alt Hacker NewsZig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
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One of the things I find so disappointing about Kelley's behavior here is that he falsely accused Jarred Sumner of lying about fuzzing Bun, and then when Sumner showed evidence[0] that they've been fuzzing Bun for months, Kelley just silently edited his post[1] to walk back the accusation and never apologized or admitted he was wrong.
I commented on Mastodon[2] to point out to Kelley that it's dishonest to silently remove the accusation, as so many people were already talking about it, and it confuses the conversation if Kelley retroactively edits it, and he replied[3]:
> the false claim is in the bun blog post not mine. I only changed the text because it's easy to lazily argue against it. Please read more carefully. They are the ones being deceitful not me.
Loris Cro, Zig's VP of Community, gave a slightly clearer response[4]:
> Jarred's post has a section about what they "were already doing" to maintain their Zig codebase, which includes "24/7 fuzzing", which will make the average reader assume that the codebase has been fuzzed thoroughly, while in reality it has been for, what, 2 months before the rewrite?
Even then, I find it so bizarre that Loris thinks that if someone says, "We've been fuzzing Bun," and shows evidence of months of fuzzing, then that person is lying because "We've been fuzzing Bun" somehow implies something longer than two months.
The duration is irrelevant. If you say you've been fuzzing it and you've fixed bugs that your fuzzer found, then clearly you're fuzzing. The Zig team doesn't get to arbitrarily move the goalposts of what "fuzzing" means.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845652
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854921
[2] https://m.mtlynch.io/@michael/116896188093796421
I'm with Andrew.
It was just a marketing piece. It offered many data and pretty graphics but only that, no way to attest the veracity of it.
AI is still 95% useless. The Zig article is spot on
Anyone still be able to trust Bun? It looks like piece of garbage to me. Doesn’t even offer much compared to node or deno.
Agreed. The outrage around what Andrew said was performative and melodramatic. I remember the "no work-life balance if you work here" thing, and then I remember Bun's CEO last year complaining he might not be able to get H1Bs anymore...
And this whole thing reeked of a publicity stunt. Show people you can use $$$ of tokens to vibe code a refactor. The headline is how great anthropic - bun's owner - is.
There's so much weaselling in this post. His suggested solution to Zig memory errors is to never dynamically allocate memory? I mean... come on.
He complains about the lack of motivational blog post until after the merge, but a) they aren't obliged to do that (where are all the "it's free so you can't complain" people now?), and b) they gave plenty of motivation in HN comments, the rewrite PR, etc.
I don't like the idea of AI slop code either but it seems to work at least reasonably well for porting from one language to another.
hey, does anyone remember when Slack wanted to replace email?
To me it seems as if the AI corporations declared war on software engineers in general. I understand that many software engineers have already been addicted to e. g. claude (look at github, you see tons of "co-authored" rubbishness here) but to me it is clear that the AI corporations also work against the humans here - this example of the creator of the zig language (which I don't use myself, as I dislike several design choices made) being harassed by Anthropic shows this clearly as well.
So much drama between all these completely irrelevant actors circling the drain.
Anthropic have lost their minds, and eventually a metric shit ton of money. Meanwhile, nobody uses Bun or Zig either. Rust continues to chug along very very slowly.
An excellent analysis. So the Bun rewrite story is full of contradictions, irrationality, and bullshit. Not that that's really a surprise at this point.
> The hearsay is essentially repeating what was announced publicly. Their job listing might as well have said, “now seeking applicants for total shit show”. It’s bad form for us to say this out loud.
It's a good thing to point out these unspoken truths explicitly. As people internalize the norms that make it bad form, it becomes easy to skip the mental step of acknowledging the problem. Even internally. But that quiet acknowledgement is necessary to keep oneself sane. Without it, the best case is someone steers away without good reason, at worst it leads to experienced and expressed frustration that doesn't add up and can snowball into the wrong places.
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Nice write-up!
Yeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself.
The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C?
C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on.
Rust was designed to answer this exact problem (among a few others of course).
So the argument "your code is fscking sheet" is very 1990's. In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.
> Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering
I didn’t read further, this is just sensationalism at its crudest
very narrow vision, openai and anthropic realized what they have probably won’t lead to agi so they moved the goalposts to replacing jobs, programming just happened to be the easiest field because engineers are technical, willing to pay, and the input/output is relatively easy to measure, even that has problems though, a lot of managers are noticing that code generation is fast but actual production output doesn’t improve at the same rate, anthropic basically bootstrapped itself on coding and now they’re looking for higher paying fields that put less pressure on their servers
When I see bullet point lists, I hit the back button. Is this just me? The smell of AI- it's like rotting vegetables.
Writing the blog post took longer than the million line Rust rewrite. That is all someone with a few brain cells needs to understand what’s going on here.
> The marketing needed to focus on how their AI was powerful enough to do this rewrite (even though it was not powerful enough to catch a use-after-free).
ding ding ding!
Wow, it's unsafe Rust? That seems... like the worst of all worlds.
If nobody knows why the unsafe is required there's no way they'll be able to unwind it. If they can't unwind it then they're in a worse version of C (+ cargo).
This post is ultimately complaining about a build step consisting of an automatic translation from technically irrelevant language A to technically slightly less, but still substantially irrelevant language B.
I don't care what Anthropic says and what the CEOs buy, I care about my own output and the recent models give me 2x uplift easily, I'd say 10x in single digit percentage of the time and I know I'm not using them to their full potential. We're living in an era of mass produced software. You can still be an artisan in this era, but you have to be aware.
"Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering" - good but are they the only ones? I do not like Anthropic after their recent locking mechanisms. I use opencode with GLM, Mimo, Qwen, and what not. I use Codex as well.
Anthropic does not need to tell me that much of software engineering is being re-written. In my opinion, the costs have crashed. I build commercial projects at 1/3rd my earlier costs. I started build everything I can in Rust and I am still doing that. My projects have only gotten more ambitious, latest being https://github.com/brainless/akar - a WIP, please don't scream at me.
Many folks have publicly said they want to keep AI agents away from their works. Good for them. I want to accelerate software engineering, something I have done passionately for 20 years, with all the agents I can use. And I make my own agents, constantly experimenting to push local llm based agents.
If engineers want to stay behind, good for them. Not everyone does. Andrew Kelly's post read like an attack, IMHO. But why care about me? I am just a farmer (https://www.instagram.com/curryhostel) who uses AI to now build ambitious software.