7 ms·

Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI

282 points by seekdeep 5mo ago

emptysongglass 5mo ago
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).
- codethief 5mo ago
  AFAIU Dagger is moving away from Docker, too. They're working on their own container engine in order to be able to improve caching.
- fkorotkov 5mo ago
  Thank you! Cirrus CLI is still around and can run your tasks locally in either Podman or Docker. Can also be used in any other CI.
  - emptysongglass 5mo ago
    I mean, yes it is, but we all know what happens to these projects when their primary devs move on or get acquihired. Keybase, anyone?
awestroke 5mo ago
Wow. I have rarely seen a company website with so many buzzwords. Still not sure what they do, except "AI". Good riddance
- jeltz 5mo ago
  Cuirrus does not do AI, they do CI.
  - thayne 5mo ago
    There is a theme in a lot of products (and open source projects) of plastering AI all over the description, even if it isn't really related to AI. The first thing I see on the CirrusLabs website is "Accelerate AI Adoption Without Compromising Safety". How am I supposed to know this is a CI product, and even if I figure that out, how am I supposed to know it is a genral CI tool and not something AI specific? I don't understand why these sites just put a bunch of buzzwords instead of telling you what it actually is.
    - fkorotkov 5mo ago
      You are checking the wrong Cirrus Labs.
bombcar 5mo ago
I liked “our incredible journey” more when it wasn’t rushing headlong into OpenMawAI
- jeltz 5mo ago
  Every great journey must have an end. As far as I understand Cirrus CI was struggling due to Github Actions eating their market. Cirrus CI was in my opinion much better than Github Actions but it is hard to compete with a bundled solution.
  - esafak 5mo ago
    What was good about it? It looks pretty ordinary to me: https://cirrus-ci.org/features/ https://cirrus-ci.org/features/
    - jeltz 5mo ago
      Much better UX for viewing logs, more supported platforms. Github Actions in particular is also very unstable.
    - a1o 5mo ago
      It gives a better docker based experience and it also has measurements of memory and cpu usage to help you dimension things quickly.
    - anarazel 5mo ago
      Ability to trivially use custom VM images was quite nice. The amount of CI time spent installing dependencies or copying a cache of installed stuff is nontrivial. Particularly for Windows the time difference is often very substantial. But even for plain Linux, there's no point in apt-get update && apt-get install the same set of things in every run (when using containers, cirrus could build them in-demand too, with little notational overhead). Defaulting to throw-away-VMs for everything is also the right choice for something where the threat model includes attackers submitting patches/PRs. I'll never understand why folks were ok with just container separation for that (and often have no separation in runners).
seekdeep 5mo ago
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, ...
- rmast 5mo ago
  FreeBSD CI testing is the part I’ll miss the most… time to find an alternative for open source projects.
fnord77 5mo ago
> 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
fidotron 5mo ago
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?
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 5mo ago
  Same thoughts. Guess the migration team responsible will have to kick up the gear.
- mcmcmc 5mo ago
  I don’t think they care about their customers at all, from the statement they consider their business a “byproduct”.
- 999900000999 5mo ago
  Realistically this is what you agree to when you want to use someone else's computer. They can just as easily ran out of money.
- JCharante 5mo ago
  but they're not > We are no longer accepting new customers for Cirrus Runners but will continue supporting the service for existing customers through their existing contract periods.
- fkorotkov 5mo ago
  Cirrus CI was on a downhill in terms of users and revenue for years now. Most of the customers moved to GHA already. Plus migration is super easy with Cirrus CLI -- tool to run our CI task definitions locally or in any CI. See https://github.com/cirruslabs/cirrus-cli https://github.com/cirruslabs/cirrus-cli
- xp84 5mo ago
  I mean, it’s no different than any other company who goes out of business. Yeah, their star rating on Yelp is gonna take a major hit, but on the other hand, they don’t exist anymore so shrug feel free to hold a grudge against them, I guess. This is the risk we run when we get services from companies that aren’t Microsoft, IBM, etc. (I would say Google but LOL, they obviously kill products even faster than the startup death cycle).
loevborg 5mo ago
What was the USP of their CI service?
- Maxious 5mo ago
  Ability to virtualize on Apple devices and linux with GPUs https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990 https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990
- rvnx 5mo ago
  To create an ephemeral (docker-like) MacOS VM on a Mac with full performance and access (e.g. GPU) you have to use a virtualization API provided by Apple. For most CI use, you can choose between: Anka, a "contact-us for pricing" closed-source projet, where you have to pay expensive license (easy 3000 USD/yr per machine) or tart, which is a lightweight wrapper around the official Apple API. But you have to know that on MacOS, there is an artificial limit of 2 VMs per Mac... but well: https://github.com/cirruslabs/orchard/commit/3cfa2445500f45fd950ea7a664036b940b057723#diff-125b6420cd4b2c9868ee7a09cb59101e62b12128efbfb72205c472c17a50a925R51 https://github.com/cirruslabs/orchard/commit/3cfa2445500f45f... With https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html Some people might find it very attractive: Instead 25 Mac Mini you might need only 5. + No licensing to pay to Anka. Even without bypassing the limit it is great actually
- jeltz 5mo ago
  Better UX than their competitors and support for many different images.
faangguyindia 5mo ago
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.
- jeltz 5mo ago
  What software do you use to run your CI?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rglullis 5mo ago
    Not OP, but to me the answer is: - gitea - woodpecker CI - my own docker registry - portainer running on my docker swarm I then define the docker stack in the git repository, and CI builds the images and pushes to build the new image to the docker repository. The portainer API allows to deploy a stack, with the image tag as a parameter.
  - zackify 5mo ago
    not op either, github actions, self hosted runner on bare metal with lxc containers for each runner. Cost savings are insane and the speed of latest amd epycs are miles ahead of the default ci instances on github and other places.
    - a1o 5mo ago
      Are your self-hosted runner on premise or are you using a cloud service for it?
- surgical_fire 5mo ago
  This is the way.
- causal 5mo ago
  That is something of a broken promise in the SaaS world; it was supposed to be convenience but instead it became a hundred broken integration points as you struggle to keep up with deprecated APIs and acqui-hires killing off shims you wouldn't have needed if everything had been on-prem to begin with.
seekdeep 5mo ago
This does raise some concerns in major open-source projects: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990 https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990 https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67noplncqhesl5eyb6wgol4ccjxynspv%40yatlykpribmm https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...
- seekdeep 5mo ago
  https://github.com/libprima/prima/issues/291 https://github.com/libprima/prima/issues/291
maxloh 5mo ago
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.
- hirako2000 5mo ago
  It could also be a suite of product acquisition, the CI could be a product OpenAI is interested in having, but not sell.
  - trollbridge 5mo ago
    Yeah. Much like Astral - acquiring both the product (because they need to use it internally, but don't care about trying to resell / market), and they also want the talent to keep maintaining it / add features they want.
- fkorotkov 5mo ago
  Just want to note that we will continue maintaining and improving our virtualization solutions actually with even greater attention. SaaS options like Cirrus CI and Cirrus Runners will eventually wind down so we can focus on incorporating pieces internally.
  - CompoundEyes 5mo ago
    If your scope includes making the Codex web app environments have additional functionality I look forward to it. More enterprise features and yaml backed pipelines.
    - mogili1 5mo ago
      If you are interested in yaml backed pipelines check out this open source tool I built for exactly this purpose: https://github.com/smogili1/circuit https://github.com/smogili1/circuit
MaxLeiter 5mo ago
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.
- threecheese 5mo ago
  Same; the reason everyone ran out to buy Mac Minis last month is it gave their Claw access to iMessage, their browser cookies, and a residential IP. Cirrus provides a way to provision and orchestrate MacOS VMs, which is exactly what I did for running Openclaw (for a minute …).
- jen20 5mo ago
  Not to sell Tart short (it is quite good), but it's "just" a wrapper around Virtualization.framework with a few extra pieces. This is the kind of thing that Codex driven by experts _should_ be able to build very easily.
  - zackify 5mo ago
    interesting that was what i thought this was, it keeps boggling my mind the sums being paid for what really could be built by experienced devs on their own teams
    - MaxLeiter 5mo ago
      Short term: they don’t need devs to build it, it’s already built Long term: they now have experienced dev(s?) to build their next products and features
      - jen20 5mo ago
        I agree that is the reality of why this has happened, but it is completely at odds with the story that that AI maximalists are telling the world, which is that software development is over because LLMs can do anything with a couple of specs and a Ralph Wiggum loop.
panchtatvam 5mo ago
Another one bites the dust.
trollbridge 5mo ago
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.
- elcritch 5mo ago
  It’s been true for a while, but AI seems to have exaggerated it. To me it reinforces the idea that LLMs created a “K” shaped talent market. Those whose are good become even more valuable.
  - deleted 5mo ago
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- mcmcmc 5mo ago
  It also kills competition and disincentivizes providing long term value. I’m not sure how making the job market more like gambling does anything positive for the majority of people
- michaelcampbell 5mo ago
  > 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 This has been popular for 25+ years. Likely before, but that's when I first started noticing a significant number of companies that were clearly in business solely TO BE BOUGHT.
  - jitl 5mo ago
dangus 5mo ago
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.
- trollbridge 5mo ago
  Making a statement like this is generally part of the terms of the acquisition.
  - dangus 5mo ago
    Sure, but I imagine the terms of the acquisition doesn’t say you have to write it in this specific style. I’m sure there’s a way to say the same thing without coming across as a bullshitter.
    - dbalatero 5mo ago
      I just don't think there's much upside to telling it how it is in the press release that gets buried after a week and everyone moves on. For better or worse.
      - dangus 5mo ago
        Why is telling it like it is not the rational default? If this is a forgettable press release isn't it lower effort than coming up with this type of nonsense?
        5mo ago
0dayman 5mo ago
yea yea yea, purchase every last company you find, no one wants OpenAI
spooneybarger 5mo ago
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.
bartekpacia 5mo ago
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 https://garden.pacia.tech/cirrus_ci_is_the_best.html
- codethief 5mo ago
  > I wrote a blogpost about it [0] Having tried many other CI systems, all of which ultimately turned out to be subpar, it makes me incredibly sad to discover only now that Cirrus CI is (was?) quite a bit better than them. :( Thanks for the blog post, though!
- tagraves 5mo ago
  Well, check out RWX! We don't do exactly everything like CirrusCI did -- most notably, we aren't open source and we are still managing all of our own infrastructure for running CI right now -- but we have a great "local" story and a validation CLI (`rwx lint`), and a lot of fundamental changes that make us better than other CI systems too :)
  - emptysongglass 5mo ago
    Why would anyone move to a closed-source tool like yours? It's 2026.
dennisy 5mo ago
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?
- fkorotkov 5mo ago
  Thank you! Full journey is too long for a comment here. It was hard and I was lucky with my previous pre-IPO gigs at Airbnb and Twitter so I had some bootstrap fund. In retrospective a dev tools startup in 2017 with no network and no VC support was a crazy idea but I was young and didn’t think thought too much. Then it was long 8 years of raw work and constant questioning this choice. Then finally a third component: luck. In 2024-2025 it kind of grew organically due to market changes and back in October 2025 I finally stopped questioning the future of Cirrus Labs. My only advice if I may, try to get your first dollar from your startup while you are employed.
  - dennisy 5mo ago
    That is good advice! I am too late for that as I am full time but also lucky to have had a previous exit. I am planning to go the VC route this time, because the problem I am going after feels VC size. However I feel bootstrap or small F&F round gives you more flexibility when it comes to exits. Congrats again!
vomayank 5mo ago
[flagged]
- mrweasel 5mo ago
  It's hard not to imaging that OpenAI is attempting to build an developer tools eco-system. It makes sense as it's one of the few fields in AI that are currently able to generate sales.
dude250711 5mo ago
AI companies need a surprising amount of people. It's kind of like electric cars charged with electricity from coal power plants.
yoyohello13 5mo ago
Incredible how many people are perfectly fine working for a company making AI powered murder bots.
- taurath 5mo ago
  This is a VC site. Morality or changing the world for the better is window dressing on earning as much money as possible and damn anyone who gets in the way. Morality is only good in as much as it’s good for business to be seen as moral. Money people have been majority running things for over 2 decades at least but the mythos lives on.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - brap 5mo ago
    Killing bad people is changing the world for the better
    - yoyohello13 5mo ago
      Yeah, the ‘bad’ people.
    - antonvs 5mo ago
      Like journalists, or civilians in Gaza and Iran?
    - 47282847 5mo ago
      I seriously doubt that’s the case. Someone will take offense in your killing, and come back for you and your tribe. And so round and round it goes.
  - antonvs 5mo ago
    > Morality or changing the world for the better I noticed on Altman’s recent announcement about someone being mean to him, he said that OpenAI had “changed the world” - conspicuously lacking any mention of “better”.
diimdeep 5mo ago
Looks like tech and talent grab for "Computer use" project https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-computer-use https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-computer... https://github.com/cirruslabs/mtell https://github.com/cirruslabs/mtell
jwpapi 5mo ago
So AI company buys devs again, but devs are dead
- darkwater 5mo ago
  They want to kill the last good ones
  - throwatdem12311 5mo ago
    Part of my $DAYJOB is working on timers. @sama if you need someone to buy to implement timers for ChatGPT I’m your guy - my price is 2 billion dollars.
    - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
      A timer?
      - Ardren 5mo ago
        > Then, unprompted, Altman offers up a kind of shocking timeline for the groundbreaking feature of counting: “Maybe another year before something like that works well.” Per Altman, ChatGPT’s voice model doesn’t have the capability of starting a timer or keeping track of time. “But we will add the intelligence into the voice models,” he said. -- https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-itll-take-another-year-before-chatgpt-can-start-a-timer-2000743487 https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-itll-take-another-year-b...
        DANmode 5mo ago
        I started writing “why would you want that?”, thinking about Alexa users… Then I remembered scripting existed ^_^
        blitzar 5mo ago
        I cant wait till chatgpt sets me 14 minute timers when I request a 40 minute timer, just another year!
pxc 5mo ago
Tart is really cool, impressive, and useful. Best of luck to the team!
Philip-J-Fry 5mo ago
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? ;)
- neuronexmachina 5mo ago
  > We have AI companies constantly fear-mongering that their next model is somehow too dangerous to release I'm guessing you're referring to this recent report of the security vulnerabilities Mythos found and submitted patches for? That just seems like they don't want the negative press and/or liability if their new model ends up being used to create 0-days that cause widespread damage. https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/ https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/
Duplicake 5mo ago
Why are they acquiring seemingly random things, they acquired Astral and now this
- WhrRTheBaboons 5mo ago
  bloating up for the IPO
prodigycorp 5mo ago
I don't think people have been keeping track but OpenAI has been hiring a murderer's row of developers for their Codex team.
- tclancy 5mo ago
  Meh, Gehrig and Ruth are long since dead.
throwaway613746 5mo ago
[dead]
qqasG12 5mo ago
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.
- zackify 5mo ago
  yeah super confused, it looks like some tools to manage vms in ci? what is unique about that vs lxc or docker or apple's native container cli?
  - jitl 5mo ago
    “what’s the advantage of kubernetes over docker?” orchestration docker / virtualization framework is for one machine this stuff is for 100s - 1000s machines
- danny_codes 5mo ago
  “We will replace white collar workers” Proceeds to buy white collar workers.
bustah 5mo ago
[flagged]
bhayanisumit06 5mo ago
Great
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
a1o 5mo ago
That is a bit sudden, it would be great if it was possible to get an extra month for migration.
elromulous 5mo ago
Did anyone else think this was Cirrus Logic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Logic
- boudin 5mo ago
  Yes, it brought back some video card memories
- drzaiusx11 5mo ago
  For a hot second yes, and I even use the modern one's tart cli
- tonyarkles 5mo ago
  I definitely had to look and see if this was the same company, yes. Edit: TIL “Apple makes up 89% of the company's revenue in 2025”
jadar 5mo ago
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.)
- fkorotkov 5mo ago
  It won’t and I think it will thrive even more. ;)
drzaiusx11 5mo ago
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.
- drzaiusx11 5mo ago
  Genuinely curious on why I'm getting down voted for the above comment
  - DANmode 5mo ago
    Didn’t downvote, but I’m assuming dogging the team’s transition while waiting for their freebies is where people are getting caught up with your comment.
    - drzaiusx11 5mo ago
      Fair. I guess the quotes make it seem sarcastic, but that was not my intention when I was quoting the article's terms. I'm genuinely interested in their approach to the community transition/transfer and what those terms mean, but it's likely they're not at liberty to say just yet. I am an active FOSS contributor to several projects, but what they do here will affect whether I am willing or even able to contribute to whatever this project becomes.
seekdeep 5mo ago
Earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704497
trendbuilder 5mo ago
[flagged]
unit149 5mo ago
[dead]
Xiaoher-C 5mo ago
The projects that tend to get acqui-hired — Astral, Bun, Cirrus, etc. — share something specific: they solved a real problem that the acquirer depends on internally, and nobody else had solved it well enough. That's a different dynamic than "be notable and hope someone bids." What's actually happening is that AI labs have infrastructure needs that don't map cleanly onto existing commercial products, so the fastest path to having the tool they want is to bring the team building it in-house. That's closer to procurement than a traditional acqui-hire. Whether that's net positive for the ecosystem is genuinely unclear. You get a better-resourced tool in the near term. But you also get organizational risk: if the acquirer pivots or the team gets reassigned, the institutional knowledge goes with it. Tart being relicensed more permissively is the hedge against that scenario, and it's a smart move.
20thr 5mo ago
The Cirrus team is fantastic, and they'll be missed in the market. We've shared a few customers over the years, and we have an increasing number of folks moving over after this change. Feel free to drop me a note at hugo at namespacelabs.com to chat about it.
AGENTLINK 5mo ago
human - Agent co-work relationship will be the future in dev

282 points by seekdeep 5mo ago

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).

codethief 5mo ago
AFAIU Dagger is moving away from Docker, too. They're working on their own container engine in order to be able to improve caching.
fkorotkov 5mo ago
Thank you! Cirrus CLI is still around and can run your tasks locally in either Podman or Docker. Can also be used in any other CI.
- emptysongglass 5mo ago
  I mean, yes it is, but we all know what happens to these projects when their primary devs move on or get acquihired. Keybase, anyone?

awestroke 5mo ago

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

jeltz 5mo ago
Cuirrus does not do AI, they do CI.
- thayne 5mo ago
  There is a theme in a lot of products (and open source projects) of plastering AI all over the description, even if it isn't really related to AI. The first thing I see on the CirrusLabs website is "Accelerate AI Adoption Without Compromising Safety". How am I supposed to know this is a CI product, and even if I figure that out, how am I supposed to know it is a genral CI tool and not something AI specific? I don't understand why these sites just put a bunch of buzzwords instead of telling you what it actually is.
  - fkorotkov 5mo ago
    You are checking the wrong Cirrus Labs.

bombcar 5mo ago

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

jeltz 5mo ago
Every great journey must have an end. As far as I understand Cirrus CI was struggling due to Github Actions eating their market. Cirrus CI was in my opinion much better than Github Actions but it is hard to compete with a bundled solution.
- esafak 5mo ago
  What was good about it? It looks pretty ordinary to me: https://cirrus-ci.org/features/ https://cirrus-ci.org/features/
  - jeltz 5mo ago
    Much better UX for viewing logs, more supported platforms. Github Actions in particular is also very unstable.
  - a1o 5mo ago
    It gives a better docker based experience and it also has measurements of memory and cpu usage to help you dimension things quickly.
  - anarazel 5mo ago
    Ability to trivially use custom VM images was quite nice. The amount of CI time spent installing dependencies or copying a cache of installed stuff is nontrivial. Particularly for Windows the time difference is often very substantial. But even for plain Linux, there's no point in apt-get update && apt-get install the same set of things in every run (when using containers, cirrus could build them in-demand too, with little notational overhead). Defaulting to throw-away-VMs for everything is also the right choice for something where the threat model includes attackers submitting patches/PRs. I'll never understand why folks were ok with just container separation for that (and often have no separation in runners).

seekdeep 5mo ago

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, ...

rmast 5mo ago
FreeBSD CI testing is the part I’ll miss the most… time to find an alternative for open source projects.

fnord77 5mo ago

> 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

fidotron 5mo ago

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?

8cvor6j844qw_d6 5mo ago
Same thoughts. Guess the migration team responsible will have to kick up the gear.
mcmcmc 5mo ago
I don’t think they care about their customers at all, from the statement they consider their business a “byproduct”.
999900000999 5mo ago
Realistically this is what you agree to when you want to use someone else's computer. They can just as easily ran out of money.
JCharante 5mo ago
but they're not > We are no longer accepting new customers for Cirrus Runners but will continue supporting the service for existing customers through their existing contract periods.
fkorotkov 5mo ago
Cirrus CI was on a downhill in terms of users and revenue for years now. Most of the customers moved to GHA already. Plus migration is super easy with Cirrus CLI -- tool to run our CI task definitions locally or in any CI. See https://github.com/cirruslabs/cirrus-cli https://github.com/cirruslabs/cirrus-cli
xp84 5mo ago
I mean, it’s no different than any other company who goes out of business. Yeah, their star rating on Yelp is gonna take a major hit, but on the other hand, they don’t exist anymore so shrug feel free to hold a grudge against them, I guess. This is the risk we run when we get services from companies that aren’t Microsoft, IBM, etc. (I would say Google but LOL, they obviously kill products even faster than the startup death cycle).

loevborg 5mo ago

What was the USP of their CI service?

Maxious 5mo ago
Ability to virtualize on Apple devices and linux with GPUs https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990 https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990
rvnx 5mo ago
To create an ephemeral (docker-like) MacOS VM on a Mac with full performance and access (e.g. GPU) you have to use a virtualization API provided by Apple. For most CI use, you can choose between: Anka, a "contact-us for pricing" closed-source projet, where you have to pay expensive license (easy 3000 USD/yr per machine) or tart, which is a lightweight wrapper around the official Apple API. But you have to know that on MacOS, there is an artificial limit of 2 VMs per Mac... but well: https://github.com/cirruslabs/orchard/commit/3cfa2445500f45fd950ea7a664036b940b057723#diff-125b6420cd4b2c9868ee7a09cb59101e62b12128efbfb72205c472c17a50a925R51 https://github.com/cirruslabs/orchard/commit/3cfa2445500f45f... With https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html Some people might find it very attractive: Instead 25 Mac Mini you might need only 5. + No licensing to pay to Anka. Even without bypassing the limit it is great actually
jeltz 5mo ago
Better UX than their competitors and support for many different images.

faangguyindia 5mo ago

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.

jeltz 5mo ago
What software do you use to run your CI?
- deleted 5mo ago
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- rglullis 5mo ago
  Not OP, but to me the answer is: - gitea - woodpecker CI - my own docker registry - portainer running on my docker swarm I then define the docker stack in the git repository, and CI builds the images and pushes to build the new image to the docker repository. The portainer API allows to deploy a stack, with the image tag as a parameter.
- zackify 5mo ago
  not op either, github actions, self hosted runner on bare metal with lxc containers for each runner. Cost savings are insane and the speed of latest amd epycs are miles ahead of the default ci instances on github and other places.
  - a1o 5mo ago
    Are your self-hosted runner on premise or are you using a cloud service for it?
surgical_fire 5mo ago
This is the way.
causal 5mo ago
That is something of a broken promise in the SaaS world; it was supposed to be convenience but instead it became a hundred broken integration points as you struggle to keep up with deprecated APIs and acqui-hires killing off shims you wouldn't have needed if everything had been on-prem to begin with.

seekdeep 5mo ago

This does raise some concerns in major open-source projects: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990 https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990 https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67noplncqhesl5eyb6wgol4ccjxynspv%40yatlykpribmm https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...

seekdeep 5mo ago
https://github.com/libprima/prima/issues/291 https://github.com/libprima/prima/issues/291

maxloh 5mo ago

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.

hirako2000 5mo ago
It could also be a suite of product acquisition, the CI could be a product OpenAI is interested in having, but not sell.
- trollbridge 5mo ago
  Yeah. Much like Astral - acquiring both the product (because they need to use it internally, but don't care about trying to resell / market), and they also want the talent to keep maintaining it / add features they want.
fkorotkov 5mo ago
Just want to note that we will continue maintaining and improving our virtualization solutions actually with even greater attention. SaaS options like Cirrus CI and Cirrus Runners will eventually wind down so we can focus on incorporating pieces internally.
- CompoundEyes 5mo ago
  If your scope includes making the Codex web app environments have additional functionality I look forward to it. More enterprise features and yaml backed pipelines.
  - mogili1 5mo ago
    If you are interested in yaml backed pipelines check out this open source tool I built for exactly this purpose: https://github.com/smogili1/circuit https://github.com/smogili1/circuit

MaxLeiter 5mo ago

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.

threecheese 5mo ago
Same; the reason everyone ran out to buy Mac Minis last month is it gave their Claw access to iMessage, their browser cookies, and a residential IP. Cirrus provides a way to provision and orchestrate MacOS VMs, which is exactly what I did for running Openclaw (for a minute …).
jen20 5mo ago
Not to sell Tart short (it is quite good), but it's "just" a wrapper around Virtualization.framework with a few extra pieces. This is the kind of thing that Codex driven by experts _should_ be able to build very easily.
- zackify 5mo ago
  interesting that was what i thought this was, it keeps boggling my mind the sums being paid for what really could be built by experienced devs on their own teams
  - MaxLeiter 5mo ago
    Short term: they don’t need devs to build it, it’s already built Long term: they now have experienced dev(s?) to build their next products and features
    - jen20 5mo ago
      I agree that is the reality of why this has happened, but it is completely at odds with the story that that AI maximalists are telling the world, which is that software development is over because LLMs can do anything with a couple of specs and a Ralph Wiggum loop.

panchtatvam 5mo ago

Another one bites the dust.

trollbridge 5mo ago

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.

elcritch 5mo ago
It’s been true for a while, but AI seems to have exaggerated it. To me it reinforces the idea that LLMs created a “K” shaped talent market. Those whose are good become even more valuable.
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mcmcmc 5mo ago
It also kills competition and disincentivizes providing long term value. I’m not sure how making the job market more like gambling does anything positive for the majority of people
michaelcampbell 5mo ago
> 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 This has been popular for 25+ years. Likely before, but that's when I first started noticing a significant number of companies that were clearly in business solely TO BE BOUGHT.
- jitl 5mo ago

dangus 5mo ago

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.

trollbridge 5mo ago
Making a statement like this is generally part of the terms of the acquisition.
- dangus 5mo ago
  Sure, but I imagine the terms of the acquisition doesn’t say you have to write it in this specific style. I’m sure there’s a way to say the same thing without coming across as a bullshitter.
  - dbalatero 5mo ago
    I just don't think there's much upside to telling it how it is in the press release that gets buried after a week and everyone moves on. For better or worse.
    - dangus 5mo ago
      Why is telling it like it is not the rational default? If this is a forgettable press release isn't it lower effort than coming up with this type of nonsense?
      - 5mo ago

0dayman 5mo ago

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

spooneybarger 5mo ago

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.

bartekpacia 5mo ago

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 https://garden.pacia.tech/cirrus_ci_is_the_best.html

codethief 5mo ago
> I wrote a blogpost about it [0] Having tried many other CI systems, all of which ultimately turned out to be subpar, it makes me incredibly sad to discover only now that Cirrus CI is (was?) quite a bit better than them. :( Thanks for the blog post, though!
tagraves 5mo ago
Well, check out RWX! We don't do exactly everything like CirrusCI did -- most notably, we aren't open source and we are still managing all of our own infrastructure for running CI right now -- but we have a great "local" story and a validation CLI (`rwx lint`), and a lot of fundamental changes that make us better than other CI systems too :)
- emptysongglass 5mo ago
  Why would anyone move to a closed-source tool like yours? It's 2026.

dennisy 5mo ago

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?

fkorotkov 5mo ago
Thank you! Full journey is too long for a comment here. It was hard and I was lucky with my previous pre-IPO gigs at Airbnb and Twitter so I had some bootstrap fund. In retrospective a dev tools startup in 2017 with no network and no VC support was a crazy idea but I was young and didn’t think thought too much. Then it was long 8 years of raw work and constant questioning this choice. Then finally a third component: luck. In 2024-2025 it kind of grew organically due to market changes and back in October 2025 I finally stopped questioning the future of Cirrus Labs. My only advice if I may, try to get your first dollar from your startup while you are employed.
- dennisy 5mo ago
  That is good advice! I am too late for that as I am full time but also lucky to have had a previous exit. I am planning to go the VC route this time, because the problem I am going after feels VC size. However I feel bootstrap or small F&F round gives you more flexibility when it comes to exits. Congrats again!

vomayank 5mo ago

[flagged]

mrweasel 5mo ago
It's hard not to imaging that OpenAI is attempting to build an developer tools eco-system. It makes sense as it's one of the few fields in AI that are currently able to generate sales.

dude250711 5mo ago

AI companies need a surprising amount of people. It's kind of like electric cars charged with electricity from coal power plants.

yoyohello13 5mo ago

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

taurath 5mo ago
This is a VC site. Morality or changing the world for the better is window dressing on earning as much money as possible and damn anyone who gets in the way. Morality is only good in as much as it’s good for business to be seen as moral. Money people have been majority running things for over 2 decades at least but the mythos lives on.
- deleted 5mo ago
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- brap 5mo ago
  Killing bad people is changing the world for the better
  - yoyohello13 5mo ago
    Yeah, the ‘bad’ people.
  - antonvs 5mo ago
    Like journalists, or civilians in Gaza and Iran?
  - 47282847 5mo ago
    I seriously doubt that’s the case. Someone will take offense in your killing, and come back for you and your tribe. And so round and round it goes.
- antonvs 5mo ago
  > Morality or changing the world for the better I noticed on Altman’s recent announcement about someone being mean to him, he said that OpenAI had “changed the world” - conspicuously lacking any mention of “better”.

diimdeep 5mo ago

Looks like tech and talent grab for "Computer use" project https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-computer-use https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-computer... https://github.com/cirruslabs/mtell https://github.com/cirruslabs/mtell

jwpapi 5mo ago

So AI company buys devs again, but devs are dead

darkwater 5mo ago
They want to kill the last good ones
- throwatdem12311 5mo ago
  Part of my $DAYJOB is working on timers. @sama if you need someone to buy to implement timers for ChatGPT I’m your guy - my price is 2 billion dollars.
  - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
    A timer?
    - Ardren 5mo ago
      > Then, unprompted, Altman offers up a kind of shocking timeline for the groundbreaking feature of counting: “Maybe another year before something like that works well.” Per Altman, ChatGPT’s voice model doesn’t have the capability of starting a timer or keeping track of time. “But we will add the intelligence into the voice models,” he said. -- https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-itll-take-another-year-before-chatgpt-can-start-a-timer-2000743487 https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-itll-take-another-year-b...
      - DANmode 5mo ago
        I started writing “why would you want that?”, thinking about Alexa users… Then I remembered scripting existed ^_^
      - blitzar 5mo ago
        I cant wait till chatgpt sets me 14 minute timers when I request a 40 minute timer, just another year!

pxc 5mo ago

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

Philip-J-Fry 5mo ago

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? ;)

neuronexmachina 5mo ago
> We have AI companies constantly fear-mongering that their next model is somehow too dangerous to release I'm guessing you're referring to this recent report of the security vulnerabilities Mythos found and submitted patches for? That just seems like they don't want the negative press and/or liability if their new model ends up being used to create 0-days that cause widespread damage. https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/ https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/

Duplicake 5mo ago

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

WhrRTheBaboons 5mo ago
bloating up for the IPO

prodigycorp 5mo ago

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

tclancy 5mo ago
Meh, Gehrig and Ruth are long since dead.

throwaway613746 5mo ago

[dead]

qqasG12 5mo ago

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.

zackify 5mo ago
yeah super confused, it looks like some tools to manage vms in ci? what is unique about that vs lxc or docker or apple's native container cli?
- jitl 5mo ago
  “what’s the advantage of kubernetes over docker?” orchestration docker / virtualization framework is for one machine this stuff is for 100s - 1000s machines
danny_codes 5mo ago
“We will replace white collar workers” Proceeds to buy white collar workers.

bustah 5mo ago

[flagged]

bhayanisumit06 5mo ago

Great

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

a1o 5mo ago

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

elromulous 5mo ago

Did anyone else think this was Cirrus Logic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Logic

boudin 5mo ago
Yes, it brought back some video card memories
drzaiusx11 5mo ago
For a hot second yes, and I even use the modern one's tart cli
tonyarkles 5mo ago
I definitely had to look and see if this was the same company, yes. Edit: TIL “Apple makes up 89% of the company's revenue in 2025”

jadar 5mo ago

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.)

fkorotkov 5mo ago
It won’t and I think it will thrive even more. ;)

drzaiusx11 5mo ago

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.

drzaiusx11 5mo ago
Genuinely curious on why I'm getting down voted for the above comment
- DANmode 5mo ago
  Didn’t downvote, but I’m assuming dogging the team’s transition while waiting for their freebies is where people are getting caught up with your comment.
  - drzaiusx11 5mo ago
    Fair. I guess the quotes make it seem sarcastic, but that was not my intention when I was quoting the article's terms. I'm genuinely interested in their approach to the community transition/transfer and what those terms mean, but it's likely they're not at liberty to say just yet. I am an active FOSS contributor to several projects, but what they do here will affect whether I am willing or even able to contribute to whatever this project becomes.

seekdeep 5mo ago

Earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704497

trendbuilder 5mo ago

[flagged]

unit149 5mo ago

[dead]

Xiaoher-C 5mo ago

The projects that tend to get acqui-hired — Astral, Bun, Cirrus, etc. — share something specific: they solved a real problem that the acquirer depends on internally, and nobody else had solved it well enough. That's a different dynamic than "be notable and hope someone bids." What's actually happening is that AI labs have infrastructure needs that don't map cleanly onto existing commercial products, so the fastest path to having the tool they want is to bring the team building it in-house. That's closer to procurement than a traditional acqui-hire. Whether that's net positive for the ecosystem is genuinely unclear. You get a better-resourced tool in the near term. But you also get organizational risk: if the acquirer pivots or the team gets reassigned, the institutional knowledge goes with it. Tart being relicensed more permissively is the hedge against that scenario, and it's a smart move.

20thr 5mo ago

The Cirrus team is fantastic, and they'll be missed in the market. We've shared a few customers over the years, and we have an increasing number of folks moving over after this change. Feel free to drop me a note at hugo at namespacelabs.com to chat about it.

AGENTLINK 5mo ago

human - Agent co-work relationship will be the future in dev