A 100-Megabyte Binary for a CLI

Anthropic just announced that Claude Code is now available as a native build . Translation: a binary executable you can install with a curl command that doesn't need Node.js.

Sounds good, right? One command, no dependencies, background auto-updates. Any CLI tool's dream.

But there's a catch: the binary weighs 100MB.

To put this in perspective, the git binary weighs about 3MB. curl is less than 1MB. Even Go, which has a reputation for generating fat binaries, rarely exceeds 15-20MB.

What the hell is inside those 100 megs?

It's Not Rust, It's Bun in an Executable Suit

When I saw the announcement, my first thought was: "They've rewritten everything in Rust." Makes sense, right? If you want a native binary that's fast and runtime-free, Rust is the obvious choice.

Well, turns out that's not the case.

Claude Code is still TypeScript.…