[gkoberger]

If Anthropic wants to own code development in the future, owning the full platform (including the runtime) makes sense.

Programming languages all are a balance between performance/etc and making it easy for a human to interact with. This balance is going to shit as AI writes more code (and I assume Anthropic wants a future where humans might not even see the code, but rather an abstraction of it... after all, all code we look at is an abstraction on some level).

[hobofan]

Even outside of code development, Anthropic seems to be very strongly leaning into code interpreter over native tool calling for advancing agentic LLM abilities (e.g. their "skills" approach). Given that those necessitate a runtime of sorts, owning/having access to a runtime like Bun that could e.g. allow them to very seamlessly integrate that functionality into their products better, this acquisition doesn't seem like the worst idea.

[BoorishBears]

It doesn't make sense, and you definitely didn't say why it'd make sense... but enough people are happy enough to see the Bun team reach an exit (especially one that doesn't kill Bun) that I think the narrative that it makes sense will win out.

I see it as two hairy things canceling out: the accelerating trend of the JS ecosystem being hostage to VCs and Rauch is nonsensical, but this time a nonsensical acquisition is closing the loop as neatly as possible.

(actually this reminds me of Harry giving Dobby a sock: on so many levels!)

[Kwpolska]

They will own it, and then what? Will Claude Code end every response with "by the way, did you know that you can switch to bun for 21.37x faster builds?"

[BoorishBears]

They're baking the LORA as we speak, and it'll default to `bun install` too

[singularity2001]

   "the full platform"

there are more languages than ts though?

Acquisition of Apple Swift division incoming?

[tomashubelbauer]

TypeScript is the most popular programming language on the most popular software hosting platform though, owning the best runtime for that seems like it would fit Pareto's rule well enough:

https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-...

[gkoberger]

I think there's a potential argument to be made that Anthropic isn't trying to make it easier to write TS code, but rather that their goal is a level higher and the average person wouldn't even know what "language" is running it (in the same way most TS devs don't need to care the many layers their TS code is compiled via).

[giancarlostoro]

According to a JetBrains dev survey (I forget the year) roughly 58% of devs deploy to the web. That's a big money pie right there.

[vlovich123]

Bun isn’t on the web. It’s a server runtime.

[giancarlostoro]

It's a JS runtime, not specifically servers though? They essentially can bundle Claude Code with this, instead of ever relying on someone installing NodeJS and then running npm install.

Claude will likely be bundled up nicely with Bun in the near future. I could see this being useful to let even a beginner use claude code.

Edit:

Lastly, what I meant originally is that most front-end work happens with tools like Node or Bun. At first I was thinking they could use it to speed up generating / pulling JS projects, but it seems more likely Claude Code and bun will have a separate project where they integrate both and make Claude Code take full advantage of Bun itself, and Bun will focus on tight coupling to ensure Claude Code is optimally running.

[rounce]

They could do that already, nothing in the license prohibited them from doing so.

[giancarlostoro]

Sure, but Bun was funded by VCs and needed to figure out how to monetize, what Anthropic did is ensure it is maintained and now they have fresh talent to improve Claude Code.

[vlovich123]

Server here I used loosely - it obviously runs on any machine (eg if you wanted to deploy an application with it as a runtime). But it’s not useful for web dev itself which was my point.

Frontend work by definitions n doesn’t happen with either Node nor Bun. Some frontend tooling might be using a JS runtime but the value add of that is minimal and a lot of JS tooling is actually being rewritten in Rust for performance anyway.

[bigyabai]

Why acquire Swift when you can write iOS apps in Typescript instead?

[giancarlostoro]

Which would use something like Bun ;)