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Comment by wesselbindt | Hacker News Reader

In Dutch there's a saying, "wij van wc eend adviseren wc eend", and it fits perfectly.

Frenchman here, I Google Translated that and it says

"We at WC Duck recommend WC Duck"... I'm left scratching my head, if you'd care to spell out what the saying means for non-Dutch I'd appreciate it :)

It was a commercial slogan for a toilet cleaning agent. An English equivalent would be "mr clean recommends you use mr clean". Today, it is used to point out when someone tells you they themselves delivered good work. Anytime you'd use the meme of Obama giving himself a medal, you could use this phrase.

The Toilet Duck brand exists in English. Canard-WC in French, even.

Actually the existence of the French name is confusing for English speakers as although many would know enough school French to get "canard" == "duck" if prompted, in English this word ends up meaning some sort of fabrication or hoax, apparently from an old French joke where somehow that punchline of that joke was popularized in England so long ago we don't have records. Human culture is weird.

So the first thing an English native might get from "Canard WC" is probably hoax toilet, I expect the duck imagery of the product would bring the "canard" == "duck" meaning across though.

I probably should have figured part of it out from my basic German, but I guess the Dutch don't capitalise nouns?

I don't see how it does. Claude Code is an extremely widely used product; the preceding comment offered an objective evaluation target, not a "trust me it's good" argument.

I don't see how Claude code being a widely used product is relevant to the person who orchestrated the Rust rewrite of bun saying that the orchestration of the Rust rewrite of bun went well. Wc eend is a widely used product as well, if that helps.

Ah, for context, which I suspect you may be unaware of, Jarred (the person who said the rewrite to rust went well) is the creator of bun, and the guy behind the rewrite.

I think the chain of reasoning is not hard to follow:

1. Assume the Rust rewrite of Bun went badly

2. Then something must be grievously wrong with a released bun runtime based on that code

3. Claude Code uses the released bun runtime based on that code

4. From #2 and #3, something must be grievously wrong with Claude Code

5. If something were grievously wrong with Claude Code, users would reduce use of Claude Code and use alternative tools

6. From #4 and #5, users are reducing use of Claude Code and using alternative tools

7. Claude Code has wide use and use is growing across all software engineering verticals

8. #6 and #7 contradict

9. From the contradiction, the assumption in #1 is false

The parts that are not explicitly spelled out here are an exercise for the reader. It doesn't really matter if the guy who wrote Bun said this or my uncle said this.

Ok, thanks for explaining! Doesn't really explain how the wc eend expression _doesn't_ apply here (which would be hard to do, because it _does_ apply, since this is someone praising their own work, and it doesn't get more straightforwardly applicable than that), but I do really appreciate the effort.

I always thought it was common sense and just basic critical thinking to take people paid by Anthropic praising products of Anthropic with a grain of salt (and let's be clear, that's what this is), but apparently it's not.

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