Comment by abnercoimbre

Comment by abnercoimbre 14 hours ago

9 replies

Handmade Cities founder here.

We never associated with Bun other than extending an invitation to rent a job booth at a conference: this was years ago when I had a Twitter account, so it's fair if Jarred doesn't remember.

If Handmade Cities had the opportunity to collaborate with Bun today, we would not take it, even prior to this acquisition. HMC wants to level up systems while remaining performant, snappy and buttery smooth. Notable examples include File Pilot [0] or my own Terminal Click (still early days) [1], both coming from bootstrapped indie devs.

I'll finish with a quote from a blog post [2]:

> Serious Handmade projects, like my own Terminal Click, don’t gain from AI. It does help at the margins: I’ve delegated website work since last year, and I enjoy seamless CI/CD for my builds. This is meaningful. However, it fails at novel problems and isn’t practical for my systems programming work.

All that said, I congratulate Bun even as we disagree on philosophy. I imagine it's no small feat getting acquired!

[0] https://filepilot.tech

[1] https://terminal.click

[2] https://handmadecities.com/news/summer-update-2025/

kopochameleon 12 hours ago

Finding this comment interesting, parent comment didn't suggest any past association but it seemingly uses project reference as pivot point to do various outgroup counter signaling / neg bun?

  • abnercoimbre 11 hours ago

    I understand the concern, but really? I found this quote enough to offer proper comments:

    > had a vague idea that "Zig people" were generally "Software You Can Love" or "Handmade Software Movement" types

    Folks at Bun are "Zig people" for obvious reasons, and a link was made with Handmade software. This happened multiple times before with Bun specifically, so my response is not a "pivot" of any kind. I've highlighted and constrasted our differences to prevent further associations inside a viral HN thread. That's not unreasonable.

    I also explicitly congratulated them for the acquisition.

    • tomnipotent 8 hours ago

      > and a link was made with Handmade software

      I'm willing to wager that 99.99% of readers do not associate "Handmade" with the org you're associated with, and that most didn't know it existed until this comment. So yes "really", without OP replying, it's understandable that the poster you're replying inferred it had nothing to do with you.

    • losvedir 10 hours ago

      Indeed, you cleared up exactly the misconception I had. Thanks for chiming in to clarify

    • [removed] 10 hours ago
      [deleted]
jatins 6 hours ago

I think you may have confused parent commenter's "Handmade software movement" types comment to Handmade cities which doesn't seem related to me other than the common word handmade

biofunsf 8 hours ago

I might missing some context. Just to check my understanding: HMC and Bun aren't a good match anymore because Bun devs use LLM/AI tooling more than HMC? Basically to really level up a system is incompatible these tools? (IYHO)

Thank you! I appreciated how you wrote up this clarifying.

kristianp 10 hours ago

I like that the filepilot download is 2.1MB. That really illustrates the difference between handmade style stuff and well, most other stuff.