What If Lock-In Doesn’t Matter So Much Anymore?
The article discusses the decreasing significance of programming language lock-in due to advancements in agentic programming. It highlights the rapid rewrite of the Bun toolkit in Rust, completed in just six days, showcasing the flexibility of modern programming practices. This trend is reflected in various technology sectors, where companies feel more comfortable switching languages or frameworks as needed.
- ▪Mitchell Hashimoto notes that programming languages are becoming less of a lock-in factor in modern development.
- ▪The Bun toolkit was rewritten in Rust in just six days, demonstrating the ease of switching programming languages.
- ▪Companies are increasingly willing to adopt new technologies, knowing they can revert to previous solutions if necessary.
kottke.org files mainly under culture. We currently carry 93 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | kottke.org |
| Canonical URL | https://kottke.org/26/05/what-if-lock-in-doesnt-matter-so-much-anymore |
| Publication time | 2026-05-20T21:25:00Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T21:35:03.014Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T21:35:03.014Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | BbcQMNdhsA6R |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
posted May 20 @ 05:25 PM by Jason Kottke · gift link What If Lock-In Doesn’t Matter So Much Anymore? Interesting observation by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant and Ghostty) on how a company’s or product’s choice of programming language matters less in the age of agentic programming: On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they’re increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. It’s useful until it’s not then it can be thrown out.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at kottke.org.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from kottke.org
