Bun Joins Anthropic ➹

I thought this was wonderfully serendipitous since I have recently started porting this site’s engine to TypeScript on bun, following almost a year of running Node-RED on it and assorted other low-risk experiments.

I started doing it because bun is the closest thing I’ve come across yet to a “batteries included” JavaScript runtime: it bundles SQLite support, HTML parsing and sane HTTP primitives, can generate standalone executables, and the fact that it installs packages with sub-second delays and bundles its own TypeScript implementation is just icing on the cake.

Do I like JavaScript any better because of bun? Heck, no. Do I think it’s especially useful for AI development? Not really, other than the fact that TypeScript removes some of the ambiguities of API calling and bun itself is well suited to ship flexible CLI tools (which is what Anthropic wants it for).

Does it mark a significant shift in the landscape of JavaScript tooling? Nah. The ecosystem has always been there–it is a great milestone for bun and Zig, and it’s a good sign for bun in terms of long term runway and support, but the only risk I see is that the hype overtakes reality and Anthropic starts shoving in AI-specific garbage into the bundled runtime.

Should Claude Code competitors heed this shift? Not really. Anything can be an AI tool helper these days, as long as it can do API calls, and bun is just more expedient in a JavaScript-infested industry.

Me, I’d probably have picked Go, but native code (or AOT builds like you’d get from C#, which is shunned by most but quite interesting for cross-platform compatibility) are not really needed for AI tooling now that we’ve come to accept the fact that models (nearly) always live on remote services.