Recently, Anthropic did something super interesting: it purchased Bun, a popular JavaScript bundler which at first seemed odd, but I am hoping it’s for the following reason.
The tooling gap
One of the liabilities with vibe coding is that what they produce is tied to the browser, but what we need is tooling and utilities that solve problems in the real world, which for most of us is our desktops.
I often get requests for helping people build automation tools, something that will generate PDFs from a series of images or batch through a bunch of diagrams to generate alt tags, etc. It’ is’s easy enough to tell the AI to generate a Python script and, as long as you have Python, a terminal, and pip installed, you can “easily” (or so we developers say) take care of these tasks. Some days I feel like I could just show people how to run things with python in the terminal.
But, for non-developers, this is ridiculous and boring. That is why the Bun purchase is important, even though its strength today is as a developer tool. For reference, Bun was created as an answer to Node.js, a tool that is foundational to how almost the entire interactive web works. It manages utilities (called modules) often used by software and helps apps ship faster because nobody has to build everything from scratch, you just use whichever package you need.
Why Bun?
At first, this purchase does not seem to make a lot of sense. Why buy an open source project? How does that even work when something like Bun is an open source MIT licensed project? According to the announcement on the Bun blog, several things stay the same: it remains open source and MIT licensed, the same team keeps working on it, and it continues to be built in public on GitHub.
So what gives? What are they actually going to do with it? On the site, it mentions that the Bun team will also get to work on Claude Code and the Claude Agent SDK, along with future AI coding tools.
The missing BUNdler
Like Node.js, Bun is a bundler that can package all of your modules and original code into an app. That’s exactly what vibe coded apps desperately need in order to move to the next level.
Right now, apps like Google Gemini are limited in what they can build. They live in a constrained, single document structure that prevents them from behaving like full fledged applications. However, if you add infrastructure through a bundler, they will be able to use the full power of web apps, connecting to and running external tools with security and modularity.
Once these apps reach a certain level of complexity, I have to extract the code into its own GitHub repo and rebuild it with traditional app infrastructure such as Node.js, Vite, etc. That is fine for a developer who is used to that workflow, but Bun can make this step much more direct and automated.
Beyond the browser
I think Anthropic and others should go even further. What the world really needs is a bundler for regular apps that can run on the desktop, with access to everything desktop apps can do, that can be easily packaged and shipped directly out of chat or vibe coding environments.
Anthropic is already more focused on business and enterprise use cases, while ChatGPT leans more consumer. Seen through that lens, the Bun investment is smart because it strengthens the developer infrastructure behind Claude and makes it easier for businesses to go from “AI generated prototype” to “actual shippable software,” not just browser-only demos.
