Comment by IshKebab
2 days ago
I had an actual look at the code, and because it's a translation it's not just straight up de novo slop. The bits I saw were fairly straightforward 1:1 translations, so the Bun developers should still be familiar with the overall structure and logic.
I still think it's mad, but not quite as mad as you might first think from the headlines.
It's the little bits that aren't 1:1
Who wants to review a brand new codebase for free?
Why is it for free? Isn’t Anthropic paying their salaries?
yt-dlp is paid by Anthropic?
1 reply →
That doesn't change anything. No one can say with confidence, backed by proof, that the 1M slop is semantically equivalent to the old code. The code is a black box without that guarantee.
Nobody can say that about Microsoft's rewrite of Typescript into Go (which was not done in a week with AI). That's an unrealistically high bar.
Presumably, in any sane process, changes would be split into small, reviewable PRs with people reasoning about the code. That wouldn't eliminate the possibility of bugs, but when done correctly it would give us substantially higher confidence that semantic equivalence is preserved.
With zero reviews and no one even reading the code, there's zero confidence. For all we know, the new Bun could contain a change that causes JS file reads to return a novel for a very specific filename, and the tests people keep pointing to, intended to downplay the malpractice, would never catch it. Tests cannot cover every contrived scenario that normal human beings would never think of writing.