Software Craft vs Industry: Bun's Rust Rewrite, Agents, Seat Belts
Taking the 2026 Bun rewrite from Zig to Rust and the ugly public spat between Andrew Kelley and Jarred Sumner as its cue, this essay asks a question the author has carried through his career: is software production a craft or an industrial process? It combs through tabs-vs-spaces wars, the rise of formatters, Go's deliberate deskilling and work intensification, the Clojure community's hand-tool romance, woodworking hobby culture, and the US government's seat-belt mandates—all to build a metaphor for type systems and Rust's borrow checker. The author argues quality is subjective, 'slop' is in the eye of the beholder, and predicts coding agents will drive software further into industrialisation: language lock-in for small/medium projects disappears, hand craftsmanship becomes a hobby, and quality is increasingly quantified and automated. A thought-provoking culture essay with a clear pro-AI, industrialist viewpoint; not a technical tutorial.