much commercial activity around it and the regular contributor community is tiny. One person seems to be doing most of the work with only a handful of notable other contributors that are probably all Anthropic employed at this point. Out of these, the dependence on a single person looks the most problematic to me.<p>So, the overall score for bun is not perfect (there a few potential red flags) but I'm happy to risk using it because it's not that critical to me and easily replaceable.<p>My read of the whole Anthropic acquihire is that it is an improvement over the starting point which was a VC funded company that was probably going to fail otherwise. Otherwise, good tech and generally nice to use. I could see Anthropic going bad and this project surviving in one form or another. So, that doesn't have to be a show stopper.

Claude is currently unusable for me on Windows because bun keeps crashing<p>:(

What is there to worry about? If we believe AI crowd, Bun and entire JS ecosystem is done for. Dead. Nothing to worry about since nothing's left.<p>If as claimed everyone and his malnourished cellar rat can whip up a SaaS on a whim, then why that SaaS should be built upon chromium+js+http instead of tcp+native ui?<p>Remember, choice of ui is no longer a constraint. Nothing is a constraint or so they say.<p>So it follows that all this javascript stuff can at last die.

Ray Bradbury foresaw this.

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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<p>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<p>[0]: <a href="https://aube.en.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://aube.en.dev/</a>

has anyone forked bun?

>Claude Code appears to be enshittifying<p>AI tech bros when the bubble is blowing up lol. LLMs where always bad and unreliable for programming due to their un-deterministic nature. And regarding pricing policies, yeah, they have to make a profit somehow, it's just that the tech is too expensive vs the actual (almost non-existent) ROI it generates. Let's see if people are willing to pay when these guys aren't subsidized by the delusional VCs anymore...

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Is there actual evidence coming from the Bun project itself?<p>Otherwise it's just FUD.

Just look at the "new" documentation. It's full on AI slop.

test

what a nice way to write an article!

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.<p>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.

I’m even more worried after reading this: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016880">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016880</a><p>So Bun is going to become a fully vibe-coded codebase, with important details lost in translation.<p>I’ve been a huge supporter of Bun, but now I’d be extremely reluctant to deploy it in production.<p>It’s also a bit disappointing to see Jared change his mind so quickly. He’s an incredible developer with deep knowledge of how to write clean, maintainable, efficient code. But now it feels like his talent is being sidelined, and Claude has been given full control over the codebase.<p>Claude Code itself seems to be built that way: they keep piling on new features every day, but it has become this big, bloated Frankenstein slug.<p>Bun used to be a small, elegant, clean codebase. Now I’m worried it may turn into an unreliable mess.

What an utterly baffling post. Moving away from a tool that you love proactively because you're concerned it might degrade in quality at some time in the future? Ok man whatever.

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TLDR;<p>> Claude Code appears to be enshittifying. So now I have to worry that Bun could enshittify too

tl;dr: I have concerns. Not because Bun is bad. Bun is great. It is not bad. But Claude was good. And now it is bad. Bun is owned by Anthropic. Transitive property. Maybe. I hope I’m wrong.

Look at them! They're like loaves of bread that hop.