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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

> Saying "because they vibe coded we are dropping support for Bun" sounds political.

I don't think "political" is necessarily a bad thing. Engaging in politics is how you shape the world. The mere act of writing and maintaining yt-dlp is quite political considering the context of IP law and enforcement that we live in.

It happens that in this case that I'd disagree with their politics if that's why they are dropping Bun support - I think there's a great deal of value in moving to memory safe languages, little harm in accepting anthropic compute and funding to do so, and that use LLMs themselves is roughly value neutral (though many uses are very much not value neutral). That said reasonable people definitely disagree with me.

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vibe coding isn't a political topic lol

this amounts to "i don't trust this dependency anymore, so i'm cutting it out for my own good"

that's fine

That's not what I meant by political. I meant political in the more modern sense of "appealing to emotion rather than thought".

EDIT:

Everyone is rightfully calling me out that this doesn't make a lot of sense. What I meant is that the move is driven by ideology. I think there is a lot of overlap between politics and ideology, and an increasing amount of overlap between ideology and emotion. But it's fair enough to call me out here.

Wait, expecting all code to be verified and tested by a human is not engineering-driven but instead emotion-driven mindset???

What code is fully, or even primarily, tested by a human? Haven't you heard of automated testing suites, regression testing, conformance testing..?

Test code written by a human counts as "tested by a human". Also, most code is literally tested (manually) by humans in addition to automated tests. You are being pointlessly pedantic.

Bun has a test suite of tens of thousands of tests. For purely non-functional changes, like refactors or rewrites (e.g. a Rust rewrite) I rely primarily on test suites, not manual testing, in order to ensure that nothing regressed. I mean, sure, I am going to poke around, too, but the test suite is the encoding of thousands of obscure bugs and issues over years. There is no way my manual testing will be able to cover the same ground.

> Test code written by a human counts as "tested by a human".

Were Bun's tests generated by an LLM? If they were, were they read by a human afterwards to be validated?

Publicly based on my calculations[1] there only ~20k tests. I would say they are usual tests for the runtime. Constantly running on the CI much lesser amount. Average test count/line of code ratio drops after rewrite. And even before Node have denser tests count/LOC ratio

[1] https://kant2002.github.io/en/llm/2026/05/16/bun-pr-analysis...

If I were to mirror your tone, I'd ask you if you've ever heard of the basic courtesy of running your code manually yourself before you waste anyone else's time with it... Or whether you've heard about QA, or about making demos for Product or for customers...

Neither of these can be replaced by an automated test suite of any kind, and all of these are examples of good engineering practices that guarantee software quality.

Additionally, even if you don't (need to) adhere to the best engineering practices and instead rely solely on an automated test suite, the tests in this suite must be validated - read and understood - by a human in order to guarantee that they nail down the correct requirements.

> I meant political in the more modern sense of "appealing to emotion rather than thought".

I'm not familiar with this definition in any modern or archaic sense. Is there somewhere I can read about it? Just because a decision is not directly engineering related (which I'm not even convinced this is) doesn't mean that it's not thoughtful.

"Political" here means "I don't like it"

That's fair - I updated my comment a little. What I mean is that the decision was driven by an ideological basis, not an empirical one. Bun was written with AI, AI doesn't fit with my ideology, therefore I reject it. As opposed to Bun has these new problems X Y and Z, therefore I reject it.

The irony of this comment on an app that is:

- free and open source, which is an ideology, and that

- expands access to otherwise locked down media, which is again an ideological stance

That has nothing to do with what "politics" means but it's exactly how people have started using "political" to mean "idea I don't agree with".

I think there is a lot of overlap between politics and ideology, and an increasing amount of overlap between ideology and emotion.

I think it's fair to call me out for skipping a step, but I wasn't using it to mean "idea I don't agree with".

>I wasn't using it to mean "idea I don't agree with".

I believe, maliciously or innocently, you were.

> I think there is a lot of overlap between politics and ideology

What is politics without ideology?

Power struggle. Lying about manager from other team so that you look better. That sort of thing is regularly called politics.

Interesting that you think there is no ideology involved in that kind of politics writ small.

In software engineering the word has also long meant "a decision not made purely on technical terms"

That's a perfectly cromulent meaning of the word.

I can't see how this counts as "political" or "ideological" by your definition unless you believe that emotion can't exist as part of any decision, in which case you should give up interacting with human beings entirely.

Regardless, the decision was 99% logical. In fact, even the emotional parts are laudable. For example, I love software. That's an emotion. If you disagree with that foundation, we will fundamentally never be able to converse with each other about what's best for software.

The opposite of political would be someone saying "I have observed that Bun has X, Y and Z bugs -- therefore we are no longer support it". An example of this is the recent announcement that Ghostty is leaving GitHub[1]. Compare and contrast the rationale:

> I've felt this way for a long time, but for the past month I've kept a journal where I put an "X" next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage3. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.

That isn't ideological in the slightest. Count the X's, and move off once you see too many.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579

But unless you're doing that for every service you use (and not just the ones that annoy you), that's still the same logic. Deciding to count something is just as "political" (as you put it) as choosing to not count something.

Humans have always appealed to emotion - as part of their logical process.

Fear (emotion) is used (advantageously) to force us to check that something isn't going to break us

In this instance fear is being used to ensure that yt-dlp is not exposed to (genuine) concerns about the quality of bun that is openly being built making use of tools we as a whole know is problematic.

I agree with you that the statements are a bit over the top (that's an emotional response to their statements btw) and that (eventually) you would /hope/ that bun gets to a point where it's got some genuine reliability from a users perspective.

Edit: I see your edit to explain that the issue is ideology - but unfortunately (perhaps) that's not an improved stance - ideology has to guide us when we just don't know - it's a heuristic.

Whole OSS is driven by ideology. It does not exiat without ideology. And not just that, whole massive development companies are driven by ideologies.

OpenAI itself is a bundle of ideologies and pretend ideologies. Thw whole puah for AI and AIG is way more about emotions and ideology then about business ir engineering.

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