It's interesting how quickly people buy the "abuse" line of thinking. We understood (and knew for a long time) that the large AI labs are not monetarily profiting from subscription users that make heavy use of their subscription. That is independent of which agent/harness is used. The fair/real price for profitable use is the pay per use token pricing.

These labs play the game of trying to kill competition in the harness game (because third party harnesses risk commoditizing the underlying LLMs once they are all good enough), while playing a game of chicken with each other how long they can burn money that way before they have to give up.

At some point they have to price their product fairly, and the only hope they have is to have killed all competition by then, which is of course a game that they seem to be loosing. Useful models are getting smaller and cheaper to run every year and it has hit a threshold at which we will see continued development of third party harnesses even without the userbase of subscription users.

Basically the prime bet that they made (that one needs extremely expensive hardware to have useful AI) has already failed. The secondary bet that they can lock users into their ecosystem (which requires them to subsidize their harness via unprofitable subscriptions burning their capital) and be able to monetize that later will also fail. They will have to compete on merit alone, and that is much less profitable.

> Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.

I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". It is also bizarre that some people are still hopeful despite it being acquired by one of the most enormously unprofitable companies in the most enormously unprofitable sectors of our industry.

You might be underestimating the effect that corporate policies and culture have on the product.

Some teams have a push now to go all in on AI; don't even look at the code. I've seen this in action and the results are probably what you'd expect. Works great at some level, but as complexity accumulates (especially across a team with different "technical vocabularies"), the end result is compounding complexity and mistakes and no person or team knows how the software actually works.

No human testing of software or QA; unit + integration + give AI control over the browser/tool. Yes, this how some teams are moving forward now. So some of this may be that Anthropic's culture will end up causing shifts in how the Bun team operates and thinks.

If this type of culture and mindset becomes the norm, I think either the models have to get a lot better or the software quality is going to decline.

Matt Pocock has a great talk here: https://youtu.be/v4F1gFy-hqg

    "Code is not cheap. Bad code is the most expensive it's ever been. Because if you have a codebase that's hard to change, you're not able to take advantage of all of the bounty that AI can offer.  Because AI in a good codebase actually does really, really well."

> Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun.

Anthropic acquired Bun for their own benefit, to protect and grow their investment in Claude Code. Not for the benefit the JavaScript community at large. Sounds obvious but I guess that has to be pointed out. Outcomes will follow incentives in the long run.

I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, GitHub had to figure out how to monetize at some point. Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, MS Windows), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making GitHub worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about GitHub.

Funding to pay the core team (via revenue/grants/VC) requires a lot of leadership attention for any independent company that is developing an open-source project as its main activity. Yet more leadership attention goes into other administration (Taxes/hiring/legal/policies/etc.).

I don't have any direct context, though I have run an open-source business (Zulip) for the last decade wearing both the CEO and technical lead hats.

But my simulation is that the Bun leadership team might well be spending 2x as much of their time working on the technology than they reasonably could have as an independent venture-funded company, just because they don't have to do all that other stuff anymore. (There's of course probably a significant bias in that focus towards whatever Anthropic needs from Bun, only some of which other users may care about).

So I agree. Personally, I would not be concerned unless you see the tell-tale signs of the team being reassigned to other priorities at the buyer, which tends to be obvious, because, say, the GitHub project activity falls off a cliff.

This is a good take, and I hope you're right.

One favorable way to phrase it for Anthropic is they acquired Bun because CC and other internal tooling depended on it so heavily and they questioned it's future as purely OSS.

It remains to be seen how things will actually unfold.

> it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse

For me it's far from a stretch, in fact it matches closely a pattern that I've seen repeated many times over at this point.

> Now, even though their parent company does some shitty practices with their other software (claude code), it's a stretch to assume this will also translate into making Bun worse: Being worried makes sense but I remain optimistic about Bun.

Can you point to any examples of a company with shitty practices buying one without shitty practices that didn't end up with the shitty practices diffusing through the newly-acquired company within a couple of years?

> I disagree with the overall premise: Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.

Incidentally, Anthropic needs to figure out how to monetize at some point too.

What came to my mind is Windows.

Regardless of what else is going on, kernel is a separate team, and has very strong incentives to remain competent and sane.

Nope. The need to monotize and the fact that an acquihire cost some money is exactly why relying on a specific runtime is where people should have concern.