AI companies talk as if engineering is over. Their acquisitions say the opposite.
Anthropic’s AI agent was the most prolific code contributor to Bun’s GitHub repository, submitting more merged pull requests than any human developer. Then Anthropic paid millions to acquire the human team anyway. The code was MIT-licensed; they could have forked it for free. Instead, they bought the people.
Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished.”
Boards repeat it. CFOs love it. Some CTOs quietly use it to justify hiring freezes and stalled promotion paths.
The Bun acquisition blows a hole in that story.
Here’s a team whose project was open source, whose most active contributor was an AI agent, whose code Anthropic legally could have copied overnight. No negotiations. No equity. No retention packages.
Anthropic still fought competitors for the right to buy that group.
Publicly, AI companies talk like engineering is being automated away. Privately, they deploy millions of dollars to acquire engineers who already work with AI at full tilt. That contradiction is not a PR mistake. It is a signal.
The key constraint is obvious once you say it out loud. The bottleneck isn’t code production, it is judgment.
Anthropic’s own announcement barely talked about Bun’s existing codebase. It praised the team’s ability to rethink the JavaScript toolchain “from first principles”.
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