Comment by dzonga
6 days ago
you know this whole exercise is both a marketing exercise and a way to make noise.
would the world come to a standstill tomorrow if every Bun instance out there ran on Node.js ?
they know their A.I can't sell without the noise that it's now on the edge of the frontier. this is hype.
zig adopting a strict 'no LLM' policy affects the LLM vendors.
A good point. The business and marketing aspect of this situation can not be overlooked. The rewrite in Rust was a clear marketing opportunity, to maintain the LLM hype, that team Bun warmly embraced.
At this point one should just say Anthropic team. I can't think of a Bun team since Anthropic bought Bun.
Jared, the hacker is now replaced by Jared, the millionaire soon to be billionaire as Anthropic valuation keeps going up.
Exactly. Always asks “who benefits from this?” . The answer in this case is: AI vendors, not us.
It’s also just a useful exercise in general, especially for getting feedback for models and harnesses.
I’ve been thinking about setting up a non trivial project to use as a benchmark for any plugins and/or harness changes I make.
Having a prebuilt verification suite is great. You can use it to asses things like token usage, time, across different harnesses, models, plugins.
I don’t think the Zig project adopting a strict ‘no LLM’ policy affects the LLM vendors at all. How many developers are working on the Zig project itself that will (maybe) now not buy a Claude subscription? I can buy that this is a marketing stunt, but nobody at the top cares if a relatively small open source project doesn’t allow AI contributions.
I don't know about that. Zig's bdfl got significant mainstream press attention for his anti-LLM stance. Definitely enough attention for various LLM vendors to notice.
Based on their actions, I don’t think the LLM vendors take anti-AI sentiment very seriously. If anything they court it, though I think it’s more likely they’re just high on their own supply. I doubt the Zig statement had any effect on the thoughts of the people who actually sign contracts with Anthropic, who are mostly not engineers.
The marketing opportunity here is in promoting Claude Code, not giving a smackdown to Andrew Kelley (who vanishingly few people who throw around millions of dollars on AI contracts have heard of).
If you think Claude needs manufactured hype at this point to sell it you're delusional.
Anthropic literally has an astroturfing program:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945021
I would expect from 'astroturfing' that they were in some way paying people to recommend it. This just seems to be advice on how to recommend it for people who already want to recommend it.
Manufactured hype is just marketing. And companies losing money and looking to get listed very soon absolutely need it.
That’s how marketing works.
If you think they can survive without hype, you are the naive one