Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

LAC-Tech

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.

vlaaad

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

embedding-shape

> Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products. Yeah, don't discount how powerful "marketing" is to management/executives, and also don't discount how absolutely ridiculously petty people can be, especially people who end up like CEOs and similar, requires a particular person. I can definitively see reason #1 and #3 from that to basically already set in stone that Bun had to be rewritten in Rust.

runtime_lens

I think two things can be true at once....It was obviously a great marketing story for anthropic but that doesn't automatically mean that engineering work had no value. Companies have always turned interesting technical projects into marketing.

jonplackett

The thing is - is it a self fulfilling prophecy? We already know junior hiring an are down. And how many people are now excited to learn to code compared to 5years ago? How many of those excited people are ACTUALLY learning to code and not just learning to prompt? LLMs/agents will take over (or at least dominate) software dev even if they don’t get any better because humans will just get old and there’ll be no new humans who know how to do it.

self_awareness

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.

throwa356262

I think Anthropic is putting too much time and energy into marketing (and politics) while competitors are catching up on the engineering side. But what do I know, maybe your CTO bought this and now wants to fire half of the dev team and use Claude to convert your COBOL codebase to Rust...

simjnd

Thank you. I was left confused after people praised the Bun to Rust blog post eventhough it contained very actual technical substance. No clear evaluation of options, very biased report on impact, missing figures. It absolutely didn't feel like an engineering blog post. Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointing from a technical standpoint.

sajithdilshan

I really don't understand what's the big deal here. Anthropic converted Bun from Zig to Rust using Fable and used that for marketing, but do people blindly trust them? Also isn't Zig still unstable and from that perspective regardless of how they did it, wouldn't it make sense to migrate it to a stable language?

virajk_31

Anthropic migrated Bun from Zig to Rust, they probably tried writing it in Zig using AI and ran into issues because there isn't enough Zig training data. A year ago, most LLMs couldn' t code reliably in Rust, But were fluent in Python, C, and web tech.

ashishb

Languages do matter. And I think the only sensible backend languages when starting a new for-profit project is Python, Go, and Rust for 99% use-cases. In other cases, third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry starts to suffer.

khalic

> Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering I didn’t read further, this is just sensationalism at its crudest

brainless

"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.

My_Name

I think I got all the information I need to be able to judge that article from seeing that the author calls themselves a "Retrofuturist Software Mender".

woodruffw

I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.

alloysmila

I remember the uber db migration post and I can't help but wonder if the tone of these conversations would be different for bun if AI wasn't involved. https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/

netdur

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

sublinear

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.

mdavid626

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.

finnthehuman

> 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.