Dev Team Built and Scrapped a Feature Intentionally to Prove a Point

The team behind KilnForge, an image and archive processing tool, built a fully functional EXIF orientation parser only to deliberately leave it unshipped after discovering Bun.Image already handles orientation internally — shipping it would have double-rotated tagged photos. The project was created as a zero-dependency hackathon entry, replacing the popular sharp and tar libraries entirely using Bun's native Bun.Image and Bun.Archive APIs. Benchmarks showed KilnForge running 1.81x to 10.22x faster than sharp on resize, rotate, and convert tasks, and 41.73x faster than tar at unpacking archives, though it was 1.22x slower at packing. The team also uncovered a reproducibility bug in their own build process, tracing a hash mismatch across three compiles down to just two differing bytes in an 89MB output caused by their own filename. All findings were verified through direct API probing, pixel-level differential comparison, and golden-corpus tests against real sharp and tar output, backed by 263 tests and 6,463 passing assertions.
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