> Electrobun aims to be a complete solution-in-a-box for building, updating, and shipping ultra fast, tiny, and cross-platform desktop applications written in Typescript. Under the hood it uses bun to execute the main process and to bundle webview typescript, and has native bindings written in Objc, C++, and several core parts written in zig.
I have to say, this whole saga is extremely interesting. Not just from a popcorn-enjoyer's point of view, but as a bit of a bell weather for 2026 software dev.
Time will tell. I predict this is just the same 20 year pattern of: people on the internet are irate about $latest_thing, and everyone will move on to some other hot topic.
But surely, whether or not the Internet mob moves on has no bearing on what actual lessons to learn from this saga. Will the vibe rewrite turn out to be a disaster or are LLMs already capable of writing human level code at this scale? That question is interesting no matter the level of attention this gets.
For some reason, when thinking about this, the visual of all the scientists at CERN camping out for the results of the Higgs Boson experiment jumped into my mind.
This is not as big an experiment as that. But, for software dev, it feels very significant.
I think it makes sense to stay away from large code bases built using LLMs until it is proven that it is possible to also maintain such code bases using LLMs or using reasonable human effort.
I have an idea on how to tell if a codebase is rotting under AI Agent maintenance.
We can collect and analyze how the coding agent reads code during programming tasks, and see if the code access and token consumption are steadily increasing for similar development tasks. If the code readability doesn't degrade for the agent, the maintainability of the codebase should be fine.
It's alarming how people instantly jump to conclusions that Bun is now "AI slop".
Bun has been almost entirely worked on by LLM's for ~6 months now, long before the Rust re-write (source: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2054525268296118363). It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
It's very easy to throw shade like this on software if you've got a bugbear with it. I'm sure you can even come up with a bunch of these "stability" problems when challenged on it. I know I could, for basically any large piece of software that I've ever used.
But really, is bun worse in this regard than any other similarly ambitious open source software within it's first few years?
see that's fine with me if they want to take a year or two of human time and do the rewrite properly
this is a piece of software with no architecture, and whose owners have no regard or respect for architecture. I can virtually guarantee that on average every bug they fix will create one new bug, because that's what it's like to work on software with no intentional architecture
It's alarming how people are willing to overlook the obvious in-your-face sloppiness of the Bun rewrite. A million lines of code in 9 days, pushed to main branch, forced on the existing userbase irresponsibly.
Nobody understands the code, nor will they be able to maintain it without AI service as an external dependency. Give me a break, I'm not running that monstrosity on my machine. Everyone running production software should move away from Bun purely as a technical decision.
While I'm certainly sceptical of pure LLM (re)-written software, I would have to assume in the case of the cyberattack vector that Anthropic used their new Mythos model to adequately test against.
Maybe someone has more info of them mentioning that.
This is my first time hearing about Electrobun it sounds like it could be a good alternative to electron. Their site mention CEF bundling as an option has anyone tried this?
This whole thing of shunning bun is a goofy protest against AI in general by a bunch of programmers about to transition from vastly overpaid to mostly unemployed, sometimes thinly disguised as quality concerns and piggybacking a little bit on the anti-"rewrite it in rust" train.
Still, I can't help but entirely support it. I don't want hard dependencies on gigantic megacorps, or on any single provider who can go rogue. Should have always been able to switch between them, and any of them who made that difficult should have been the ones to be shunned. Completely dropping support for bun is equally bad imo, because now your choices are limited to Microsoft and deno, making deno close to a single point of failure.
Although I have to wonder what would happen if Anthropic threw a couple of bucks at electrobun (lol, not really.)
Great, the author speaks out what everyone thinks but cannot say, either due to being invested in the hype or due to effectively having a gag order from their employers:
In many a brand name company now tokenmaxxing is the name of the game; CryptoBase, FacePaper, AntiqueOptics, tinyflacid, they all use AI usage metrics as part of their perf review these days.
I'm not joining the chorus condemning Bun for the vibe-rewrite, and I think it's fascinating whether it turns out to be a complete trainwreck or not. But FFS, it should have been a separate repo.
They're two completely different codebases... even if they are 100% feature parity, it's 100% different code. They should absolutely be separate from each other, with different issues lists. Clean separation of two different codebases isn't a strange concept...
Right, but it's my understanding that it was done as a PR that was merged to `main`. Sure, anyone could find the last Zig commit and branch off of that, so I guess it's all po-tay-to po-tah-to.
Realistically speaking, when Anthropic acquired Bun, they naturally would have needed a narrative showcasing that their AI excels even at relatively new languages like Zig. But since the Zig camp explicitly declared an anti-AI stance, it makes perfect sense why things played out this way. It's a understandable business realit
To upper-middle class people, their job is a religion. Investing in a programming language is a decision to gamble thousands of hours of your life for a programmer. At some point of projects shifting away from your language, your mortgage and your children's tuition will be affected.
Electrobun repo: https://github.com/blackboardsh/electrobun
> Electrobun aims to be a complete solution-in-a-box for building, updating, and shipping ultra fast, tiny, and cross-platform desktop applications written in Typescript. Under the hood it uses bun to execute the main process and to bundle webview typescript, and has native bindings written in Objc, C++, and several core parts written in zig.
I have to say, this whole saga is extremely interesting. Not just from a popcorn-enjoyer's point of view, but as a bit of a bell weather for 2026 software dev.
Time will tell. I predict this is just the same 20 year pattern of: people on the internet are irate about $latest_thing, and everyone will move on to some other hot topic.
But surely, whether or not the Internet mob moves on has no bearing on what actual lessons to learn from this saga. Will the vibe rewrite turn out to be a disaster or are LLMs already capable of writing human level code at this scale? That question is interesting no matter the level of attention this gets.
I'm believe projects that pin old versions or maintain their own shoddy fork will be left behind. Deprecation is fine.
For some reason, when thinking about this, the visual of all the scientists at CERN camping out for the results of the Higgs Boson experiment jumped into my mind.
This is not as big an experiment as that. But, for software dev, it feels very significant.
People are going to be using a lot less software if the selection criteria include not being no agents.
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That name is quite near the infamous Electron, is it similar?
I think it makes sense to stay away from large code bases built using LLMs until it is proven that it is possible to also maintain such code bases using LLMs or using reasonable human effort.
I have an idea on how to tell if a codebase is rotting under AI Agent maintenance. We can collect and analyze how the coding agent reads code during programming tasks, and see if the code access and token consumption are steadily increasing for similar development tasks. If the code readability doesn't degrade for the agent, the maintainability of the codebase should be fine.
Mist of human written codebases are unusable for llm dev by that definition.
It's alarming how people instantly jump to conclusions that Bun is now "AI slop".
Bun has been almost entirely worked on by LLM's for ~6 months now, long before the Rust re-write (source: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2054525268296118363). It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
> Bun has been almost entirely worked on by LLM's for ~6 months now
So what you’re saying is that this boycot is 6 months overdue?
> It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
Is it? Seems like bugs in Claude Code are getting out of hands. That project has a bit more lifetime.
Worked on by LLMs is fine, but the rust pr proved no one is reviewing anymore. You cannot review 1M LOC in 5 days.
Bun never was great in terms of stability. It has been vibe coded for 6 month but code was reviewed by a person.
>It already has been proven that LLM's can maintain such codebases.
Proven is a strong word. In my experience AI fails miserably at anything beyond junior level tasks. We will see soon, once bun goes into production.
> Bun never was great in terms of stability
It's very easy to throw shade like this on software if you've got a bugbear with it. I'm sure you can even come up with a bunch of these "stability" problems when challenged on it. I know I could, for basically any large piece of software that I've ever used.
But really, is bun worse in this regard than any other similarly ambitious open source software within it's first few years?
see that's fine with me if they want to take a year or two of human time and do the rewrite properly
this is a piece of software with no architecture, and whose owners have no regard or respect for architecture. I can virtually guarantee that on average every bug they fix will create one new bug, because that's what it's like to work on software with no intentional architecture
It's alarming how people are willing to overlook the obvious in-your-face sloppiness of the Bun rewrite. A million lines of code in 9 days, pushed to main branch, forced on the existing userbase irresponsibly.
Nobody understands the code, nor will they be able to maintain it without AI service as an external dependency. Give me a break, I'm not running that monstrosity on my machine. Everyone running production software should move away from Bun purely as a technical decision.
Do you use Claude code on your machine? That seems mostly vibe coded
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While I'm certainly sceptical of pure LLM (re)-written software, I would have to assume in the case of the cyberattack vector that Anthropic used their new Mythos model to adequately test against.
Maybe someone has more info of them mentioning that.
I wouldn't be surprised if the kinds of security issues LLMs tend to create are the exact types of security issues LLMs are bad ar detecting.
Jarred said this had nothing to do with Mythos or Anthropic.
The concept of a "useful fool" is apt here.
This is my first time hearing about Electrobun it sounds like it could be a good alternative to electron. Their site mention CEF bundling as an option has anyone tried this?
TIL electrobun. How does it compare against electron?
This whole thing of shunning bun is a goofy protest against AI in general by a bunch of programmers about to transition from vastly overpaid to mostly unemployed, sometimes thinly disguised as quality concerns and piggybacking a little bit on the anti-"rewrite it in rust" train.
Still, I can't help but entirely support it. I don't want hard dependencies on gigantic megacorps, or on any single provider who can go rogue. Should have always been able to switch between them, and any of them who made that difficult should have been the ones to be shunned. Completely dropping support for bun is equally bad imo, because now your choices are limited to Microsoft and deno, making deno close to a single point of failure.
Although I have to wonder what would happen if Anthropic threw a couple of bucks at electrobun (lol, not really.)
Great, the author speaks out what everyone thinks but cannot say, either due to being invested in the hype or due to effectively having a gag order from their employers:
https://xcancel.com/YoavCodes/status/2058170216408813583#m
The bun rewrite was Anthropic's Vietnam and the open source community needs to react and and build resistance.
In many a brand name company now tokenmaxxing is the name of the game; CryptoBase, FacePaper, AntiqueOptics, tinyflacid, they all use AI usage metrics as part of their perf review these days.
I doubt any sane human will continue using Bun.
In this industry, that leaves most of us.
I'm not joining the chorus condemning Bun for the vibe-rewrite, and I think it's fascinating whether it turns out to be a complete trainwreck or not. But FFS, it should have been a separate repo.
What? Why? Git has branches...
They're two completely different codebases... even if they are 100% feature parity, it's 100% different code. They should absolutely be separate from each other, with different issues lists. Clean separation of two different codebases isn't a strange concept...
Right, but it's my understanding that it was done as a PR that was merged to `main`. Sure, anyone could find the last Zig commit and branch off of that, so I guess it's all po-tay-to po-tah-to.
It’s really only a matter of time until someone forks the Zig version of Bun.
What a slap in the face to all the Zig developers that spent their time, effort and probably even some money contributing to it.
Realistically speaking, when Anthropic acquired Bun, they naturally would have needed a narrative showcasing that their AI excels even at relatively new languages like Zig. But since the Zig camp explicitly declared an anti-AI stance, it makes perfect sense why things played out this way. It's a understandable business realit
Add todo item: learn zig.
Chill dog, it’s a programming language not a religion
To upper-middle class people, their job is a religion. Investing in a programming language is a decision to gamble thousands of hours of your life for a programmer. At some point of projects shifting away from your language, your mortgage and your children's tuition will be affected.
What a weird take. Might as well give up on anything you care about, as its only an "x"
You shouldn’t feel slapped in the face if someone chooses a programming language you don’t like. Full stop.