I don't think people's main concern is just the use of AI. The main concern seems to be that a PR of this scale was merged probably without a proper review process.
I'm really out the loop here so maybe you can help answer me a question - why is HN unhappy about this rewrite? why are people writing here almost as if they feel betrayed by Bun being rewritten from Zig into Rust?
I genuinely don't get it. I've been following this Bun stuff a bit but I don't understand where the HN sentiment is coming from.
Because in the software world, especially before 2022, ownership and stability have been valued. People like using things that do not randomly start breaking more often after every new release, and if things break, there is a human who knows exactly why it broke and what's the best way to fix it. Businesses would not want their losses to be attributed to an AI rewriting an entire codebase. AI owns nothing, not even the bugs which it produces. I would not want my SaaS to have downtime because a JavaScript runtime it depends on decided that they had to market their LLM by rewriting years of code recklessly.
People are not betrayed by a rewrite. They are betrayed by an LLM rewriting with minimal supervision fasttracked to a merge within 9 days of commencement.
To the contrary I do not understand how we have become so insensitive towards stability since the LLM era. Why is unbreakable code no longer the goal but a truckload of generated code is.
> Businesses would not want their losses to be attributed to an AI rewriting an entire codebase. AI owns nothing, not even the bugs which it produces. I would not want my SaaS to have downtime because a JavaScript runtime it depends on decided that they had to market their LLM by rewriting years of code recklessly.
I don't know how else to say this but "Tough Shit"? Businesses are building their entire enterprise on the volunteer work donated by the free software community (or given away for free by some other company solving its own problems).
If you don't want 'your' SaaS to have downtime based on somebody else's whims, then fucking pay for your own developers (or your own AI) to build your SaaS platform in house. That's what IBM did in the 1970s, and nothing except market pressure is stopping you from doing it today.
I'm sorry for the vulgarity but this entitled attitude of businesses toward FREE SOFTWARE GIVEN TO THEM FOR NO MONEY is infuriating. If the electric company decided to give your company free power on windy days, would you then get angry that they installed a new model of turbine?
You should place this energy with something like ripgrep, not a company with huge funding that actually depends on people using their product. Their whole thing is convincing you to use Bun over Node.
so...don't be convinced? Use Node if you prefer Node's governance style. Or Deno?
If they "depend" on people using their product, then surely all their paying customers will be happy to pay them whatever it costs to maintain the Zig-version-Bun that matters so dearly to them. They will see the folly of this rewrite and follow the money back to Zig.
> so...don't be convinced? Use Node if you prefer Node's governance style. Or Deno?
This is a thread full of people saying they aren't convinced and would prefer to use Node/Deno, and that was enough for you to call them entitled and shame them. Your comment doesn't really read like a FOSS advocate, it reads like you're running interference.
Whether you like it or not, Bun actually does care about carving out an audience, and this thread has a lot of useful feedback for them on how they run the project. When people are concerned about the stability of your runtime, if the best defense that can be mustered is "tough shit, it's free," that's damning in itself.
I also think you overestimate the Zig fandom. We could be talking about completely different languages and the response would be the same because it's not about the languages.
I'm not a "FOSS advocate". Honestly, I'm a believer in free software and strong copyleft licenses. Companies should be made to give back to the commons they so cavalierly strip mine. You will never gain my sympathy whining about oh no won't someone think of the poor profitmaking enterprises that depend on your free gifts.
There is a way to obtain software that comes with guaranteed stability and support and it's called a paid contract.
> There is a way to obtain software that comes with guaranteed stability and support and it's called a paid contract
This is a completely off topic deflection. You make it sound like Bun rewrote the whole thing in Rust because they were financially in a corner, and if people just paid for free software, this wouldn't have happened.
The context nobody is mentioning is this came shortly after Bun forked Zig in the name of optimization, but then a Zig maintainer came out and basically said they (Bun) don't know what they're doing, or else they would have known that wasn't an effective optimization.
It outwardly seemed like they forked Zig for a flashy headline, were called out, then immediately started moving to Rust. This, combined with being bought by Anthropic, and plugging vibe coding the whole way, just gives the impression of random and chaotic technical decisions, which is not what people want in software their business depends on.
The unhappiness is primarily stemming from Bun’s ownership by Anthropic - HN sees this as Anthropic using an OSS project for reckless marketing stunts.
For the record I don’t believe it’s a stunt, it’s ridiculous to me - everyone’s just seeing what they want to see out of sheer hate for anything Anthropic does.
In any case if the rewrite is really as reckless as many in this thread claim, we will see Bun collapse in on itself with a 1M LOC codebase the core team doesn’t understand, or rollback to Zig. So we don’t need to have a flamewar over it, time will answer the question.
My read is it's less the rewrite and more the messaging around the rewrite. Nine days between "you're over-reacting" and merge is surprising, to say the least. Sure will be interesting to see that blog post!
My read. If the code has a comprehensive feature test suite, a performance test suite (how long a function takes), and a linter with readability guidelines (e.g. cyclomatic complexity; no code duplication), and the LLM rewrite passes all three, then it should be fine. But I think that in the real world only the first one (functional tests) exists.
posting my read (since it differs so much from the others')- there's a 'holy war' being waged by people that think LLMs shouldn't do full rewrites of software. There are various reasons people think this (think LLMs are parrots that make slop and are incapable of writing good code, have environmental concerns, or are angry that software licenses can be circumvented). I call it a 'holy war' because I think most see our current trajectory as a bit inevitable and have a strong urge to proselytize their views and chide maintainers that use LLMs in ways they don't like.
Very similar angry comments happened with the discussions of the Chardet rewrite, next.js/vinext, and JSONata/gnata if you want to look at this in context.
I mean this is just fingers-in-your-ears "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!" stuff.
I still have a job so AI hasn't taken that yet. But the suggestion it's "no closer" is ridiculous. At least in my life/career/office this last 12 months seems to have been a real inflection point in how AI is being used for software development.
I don't completely disagree with what you are saying -- but there's no way you produce and review 20k lines a day. That part is clearly false. Even if Claude generated it in 10 seconds and it needed no changes you probably still couldn't review that much sensibly.
I used Claude a lot on a recent project where it probably wrote 15-20k lines in a month, and it was overall excellent.
I'm less concerned with Trump voters (more or less the same people keep voting for him), and more with why ~10 million people didn't vote for his opponent (who had voted for her predecessor).
I don't believe it had anything to do with the price of eggs, either. That was presented as the primary reason, and it's so clearly wrong that it makes me suspicious.
They’ve functionally done a fuck ton while not knee capping the economy at the same time. The IRA injected a massive amount of funds into environmentally friendly technology and infrastructure. Half my street put up solar in the past 2 years because of these subsidies.
The Republicans are looking at bringing back coal mining. You’re just completely incorrect in your classification of both parties being as bad on the environment unless your bucket is so broad as to be meaningless for use in comparing two organizations
I'm really puzzled how you claim to this conclusion. The positions and policies of the last two Democratic administrations are pretty well-known. They are trivially googlable. Or you can ask AI to summarize them for you. Off the top of my head, without going to Google I can think of Obama's CAFE standards and Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
When multiple independent research groups show that the impact of implementing these policies show significant reduction in projected greenhouse gas emissions and rolling them back shows the opposite effect, how do you make the claim that they are "functionally the same"? And I don't even count the soft power - one side consistently claims that climate change is a hoax and the other side consistently takes it seriously.
I don't understand this at all. I could get behind an "enlightened centrist" position when it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East. But environmental policy?
Who is the preeminent manufacturer of solar PV and electric vehicles in the world?
How is our charging infrastructure compared to say Europe's?
Considering we've had the technology for almost 30 years now, why isn't practically every consumer vehicle a phev?
I'm not going to believe any projected carbon emissions. I'm going to believe real carbon emissions that get measured. Hey, guess what? They are still going up.
I get that they were solar subsidies, but it's my strong opinion that there should have been unrefusable subsidies for home solar. I get so sick of the utility people complaining about how hard it's going to be to adapt the grid to alternative energy. Yet in the same time they bad mouth home solar which basically alleviates grid load.
There still is no effective policy implementations on reducing sprawl, except that which simply resists building housing in general.
And while I generally think nuclear energy isn't really an effective solution for clean energy, it should still be aggressively researched, although I think they should be chasing lftrs like China is.
You can say a lot of these are simply politically infeasible. That speaks more to the nature of the Democrats being a corporatist party than anything. a lot of these policies, especially ones around alternative energy and transport electrification which would functionally drop the price of energy and transportation, a key driver to economic growth in the long term, should have been a strong sell overall to the business lobby in general.
I'm not going to disagree that the only place that you're going to get some environmental progress is the Democratic party.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
But maybe the simplest answer is that most people do use the tools daily now and consider them essential...?
As much as HN would hate to think that