I care about Bun. I have been rooting for it since the initial release in 2022. I switched all my development from Node to Bun. I used it in the development of theNue frameworkand now with my new projectHertta.
The last three months have not looked good for Bun. It started as one of the most impressive individual engineering projects I have seen, but has now turned into this weird AI-powered creature with continuous false promises and an increasingly frustrated community.
In the next version of Bunused to be a positive tweet to watch for. For years it meant a feature had been implemented, tested, and would ship in a few days. This changed after the Rust rewrite. Now the posts are false promises about the upcoming release:
It’s now three months and counting since the last stable release, the longest gap in Bun’s history since 2022. Nothing unusual there. Software slips, that’s normal. It’s just that an account which used to communicate with real dates and real numbers has switched to vibing. And the user reaction is what you’d expect after constant false promises:
Rejoice fellas, tomorrow in Jarred Standard Time zone means we have a new blog coming next week.
You won’t care, but personally I am switching to go now. It’s not even funny, you are just stringing your users along again and again.
How can we believe you? You always make promises that you can’t keep, tomorrow, next week, Monday…
If you need 2 months to release it you can just say that instead of saying you’ll ‘release it tomorrow’ every week
The Bun 1.4 rewrite is a big bet on AI. In the past month, 15.8k commits came fromrobobun,1.6k commits fromautofix-ci[bot],and 790 commits from Jarred.
The project has over5k open pull requests, which is the largest number of pull requests I’ve seen. For comparison,OpenClawhas 2.2k, andReacthas 441. GitHub recommends staying under 1,000 open PRs against a single branch before mergeability checks start timing out.
The biggest worry is, of course, the code itself. In the early days Jarred’s work was inspirational. I thought he was a true Zig talent, until I read Zig creator Andrew Kelley’sthoughts on the Bun rewrite:
This rewrite isthemost closely watched real-world test of whether AI agents can take over a production codebase with a human mostly directing rather than reading. Anthropic’s own reputation is also on the line: if this goes well, it is real proof of what agentic coding can do. If it goes badly, it will send a signal in the opposite direction.