I would have thought LLM-generated code would run a bit counter to both of those. I had sort of carved the world into "vibe coders" who care about the eventual product but don't care so much about the "craft" of code, and people who get joy out of the actual process of coding and designing beautiful abstractions and data structures and all that, which I didn't really think worked with LLM code.
But I guess not, and this definitely causes me to update my understanding of what LLM-generated code can look like (in my day to day, I mostly see what I would consider as not very good code when it comes from an LLM).
Would you say your usage of Claude Code was more "around the edges", doing things like writing tests and documentation and such? Or did it actually help in real, crunchy problems in the depths of low level Zig code?
We never associated with Bun other than extending an invitation to rent a job booth at a conference: this was years ago when I had a Twitter account, so it's fair if Jarred doesn't remember.
If Handmade Cities had the opportunity to collaborate with Bun today, we would not take it, even prior to this acquisition. HMC wants to level up systems while remaining performant, snappy and buttery smooth. Notable examples include File Pilot [0] or my own Terminal Click (still early days) [1], both coming from bootstrapped indie devs.
I'll finish with a quote from a blog post [2]:
> Serious Handmade projects, like my own Terminal Click, don’t gain from AI. It does help at the margins: I’ve delegated website work since last year, and I enjoy seamless CI/CD for my builds. This is meaningful. However, it fails at novel problems and isn’t practical for my systems programming work.
All that said, I congratulate Bun even as we disagree on philosophy. I imagine it's no small feat getting acquired!
> had a vague idea that "Zig people" were generally "Software You Can Love" or "Handmade Software Movement" types
Folks at Bun are "Zig people" for obvious reasons, and a link was made with Handmade software. This happened multiple times before with Bun specifically, so my response is not a "pivot" of any kind. I've highlighted and constrasted our differences to prevent further associations inside a viral HN thread. That's not unreasonable.
I also explicitly congratulated them for the acquisition.