Celebrating Bun

In the rapidly evolving world of developer tooling, the best founders don’t just build great products, they see inflection points before others do and have the courage to act on them. Jarred Sumner and the Bun team have done exactly that.

When we first met Jarred in 2022, Bun had just launched v0.1.0 and hit 20k GitHub stars in its first week. The vision was incredibly ambitious: a bundler, transpiler, runtime, test runner, and package manager, all in one blazingly fast tool. 

What started as Jarred’s side project to fix slow Next.js hot reload times had turned into something developers around the world were excited about. Jarred’s technical vision and relentless focus on developer experience was clear, and we proudly led Bun (then called Oven’s) Seed. 

Bun grew from a promising tool to production infrastructure powering companies like X, Midjourney, and Tailwind’s standalone CLI. Monthly downloads surged past 7 million, and the community rallied around it as a genuine alternative to Node.js.

But the best founders adapt. As AI coding tools went from “cool demo” to “actually useful” over the past year, Jarred noticed something: Bun’s single-file executables were perfect for distributing AI coding agents. Claude Code, FactoryAI, OpenCode…they were all built with Bun. 

The infrastructure layer matters more when agents are writing code. Ultimately, Bun’s next chapter is again where software development as a whole is headed. Bun remains open-source, MIT-licensed, and built in public, now with the resources of a world-class AI lab behind them. We can’t wait to see what the Bun team builds next.

— Leigh Marie