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.

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.

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.

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.

They released more major features and breaking changes in their last patch release than most software sees in two major versions.

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.

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.

Here are some things shipping in the next version of Bun:

- 17 MB smaller Windows x64 binaries [0]

- 8 MB smaller Linux binaries [1]

- `--no-orphans` CLI flag to recursively kill any lingering processes spawned [3]

- SSL context caching for client TCP & unix sockets, which significantly reduces memory usage for database clients like Mongoose/MongoDB [4]

- Experimental HTTP/3 & HTTP/2 client in fetch [5]

- Experimental HTTP/3 support in Bun.serve() [6]

- Bun.Image, a builtin image processing library [7]

(Along with several reliability improvements to node:fs, Worker, BroadcastChannel, and MessagePort)

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.

[0]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30219

[1]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30098

[2]: https://github.com/oven-sh/WebKit/pull/211

[3]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29930

[4]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29932

[5]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29863

[6]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30032

- Querying sqlite with tagged template literals

- Bun.password.verify being argon2 is a better default

- HTML imports

- JSX transpilation

- Auto loading .env file

https://burlyburr.com, which hits https://backend.burlyburr.com

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.

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.

For example, i'd been following this issue https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/14102 and eventually all the libraries shipped "if bun do x" into them, which is the opposite of compatibility.

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.

[1]: https://github.com/PerryTS/perry

So the more direct question would be: How has Bun actually been since the acquisition?

From what I can tell they have been responding to users as fast as before, and improving the product as well as before.

Then you could have been using Deno, like many of us, for years.

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

They are not a runtime, but they do seem to be interested in wrapping a lot of tools with simple top-level commands

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.

Always appreciated nuance.

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.

For my projects I don’t even need any additional dependencies. I use vanilla dom and sqlite

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.

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.

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.

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.

But mainly for now it just generated a lot of distrust for me

Might as well just open our pants and wave our wangers, hoping for a better world

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.

You see this all over the place with other programming languages.

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.

In the end nodejs will keep improving, with Microsoft and Google's baking, and that will be it.

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:

1. Giving away a product free to users, subsidized by venture capital, to gain a monopoly

2. Switching to advertising, then abusing users on behalf of the real customers, advertisers

3. Using monopoly power to abuse real customers (advertisers) to extract as much money as possible

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.

ETA: In other words, "Enshittification" isn't just random; you're making the user experience worse in order to make advertiser experience better; and then making advertiser experience worse in order to extract maximum profit. 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.

Personally my experience with Bun has been 100% positive so far.

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.

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.

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.

So Bun is going to become a fully vibe-coded codebase, with important details lost in translation.

I’ve been a huge supporter of Bun, but now I’d be extremely reluctant to deploy it in production.

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.

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.

Bun used to be a small, elegant, clean codebase. Now I’m worried it may turn into an unreliable mess.

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

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.

Their product focus, roadmap, or execution is likely a rounding error in the face of that tsunami.

Frankly, it’s shocking they’re doing so well relative to, say, GitHub.

Technically, no, not textbook enshittification. Enshittification was originally meant to refer to companies squeezing two-sided markets, not products just getting kinda worse.

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.

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

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence, etc.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

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.

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.

:(

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?

Remember, choice of ui is no longer a constraint. Nothing is a constraint or so they say.

So it follows that all this javascript stuff can at last die.

It's annoying, but I don't see this as a bad thing at all for Bun.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/04/13/anthropic-revenue-growth-ai

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

[0]: https://aube.en.dev/

Otherwise it's just FUD.

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.

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