Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI

Note that this is fundamentally different from the Astral acquisition. At the end of their announcement, they stated:

> Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026.

And earlier in the article:

> Joining OpenAI allows us to extend the mission we started with Cirrus Labs: building new kinds of tooling and environments that make engineers more effective, for both human engineers and agentic engineers.

It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.

This does raise some concerns in major open-source projects:

https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...

Did anyone else think this was Cirrus Logic?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Logic

So AI company buys devs again, but devs are dead

I liked “our incredible journey” more when it wasn’t rushing headlong into OpenMawAI

FTA:

> In 2022, we built Tart, which became the most popular virtualization solution for Apple Silicon, along with several other tools along the way.

from Tart's github:

> [Tart is for] macOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon to use in CI and other automations

My (naive?) hypothesis is this kind of expertise is why OpenAI chose to acquihire.

I've moved most companies away from using others stuff

Today we use Hertzner and OVH and roll out our own solution whenever possible.

Running lean and mean.

Depending on such third party services is a trap.

It looks like OpenAI has no clue what to do and does what every software company without a plan does: create new dev tools and a new dev stack.

So they want an integrated solution with CI, Python packaging and vibe coding.

That is a $100 million valuation at best, not a $1 trillion one.

Incredible how many people are perfectly fine working for a company making AI powered murder bots.

Wow Cirrus was like the one cool CI thing with first-class Podman support. RIP. Guess I'm looking elsewhere (and not at Dagger which refuses to support rootless Podman).

A pity. Cirrus has been providing quite decent CI facilities, for free. One of the advantages (among many) compared to GitHub Actions is the large variety of runner images, e.g., Debian, Fedora, Alpine, FreeBSD, ...

Wow, this is surprising.

I’m happy for the founders, they’re great folks. I contributed to CirrusCI a bit in the past and it was a great experience. I even advocated for Cirrus in a couple of my last $DAYJOBs (with varied success). Congrats Fedor!

I’m very sad they’re shutting down, though. IMHO CirrusCI was very close to a perfect CI system (I wrote a blogpost about it [0]). I’ll now have to find something to replace it with in my personal projects. I guess I’ll run their cirrus-cli in GitHub Actions for a while. But GitHub Actions is really poor. I heard some good things about Buildkite.

[0]: https://garden.pacia.tech/cirrus_ci_is_the_best.html

I don't think people have been keeping track but OpenAI has been hiring a murderer's row of developers for their Codex team.

The level of aqui-hires is getting interesting - at this point, it appears that if one wants one's career to progress, you need to start some kind of tiny startup like Astral or Bun and hope to be notable enough you can get acquired by someone like OpenAI or Anthropic.

It certainly makes the idea of a career progression / promotion more challenging than it used to be, but perhaps it also opens up some new opportunities. It becomes far more "high stakes" since you have to take the risk of starting and running a startup that ultimately fails if it does not get acqui-hired.

Tart is an amazing tool, and I have been very grateful for it. There's almost no other way I've found to stand up ephemeral CI/CD macOS VMs for self-hosted Git forge solutions. I really hope this doesn't mean that Tart will eventually die the death of unmaintained projects (e.g. Realm post-Mongo-acquisition.)

Cirrus gave a ton of support for years to open source projects. I congratulate them on cashing out. Running a business like Cirrus did is always a hard road and I will never fault folks who gave time and resources on their platform away for taking the money.

I wish Fedor and everyone at Cirrus the best of luck and OpenAI and thank them immensely for the years of free CI they gave to us in the Pony programming language despite it not having any marketing value to them.

Interesting move. Cirrus Labs has been doing solid work in mobile CI/CD infrastructure — curious to see how their expertise gets integrated into OpenAI’s tooling and developer ecosystem.

As a tart cli user, I'd love to know more about their "more open" licensing of that particular project that they call out that will follow the merger.

That said, I find their aqui-hire by OpenAI disappointing for a number of (mostly personal) reasons. However, I wish them the best regardless.

Why are they acquiring seemingly random things, they acquired Astral and now this

Tart is really cool, impressive, and useful. Best of luck to the team!

That is a bit sudden, it would be great if it was possible to get an extra month for migration.

Am I reading this right?: a CI company that shuts down CI services with such short notice?

Do service providers not think customers have other things to do than simply maintain their existing infrastructure?

Congratulations!

Can you talk a bit more about your journey without raising funds?

Also what does HN think of that path today when trying to launch a new AI startup?

> I wanted to work on fun and challenging engineering problems, in the hope of bootstrapping a business as a byproduct.

> We never raised outside capital

I guess it worked out though

We have AI companies constantly fear-mongering that their next model is somehow too dangerous to release. But they just continue to go on an acquisition spree.

This just confirms to me that we are no where near AI being able to write any complicated software. I mean, if it could woudln't OpenAI just prompt it into existence? ;)

Looks like tech and talent grab for "Computer use" project

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-computer...

https://github.com/cirruslabs/mtell

What was the USP of their CI service?

AI companies need a surprising amount of people.

It's kind of like electric cars charged with electricity from coal power plants.

I just love how companies like this gaslight the whole world with announcements like this.

We started a company to make a big difference in the world and build an engineer’s dream company, and that’s why we have now decided to do the exact opposite and become employee numbers 32,463 through 32,510 at one of the largest tech companies in the world because money is nice.

Look, I’d have done the same thing, I’m not criticizing the choice. I just think we don’t need this kind of weird unnatural rhetoric.

Please just stop with the tech industry puffery. You’re not Steve Jobs, you’re just the DevOps team at OpenAI now. You’re dumping your worthless code on GitHub, and you’re kicking your customers to the curb.

There’s no PR spin left to do anymore. You’re not a company anymore and you’re not a founder anymore.

Great

yea yea yea, purchase every last company you find, no one wants OpenAI

Another one bites the dust.

[dead]

[dead]

Wow. I have rarely seen a company website with so many buzzwords. Still not sure what they do, except "AI". Good riddance