Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds

A rebel coder says Bun is a mess, bans human help, and commenters are obsessed

TLDR: Buz is an early attempt to remake Bun into something cleaner and easier to maintain, and its creator says the original code is such a mess that human help is temporarily off-limits. Commenters are split between cheering the cleanup mission, laughing at the “no humans allowed” rule, and doubting one person can keep it alive.

A work-in-progress project called Buz has arrived with a deliciously chaotic pitch: take an older version of Bun, rebuild it with newer tools, strip out the junk, and make it faster to work on. The creator says they’ve already cut 11,000 lines of dead code, fixed piles of bugs, and gotten rebuild times down to under a second. But the detail that sent the peanut gallery into overdrive wasn’t speed — it was the vibe. The developer basically called Bun a giant mountain of “AI slop” and then dropped the most eyebrow-raising rule of all: no human-coded contributions for now.

That line instantly became the real show. One commenter was all in, cheering, “Bun, but managed by someone who values code quality? Sign me up,” while also admitting this is a monster of a cleanup job. Another could barely contain the laughter at a “no humans allowed” policy, calling it absurd — but also weirdly logical. And then the split began: some saw the whole thing as a brave rescue mission, while skeptics rolled their eyes and warned that building and maintaining a full JavaScript runtime is a huge, lonely grind with no guarantee of long-term survival. One especially spicy take argued there’s no irony at all in using artificial intelligence to clean up a codebase that artificial intelligence helped wreck in the first place.

So yes, Buz is a software project. But in the comments, it’s being treated like a reality show: part redemption arc, part roast, part intervention for messy code.

Key Points

  • Buz is an early work-in-progress fork of Bun based on the last commit before Bun’s Rust rewrite and is not production-ready.
  • The project has been ported to build with modern upstream Zig, with sub-1-second incremental builds enabled through its build setup.
  • The build graph is now contained in build.zig and includes vendored JavaScriptCore sources.
  • The author imported newer tests from Rust Bun, but many tests still do not pass and upstream compatibility remains ongoing work.
  • The project reports removal of more than 11,000 lines of dead code, modernization of parts of the codebase, and planned extensive use of LLMs while temporarily rejecting human-coded contributions.

Hottest takes

"Bun, but managed by someone who values code quality? Sign me up." — christophilus
"a 'no humans allowed' contribution policy" — Retr0id
"LLMs are much better at cleaning up a mess." — fp64
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