Couldn’t they just contribute…without using ai? Am I missing something? Or have people legitimately lost the ability to write code without llms already
The very legitimate performance improvements to Zig co-authored by Claude are explicitly rejected by the Zig maintainers.
These improvements were not mindlessly vibe-coded, but made in the way you'd want them to, using the LLM as a powerful tool, and tested against a pretty good use case (a JS server runtime). But the improvements were co-authored by an AI agent, thus are not accepted into Zig's codebase.
And so yes, in theory someone working on Bun could hand-copy over the code, read and understand it all (which they likely have done already), and make some PRs against Zig, but ... the provenance of the code is still AI, not a human. And so it goes against the contribution policy.
the other enhancement they discussed is splitting the LLVM backend’s output into multiple modules. There’s nothing wrong with doing this for Debug builds in theory, but it’s simply not the right place for us to focus our efforts. The Tweet showing off this feature showed a compile time of 20 seconds for Bun. However, we view 20 seconds as an entirely unacceptable amount of time to wait for every single rebuild. This change to the LLVM backend has a hard performance ceiling, which Bun’s implementation has probably hit, because there’s no getting around the final bottleneck of LLVM’s compilation speed.
They also said before that they want to implement some of the changes but that it was "hacked together for a headline" which it was. AI aside they had valid reason to reject it.
I think it has to do with optics, not really skill. Anthropic wants to project the opinion that they are 100% using ai, no manual coding. Them contributing "manually" to zig goes against that opinion, and even if they downplayed it as "well it is a necessary evil" it would still impact that perception/message they want to send across.
So I assume they just prefered the cost of the rewrite to the bad optics that writing manual code could generate.
What? In what world does what you said make any sense, let alone have any evidence to support it?
Zig has a no AI policy and a lot of the forked improvements were co-authored by an AI agent. And so they literally cannot contribute this code, no matter how battle-tested it is, back into the core codebase.
you must be new here brother. people don't think logically in the modern day tech industry. the people who pay the salaries persistently and ubiquitously commit to perverse decisions that technical people would writhe at. i advise you to stop thinking these people have sound technical sense with respect to what they're doing
Unlike Zig, Rust offers security, language stability, a better ecosystem, a larger community, a bus factor > 1 and so on. Zig has no niche and is just another language the no one needs.
Then what is its niche? It has no noteworthy advantages over C, you would lose support for several platforms by switching and also all tooling around it. Has Zig even support for proper dynamic and static analysers?
That is deeply subjective, but defer and errdefer make it much easier to handle errors. Lets say you acquire 4 resources in your function, but after allocating 3 of them you need to return an error and release the resources. In c you have to write that out completely, which becomes messy. In zig it is handled automatically without hidden destructors. But this is all subjective and i dont believe you even understand what the language can do. So i think you should look that up before being so hostile
I'm familiar with Zig, otherwise I wouldn't refuse it. errdefer is nice, but goto chains, smaller functions, cleanup attribute, ... are all not that much more complicated if you don't write spaghetti code. But a bit of syntactic sugar doesn't outweigh the many downsides of Zig. Whereas e.g. Rust actually offers useful features and improves security Zig provides nothing.
This is actually hilarious. Who wants yet another package manager, cares about hidden allocations (zig doesn't support systems where this would be an argument), is amazed by the fact that it supports nostdlib (as most of the other languages), or "tooling" that just lacks the most fundamental features developers actually want. What a shit show.
C interop, and overall if you want the "better C experience" rather than the "better C++ experience" that Rust provides. A nice thing from Zig is that everything is very explicit.
I think that’s a little harsh… I see it as a language that could really work well in micro controllers / environments where C is still the go to option. Rust can work in those contexts, and is often a better choice. But zig has a niche there if you have to resort to a lot of unsafe rust.
Zig doesn't even support micro controllers or common embedded architectures and probably never will given the small interest in the language and the lack of developers.
They say they what do that feature right, not partially right(like rust does)... thing is, that feature seem very hard to do right.. thing is "very hard" isn't "impossible".. although it's definitely "AI possible".
Now why they aren't just forking Zig to add that feature? I guess it's be a core feature a bit to deep to not get a bit of support from the official Zig team?
This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side."
I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side.
For them to comparable they also have to share 1:1 features with no added functionality in between. People tend to conveniently omit overhead added by functionality that's blatantly missing just to say "totally X language works".
ISTM that in this day and age, non-llm-augmented devs are going to be the extreme minority, if not today then soon.
The project ecosystems will have to come to accept this and revise their processes accordingly. Yes, it will be a tumultuous transition period and safeguards for new contributors will be imagined and tried, but the genie is not going back into the bottle.
The project ecosystems will have to come to accept this and revise their processes accordingly.
They really don't though! I agree with you that non-LLM-augmented development will be a small minority as well, but they have very clear reasons for their anti-AI policy based on attempting to accept contributions today. They're not even anti-AI, it's just that most people who attempted PRs in the past did drive-by 10k line PRs or worse, couldn't follow up in a code review and lied by having an LLM impersonate them when responding to a maintainer.
I'm actually not one of those "memory safety is a skill issue people". However, bugs happen in every language, and Zig definitely does require more thought and caution around memory management. Personally, I think Bun behaves as quite an unserious project, between the vibe-coding and forking Zig.
Agreed. It’s a shame because I love Go and C# for being mostly batteries included— especially if you take 1st party packages into account. Bun promised to bring that to the Typescript world, maybe freeing us from npm hell. The way it’s vibed up and slapped together, though… does not make me confident.
Bun IS very good at being a JS alternative to Python though. Python is batteries included, and it's really nice to be able to write in TypeScript with way, way more available to you without needing to touch the nightmare that is NPM.
I've also got a personal project using it I've been working on for several months because Bun has a really good built-in single executable build option, so I can bundle my code and all of my deps into an EXE or whatever.
But Bun does have some critiques against Zig due to their anti AI policies (Bun basically can't upstream improvements easily and use their own Zig fork for development), so there is definitely some motivation behind it.
The Rust compiler is much slower than the Zig compiler. Maybe people should start focusing on engineering excellence. Also, the contributors behind Zig work for free if they want improvements, it's up to them to invest in the zig foundation rather than just computing resources, so they can hire more people and make a broader contribution to the community
They don’t need to not be able to write could to justify it. Could just find it massively valuable to be able to use LLMs and a lack of benefits to sticking with Zig otherwise.
These critiques are bullshit by the way as the actual reason is that the bun version is pushing custom improvements for the LLVM backend, whereas Zig is moving to its own non-LLVM compiler, which by the way is faster than the bun version.
bew78@reddit
Why ?
Parachuteee@reddit
Zig has a strict no ai policy which means Bun cannot contribute to zig and has to maintain their own fork and handle constant conflicts and so on.
potatokbs@reddit
Couldn’t they just contribute…without using ai? Am I missing something? Or have people legitimately lost the ability to write code without llms already
syklemil@reddit
Given the lead maintainer's views on LLM-generated code that seems … highly unlikely to be something they'd be interested in.
phillipcarter2@reddit
The very legitimate performance improvements to Zig co-authored by Claude are explicitly rejected by the Zig maintainers.
These improvements were not mindlessly vibe-coded, but made in the way you'd want them to, using the LLM as a powerful tool, and tested against a pretty good use case (a JS server runtime). But the improvements were co-authored by an AI agent, thus are not accepted into Zig's codebase.
And so yes, in theory someone working on Bun could hand-copy over the code, read and understand it all (which they likely have done already), and make some PRs against Zig, but ... the provenance of the code is still AI, not a human. And so it goes against the contribution policy.
helloworldpi@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1t480nm/comment/ok1jgse/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
the other enhancement they discussed is splitting the LLVM backend’s output into multiple modules. There’s nothing wrong with doing this for Debug builds in theory, but it’s simply not the right place for us to focus our efforts. The Tweet showing off this feature showed a compile time of 20 seconds for Bun. However, we view 20 seconds as an entirely unacceptable amount of time to wait for every single rebuild. This change to the LLVM backend has a hard performance ceiling, which Bun’s implementation has probably hit, because there’s no getting around the final bottleneck of LLVM’s compilation speed.
They also said before that they want to implement some of the changes but that it was "hacked together for a headline" which it was. AI aside they had valid reason to reject it.
ItsBarney01@reddit
Bun is pwned by anthropic
potatokbs@reddit
Right… so are they not capable of coding without an llm because of that? They can still vibe code their own product all day long if they want…
TheLunaLem@reddit
I think it has to do with optics, not really skill. Anthropic wants to project the opinion that they are 100% using ai, no manual coding. Them contributing "manually" to zig goes against that opinion, and even if they downplayed it as "well it is a necessary evil" it would still impact that perception/message they want to send across.
So I assume they just prefered the cost of the rewrite to the bad optics that writing manual code could generate.
phillipcarter2@reddit
What? In what world does what you said make any sense, let alone have any evidence to support it?
Zig has a no AI policy and a lot of the forked improvements were co-authored by an AI agent. And so they literally cannot contribute this code, no matter how battle-tested it is, back into the core codebase.
potatokbs@reddit
Yea that makes sense, still seems a bit crazy to me though!
kayinfire@reddit
you must be new here brother. people don't think logically in the modern day tech industry. the people who pay the salaries persistently and ubiquitously commit to perverse decisions that technical people would writhe at. i advise you to stop thinking these people have sound technical sense with respect to what they're doing
tnemec@reddit
Welcome to the modern tech industry.
If you want a million dollars, focus on building or doing something useful, as efficiently as you can.
If you want billions of dollars, focus on doing a song and dance to prove to VCs how dedicated you are to The New Popular Thing™.
blind_ninja_guy@reddit
It's kind of funny to me because anyone with an no AI policy'll be obsolete in a year anyway.
vivainio@reddit
Or you know, they could switch to rust
ridicalis@reddit
Can you imagine the CEO of Wendy's swinging by BK on the way home from work?
Actually, wait, bad example; those burger-chain CEOs are a little off.
HappyAngrySquid@reddit
“This foodstuff is delicious. It pairs well with our liquid foodstuffs. Buy some!”
T-MoneyAllDey@reddit
Product
Jmc_da_boss@reddit
I doubt they (anthropic) were ever able to. The most dog shit of "programmers" work there. Look at their products lmao
jonathancast@reddit
Yes.
helloworldpi@reddit
That would require skill and effort.
Hot-Employ-3399@reddit
They can also contribute without using text editor, just do
echo >file.cIt's just some people don't mind liking tools they use.
PepegaQuen@reddit
why take years to do it
m0j0m0j@reddit
I imagine it would be a constant distrust and friction all the time
charmander_cha@reddit
Simples, seria lento.
CrossFloss@reddit
Unlike Zig, Rust offers security, language stability, a better ecosystem, a larger community, a bus factor > 1 and so on. Zig has no niche and is just another language the no one needs.
RIFLEGUNSANDAMERICA@reddit
Zig has no niche? I dont know how you come up with this
CrossFloss@reddit
Then what is its niche? It has no noteworthy advantages over C, you would lose support for several platforms by switching and also all tooling around it. Has Zig even support for proper dynamic and static analysers?
RIFLEGUNSANDAMERICA@reddit
That is deeply subjective, but defer and errdefer make it much easier to handle errors. Lets say you acquire 4 resources in your function, but after allocating 3 of them you need to return an error and release the resources. In c you have to write that out completely, which becomes messy. In zig it is handled automatically without hidden destructors. But this is all subjective and i dont believe you even understand what the language can do. So i think you should look that up before being so hostile
CrossFloss@reddit
I'm familiar with Zig, otherwise I wouldn't refuse it. errdefer is nice, but goto chains, smaller functions, cleanup attribute, ... are all not that much more complicated if you don't write spaghetti code. But a bit of syntactic sugar doesn't outweigh the many downsides of Zig. Whereas e.g. Rust actually offers useful features and improves security Zig provides nothing.
_Noreturn@reddit
Zig seems like C++ but 10x worse
CrossFloss@reddit
I'm not sure about that though...
piesou@reddit
I've got no skin in the game, but why should I ever choose Zig over Kotlin or Rust?
Username_Taken46@reddit
https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/
CrossFloss@reddit
This is actually hilarious. Who wants yet another package manager, cares about hidden allocations (zig doesn't support systems where this would be an argument), is amazed by the fact that it supports nostdlib (as most of the other languages), or "tooling" that just lacks the most fundamental features developers actually want. What a shit show.
Bergasms@reddit
Cross compilation. People use zig to cross compile rust.
thuiop1@reddit
C interop, and overall if you want the "better C experience" rather than the "better C++ experience" that Rust provides. A nice thing from Zig is that everything is very explicit.
letemeatpvc@reddit
C interop is Zig’s killer feature
uahw@reddit
I think that’s a little harsh… I see it as a language that could really work well in micro controllers / environments where C is still the go to option. Rust can work in those contexts, and is often a better choice. But zig has a niche there if you have to resort to a lot of unsafe rust.
CrossFloss@reddit
Zig doesn't even support micro controllers or common embedded architectures and probably never will given the small interest in the language and the lack of developers.
Global_Persimmon_469@reddit
Also AI is probably better at writing Rust than Zig
PrimozDelux@reddit
devastating truth
personator01@reddit
Boss calls were made, have to juice those token burn rates somehow
XLNBot@reddit
Friendship ended with Zig
lenswipe@reddit
now rust is my new best friend
Nzkx@reddit
Memory leak.
ego100trique@reddit
What are you waffling
Nzkx@reddit
The hard reality.
Massive-Collection80@reddit
https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilation-times/15183/19?u=badtuple
Not because of the ai policy of zig, just read link please. Even though ai policy also counts, but it is not the main reason
devraj7@reddit
Sure but even if the PR were perfect, they would still reject it because of AI. It's literally in their manifest.
badpotato@reddit
They say they what do that feature right, not partially right(like rust does)... thing is, that feature seem very hard to do right.. thing is "very hard" isn't "impossible".. although it's definitely "AI possible".
Now why they aren't just forking Zig to add that feature? I guess it's be a core feature a bit to deep to not get a bit of support from the official Zig team?
cesarbiods@reddit
🦀 supremacy
reallokiscarlet@reddit
Slopremacy more like
Clanker schlop
PatagonianCowboy@reddit
Fake news btw, Jarred comment:
"I work on Bun and this is my branch
This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side."
Devatator_@reddit
Man I fucking hate reddit.
Efficient-Chair6250@reddit
Hopefully not comparing performance of a hand optimized implementation against a vibe-coded port
exapunk_11@reddit
For them to comparable they also have to share 1:1 features with no added functionality in between. People tend to conveniently omit overhead added by functionality that's blatantly missing just to say "totally X language works".
vincentofearth@reddit
If anyone’s familiar with the strategy of boosting benchmarks by omitting features, it’s bun
Civil_Rent4208@reddit
does anyone know why they are doing this, what are the reasons Jarred Sumner gave for this, if you have any link then share it
lesleh@reddit
The comments reference https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/30/zig-anti-ai/ as a reason which would make sense now that Anthropic owns Bun.
CrackerJackKittyCat@reddit
ISTM that in this day and age, non-llm-augmented devs are going to be the extreme minority, if not today then soon.
The project ecosystems will have to come to accept this and revise their processes accordingly. Yes, it will be a tumultuous transition period and safeguards for new contributors will be imagined and tried, but the genie is not going back into the bottle.
phillipcarter2@reddit
They really don't though! I agree with you that non-LLM-augmented development will be a small minority as well, but they have very clear reasons for their anti-AI policy based on attempting to accept contributions today. They're not even anti-AI, it's just that most people who attempted PRs in the past did drive-by 10k line PRs or worse, couldn't follow up in a code review and lied by having an LLM impersonate them when responding to a maintainer.
araujoms@reddit
And that blog post references this one, which I think makes a great argument: https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/
asmx85@reddit
https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20sigsegv%20OR%20sigtrap%20OR%20sigbus
Annual_Pudding1125@reddit
Definitely the fault of the programmers, not the language.
asmx85@reddit
If you use a language that don't allow the majority of this i would debate this position.
Annual_Pudding1125@reddit
I'm actually not one of those "memory safety is a skill issue people". However, bugs happen in every language, and Zig definitely does require more thought and caution around memory management. Personally, I think Bun behaves as quite an unserious project, between the vibe-coding and forking Zig.
HappyAngrySquid@reddit
Agreed. It’s a shame because I love Go and C# for being mostly batteries included— especially if you take 1st party packages into account. Bun promised to bring that to the Typescript world, maybe freeing us from npm hell. The way it’s vibed up and slapped together, though… does not make me confident.
joelkurian@reddit
Bro is vibing over 9000.
https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/compare/claude/phase-a-port
kharbaan_@reddit
I feel so bad for future bun users lmao
helloworldpi@reddit
As soon as I started seeing claude rise in the contributor list I knew the project was doomed. You don't vibe code zig and build a good product.
GenazaNL@reddit
Check the amount of commits from robobun, their AI agent
NenAlienGeenKonijn@reddit
People have been stabbed for less
sweetno@reddit
OMG the fabled 100x developer!
Get_Shaky@reddit
just wondering anyone actually uses and benefits from bun?
Sloshy42@reddit
In production? Not really.
Bun IS very good at being a JS alternative to Python though. Python is batteries included, and it's really nice to be able to write in TypeScript with way, way more available to you without needing to touch the nightmare that is NPM.
I've also got a personal project using it I've been working on for several months because Bun has a really good built-in single executable build option, so I can bundle my code and all of my deps into an EXE or whatever.
Infiniteh@reddit
I use it in prod docker containers so I can just run TS without transpiling to JS.
Ok-Armadillo-5634@reddit
I use it on pretty much every project it's way faster if your project is huge.
bb22k@reddit
They are just experimenting...
But Bun does have some critiques against Zig due to their anti AI policies (Bun basically can't upstream improvements easily and use their own Zig fork for development), so there is definitely some motivation behind it.
aabbdev@reddit (OP)
The Rust compiler is much slower than the Zig compiler. Maybe people should start focusing on engineering excellence. Also, the contributors behind Zig work for free if they want improvements, it's up to them to invest in the zig foundation rather than just computing resources, so they can hire more people and make a broader contribution to the community
AresFowl44@reddit
Mind explaining what exactly this comment is responding to?
cosmic-parsley@reddit
> Maybe people should start focusing on engineering excellence.
Lmao wat
267aa37673a9fa659490@reddit
Seems concerning that they are so dependent on AI that they can no longer write code traditionally even when needed.
NeoliberalSocialist@reddit
They don’t need to not be able to write could to justify it. Could just find it massively valuable to be able to use LLMs and a lack of benefits to sticking with Zig otherwise.
Infiniteh@reddit
Bun got acquired by antropic, so it's about optics.
thuiop1@reddit
These critiques are bullshit by the way as the actual reason is that the bun version is pushing custom improvements for the LLVM backend, whereas Zig is moving to its own non-LLVM compiler, which by the way is faster than the bun version.
NIdavellir22@reddit
Rewritten to Rust slop*
KindOfPoo@reddit
r/programmingcirclejerk
Deranged40@reddit
So, it's... in the oven?
backwrds@reddit
the last thing reddit needs is _more_ AI slop. An unadorned bare github link is preferable.