Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke<br>Jul 12, 2026<br>#work<br>#musings<br>#ai<br>#zig<br>#anthropic

I harass the sea with my tiny boat and am called a pirate, you do it with a great fleet and are called a king.

Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering . They need you to believe they can do that. Well, maybe it’s not you that they need to convince. Maybe it’s your C-Suite, various world leaders, or the manager of your retirement fund. They’ve raised $132 billion in investment, and are approaching an IPO valued over $1 trillion. Since they cannot show profitability, this depends on selling their hypothetical future impact.

In literary terms, Anthropic is an unreliable narrator.

One of their key narratives is: Coding is going away, then the rest of software engineering, and eventually most other human labor. This kind of money behind this kind of story has an impact, regardless of how true we think the story is.

People will make architecture, product, and staffing decisions based on these events. Many of those decisions will be based on fear - fear of layoffs, rapture-esk warnings of being “Left Behind”, Doom Trolling, etc…

To make good decisions we need to think clearly, which is hard right now. Put on your skeptical hat.

Views are my own. I have no history with Zig. I’ve never spoken to Andrew Kelley, but found his recent JetBrains interview a great watch.

My interest here is in public literacy about AI in software. That’s been my career focus now for 3 years, along with improving the technology itself. During half of that time I was Chief Architect of a coding agent startup - both a customer of Anthropic’s models and competitor to their agent Claude Code. My current project is The Coding Agency.

So where were we?

This week, Anthropic / Bun put out their explanation of the decision to port Bun from Zig to Rust. This explanation came two months after merging the migration to the mainline. Explaining the direction beforehand would have been more traditional in an infrastructure project like this, but meanwhile the delay conveniently allowed the story to be carried by sexy headlines like The Register’s Anthropic’s Bun Rust rewrite merged at speed of AI. Much invest. Very wow.

Zig’s creator Andrew Kelley has now put out a response with his own thoughts. It’s blunt, to an unusual degree. That has questionable optics. As a general rule, you would not want to worry that when you switch programming languages you will wake up the next morning to the old language’s leader unloading on your personal flaws. As Dax hilariously put it:

guys we have a pretty substantial opensource zig codebase and i’m terrified he’s gonna look at it

Still, as I read Andrew’s piece I found myself cheering out loud. I may have briefly jumped around the room. Some called his take a “meltdown”, all I can say is he’s gained a new fan today.

Sometimes things need to be called out.

What is model behavior?

On my best days I’d aspire to something like Buddhist right speech, a high standard that everything we say should meet all five of these criteria.

Is it true?

Is it helpful?

Is it timely?

Is it kind?

Is it from kindness?

We’re breaking decorum a little, straying into “true, but unkind” territory. I’m defending someone’s choice to do that. I don’t do that lightly, and I hope it’s helpful.

Background

Just to catch you up…

Bun is a TypeScript runtime, like a faster NodeJS.

Zig is a systems programming language, like a modern C.

Bun was written in Zig until recently - one of the largest Zig codebases.

Bun claims near 100% AI contributions.

Zig allows 0% AI contributions.

Bun was acquired by Anthropic, a leading AI model lab.

Bun’s founder experimented with a massive agentic rewrite from Zig to unsafe Rust.

That experiment was merged days later and is now the official version.

This is situation is controversial on a few fronts, though apparently no one involved actually wants Bun to stay in Zig. The drama lives purely in the meta-discussion. The migration process itself is pretty interesting, I would consider doing something similar in the right situation.

Who to believe

When people choose between Zig and Rust for their projects, they will naturally see the Bun situation as a data-point. That fact that one of the biggest Zig users wound up reversing the decision feels relevant, regardless of the reasons. People will try to understand what happened, and decide which is more true:

Anthropic/Bun story : Bun tried everything reasonable, and was still overwhelmed by memory bugs because Zig wasn’t up to the task.

Andrew’s story : The Bun code is a mess because of their engineering decisions, including overusing AI agents to write and review everything.

I’d lean more toward the latter, but I suspect the dominant factor is more boring:

Ray’s story : Faced with a legitimate challenge of memory bugs, there were several viable options....