I am worried about Bun

Personally, I suspect that Bun is a Silicon Valley attempt to lock some companies into its stack (similar to what cloud providers, Next.js + Vercel do). Especially now that Anthropic has become an owner, I'll be keeping Bun at a considerable distance.

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.

I see the word “enshittify” being thrown around casually about Claude Code. We’re far from that part of the Enshittification cycle still. This is just a mismanaged product and the result of an extremely competitive market that moves too fast.

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

Mostly in my day to day routine, where is use Claude Code maybe 90% of the time, I don’t see that it’s become that bad. Yes they’ve made some questionable decisions on API usage and OpenClaw but I feel like this post is making it out to be worse than it is.

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.

Here's how I evaluate whether I'm going to use a given bit of OSS:

- 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.

has anyone forked bun?

Claude is currently unusable for me on Windows because bun keeps crashing

:(

The term “enshittification” really ruins (one might say “enshittifies”) any article it’s in.

Millenials of the redditor class desperately need a moratorium on the word enshittifying.

What is there to worry about? If we believe AI crowd, Bun and entire JS ecosystem is done for. Dead. Nothing to worry about since nothing's left.

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.

Ray Bradbury foresaw this.

The issues with Claude Code lately look to me like symptoms of being part of a service that is experiencing insane growth (fastest growth in history, by far [1]), while being severely constrained on adding capacity (GPUs are hard to get quickly right now, even if you have the money). I assume they're constantly fighting fires trying to keep the core use cases of Claude Code working, even if that means limiting OpenClaw usage in somewhat draconian ways.

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

Aube[0] seems interesting to me, I have submitted it as show HN after hearing about your post. Its created by the same person who has made mise and I actually discovered it when I was browsing through on mise.en.dev website

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/

Is there actual evidence coming from the Bun project itself?

Otherwise it's just FUD.

Just look at the "new" documentation. It's full on AI slop.

what a nice way to write an article!

test

I used to be a fan of Bun, but the way it keeps adding bloat makes me seriously doubt its future. Also, it seems like they are doing a lot of vibe coding without taking enough time, which raises other questions.

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.

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TLDR;

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

tl;dr: I have concerns. Not because Bun is bad. Bun is great. It is not bad. But Claude was good. And now it is bad. Bun is owned by Anthropic. Transitive property. Maybe. I hope I’m wrong.

Look at them! They're like loaves of bread that hop.