> I’m genuinely confused at how it caught on
Probably because they said AI rewrote it in 11 days, yet haven't cut a release almost 2 months later. If their AI finished it, where's the release?
They ported enough of it to run a single app (Claude Code). Good job. But if I ported Linux to Rust and it was only capable of running a single app, should I be able say it was a complete port? We'd all agree that was misleading. It's the same with Bun.
The marketing lies simply backfired.
> If their AI finished it, where's the release?
Producing a stable release for their community of code that had been written by AI in 11 days and had not yet been extensively tested in the real world would be grossly irresponsible.
Instead, they made the AI rewrite available as a canary release and shipped it for a month as part of Claude Code to millions of their own users.
So... not finished, then? There have been lots of commits between then and now.
If I pay someone to build a house and they left me a voicemail saying "Yep the house is finished, it only took us 11 days!" And then later, "No, you can't move in yet, still fixing some last-minute issues (there's no plumbing yet)." We would classify this as: a lie. And if you told it to your investors: fraud.
Would it really be so bad for Anthropic to admit that a project of this size takes months instead of weeks?
I'm not saying AI is not capable of this. I'm saying that their dishonest marketing has given ammo to their haters.
> Would it really be so bad for Anthropic to admit that a project of this size takes months instead of weeks?
I think that's exactly what they've done by not shipping a stable release yet.
I don't think they've been pushing that "It only took us 11 days!" message nearly as hard as their critics suggest that they have.
> If their AI finished it, where's the release?
`bun upgrade --canary`. You can use it today.
Keeping a large release, like a total rewrite, on canary for a while to iron out bugs is a very reasonable software engineering practice.
Would you release it when it's not complete?
> Would you release it when it's not complete?
Nope. I also wouldn't lie and say it's complete when it isn't.
Can you provide a source where they said it was complete? I can't seem to find any evidence of this.
Hmm, you are right. The 11 days number came from the Bun blog, not the Anthropic blog. Anthropic has a history of making dishonest claims like this (for example their C compiler) so when I saw the news coverage I assumed this was just another one of those. My mistake.
Even then, can you point out where Jarred said this on the Bun blog? Because AFAICT, it seems pretty clear that he said that it took 11 days to get to all integration tests passing, but not to a full release candidate. In his blog post from a few weeks ago, he specifically calls outs:
>Bun v1.4 makes Bun faster, smaller, use less memory and gives the team incredibly powerful tools for systematically improving stability going forward: Rust's borrow checker, Miri (which runs for a growing chunk of code in CI), LeakSanitizer, and 24/7 coverage-guided fuzzing for parsers. There's still more to refactor, but things are off to a great start.
Perhaps you never perused beyond the HN headline?