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Comment by jwpapi

1 day ago

This will go down in history as the biggest mistake of software engineering of all time.

Bun is the runtime of Claude Code, which is the core product of a trillion dollar company, which now sits on a vibe-coded app, where not a single person in the world has a proper mental model of.

Claude Code itself is purely vibecoded, both CC and Bun leads are saying that humans are not writing code at Anthropic anymore. It is amazing how much money they intend to squander, because it's all funny money to them, investors just give it to them hand over fist for them to burn. Developing wrappers around the model isn't even the hard part and yet they're going to burn themselves to the ground getting high on their own supply.

  • > Claude Code itself is purely vibecoded [...] money they intend to squander [...] going to burn themselves to the ground getting high on their own supply.

    This really really really isn't the burn you think it is. Going from 0 to 2B+ in revenue from a "purely vibecoded" thing is what they've said they're doing, and what they've actually done. Like in already done. It's not going back, no matter how many nuh nuh people write. They've already shown this can be done.

    People will continue to think that this is some sort of a gotcha. But it's actually precisely what they've done: they showed that dogfooding works. If this works, why not x y z?

    • 2B+ in revenue on hundreds of billions in investments and future commitments is completely worthless. Anybody can turn $100b into $2b, that's not a fucking accomplishment. And to the extent that something is driving any revenue, it is the model, not the TUI. Any success Claude is having is despite the godawful TUI, not because of it.

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Maybe this is the best marketing trick for Claude Code ever. Maybe there was pressure from Anthropic to do this and prove the value. Even partial success is enough to prove the value, justify the value and usage, and AI dependency even further.

  • And as long as Bun doesn't break Claude code, which only uses a subset of it's APIs, this might just pay out.

    • Running the rust version in their prod for two weeks should be long enough to catch the biggest crashes and fix them. I'll be up to bug bounty hunters to find the big one that crashes all their app servers at once.

On the other hand they might be super confident in the results, and if it goes well they might use is as an example of how good claude is

Well, realistically as well, humans gave us softwares that are full of security holes (and bugs), which one have you seen that a human perfected on the first time around? Give AI some time as well to be fair.

My initial reaction was that this is pure insanity but in fairness this is a fairly 1:1 port of existing code, so the developer's mental model of it should still match fairly well.

For instance look at this Zig function: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/ed1a70f81708d7d137de8de0...

Versus this Rust version: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/ed1a70f81708d7d137de8de0...

I did pick that at random but it does look like the best case. I skimmed through a lot of the Rust code and there's a surprisingly small amount of `unsafe`.

Still pretty insane to merge this in such a short time with so little testing, but I can easily think of bigger software engineering mistakes. Hell it's not like Bun even needs to be commercially successful any more.

  • It’s still 400k more lines

    • Dunno where you got that number from but it's half that. Tokei says:

        ===============================================================================
         Language            Files        Lines         Code     Comments       Blanks
        ===============================================================================
         Zig                  1298       711112       577946        57772        75394
         Rust                 1443       931232       737485       114373        79374
      

      So it's 28% more lines of code (not comments/blanks).

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