Hacker News

It’s a small tool shop building a tiny part of the Python ecosystem, let’s not overstate their importance. They burned through their VC money and needed an exit and CLI tool chains are hyped now for LLMs, but this mostly sounds like an acquihire to me. Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.

somebody looked at Claude Code's binaries and Anthropic is testing out their own app platform called antspace. Not sure why people are shocked, they've been cloning features of their API customers and adding them to their core products since day 1. Makes sense they will take user data and do it for Claude Code by copying features or buying up what developers are using so they can lock people into a stack. These are the same people that trained on every scrap of data they could get their hands on and now complain about distilling models from their output

https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084

Ironically this type of stuff really makes me doubt their AGI claims, why would they bother with this stuff if they were confident of having AGI within the next few years? They would be focused on replacing entire industries and not even make their models available at any price. Why bother with a PaaS if you think you are going to replace the entire software industry with AGI?

It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

I think the good news here is that since OpenAI is a zombie company at this point this particular acquisition shouldn't be too concerning - and from what I've seen Anthropic has been building out in a direction of increased specialization. That said vertical integration is as much of a problem as it always was and it'd be excellent to see some sane merger oversight from the government.

In the many darker timelines that one can extrapolate, capturing essential tech stacks is just a pre-cursor to capturing hiring.

Once we start seeing Open AI and Anthropic getting into the certifications and testing they'll quickly become the gold standard. They won't even need to actually test anyone. People will simply consent to having their chat interactions analyzed.

The models collect more information about us than we could ever imagine because definitionally, those features are unknown unknowns for humans. For ML, the gaps in our thinking carry far richer information about is than our actual vocabularies, topics of interest, or stylometric idiosyncrasies.

Hmm, from my perspective, an essential step to legitimize "vibecoding" in an enterprise setting is to to have a clearly communicated best practice - and have the LLM be hyper optimized for that setting.

Like having a system prompt which takes care of the project structure, languages, libraries etc

It's pretty much the first step to replacing devs, which is their current "North Star" (to be changed to the next profession after)

Once they've nailed that, the devs become even more of a tool then they're already are (from the perspective of the enterprise).

If it ever goes bad, well I hope that that’s an impetus for new open source projects to be started — and with improvements over and lessons learned from incumbent technologies, right at the v1 of said projects.

>> "means of production" in software

Ah yes, it was impossible to write software before these companies existed, and the only way to write software is via the products from these companies. They sure do control the "means of production".

Honestly, for now they seem to be buying companies built around Open Source projects which otherwise didn't really have a good story to pay for their development long-term anyway. And it seems like the primary reason is just expertise and tooling for building their CLI tools.

As long as they keep the original projects maintained and those aren't just acqui-hires, I think this is almost as good as we can hope for.

(thinking mainly about Bun here as the other one)

Stop using MIT licensed software being run by small vc backed operations if you value stability. They are risky and often costly Trojan horses.

As the cost of software trends towards $0 I don't see how one can realistic own "the" means of production rather than "a" means. Any competitor can generate a similar product cheaply.

But how does this work out in the long run, in the case of AGI?

If AGI becomes available, especially at the local and open-source level, shouldn't all these be democratized - meaning that the AGI can simply roll out the tooling you need.

After all, AGI is what all these companies are chasing.

it never made sense to have devs all over the world doing the same task with tiny variation. Centralization was inevitable. LLMs might have been a step change but the trajectory was already set.

If it becomes too antagonistic, people will change. The desire to build things is larger than any given iron fist du jour. Just ask Oracle or IBM.

"Bearded German philosopher" once again being uncannily applicable to 21st century happenings...

This is a logical conclusion of most open source tools in a capitalist economy, it's been this way for decades.

Equivalent or better tools will pop up eventually, heck if AI is so fantastic then you could just make one of your own, be the change you want to see in the world, right?

These are MIT/Apache 2. Sure they can buy and influence the direction but they can't prevent forks if they stray from what users want.

Of course they're trying to capture existing tech stacks. The models themselves are plateauing (most advancement is coming from the non-LLM parts of the software), they took too much VC money so they need to make some of it back. So gobbling up wafers, software, etc... is the new plan for spending the money and trying to prevent catastrophic losses.

Explain to me how this is any different than Microsoft, Blackrock, Google, Oracle, Berkshire or any other giant company acquiring their way to market share?

If our corporate overlords are gonna buy up all that is good I’d rather it have been Anthropic and not that wierdo humans-need-food-and-care-for-inference-so-LLMs aren’t-that-power-hungry Sam Altman. Man that guy is weird.

Oh well. They’ll hopefully get options and make millions when the IPO happens. Everyone eventually sells out. Not everyone can be funded by MIT to live the GNU maximalist lifestyle.

The strangest part is that Python is effectively a dead language because of agentic coding.

Why on earth would agents ever code in as terrible a language as Python when the cost of significantly better languages is essentially free? The only advantage Python ever had was that it was easy to write

I think this overstates the “betrayal” angle.

A lot of great open source comes out of startups because startups are really good at shipping fast and getting distribution (open source is part of this strategy). Users can try the tool immediately, and VC funding can put a lot of talent behind building something great very quickly.

The startup model absolutely creates incentive risk, but that’s true of any project that becomes important while depending on a relatively small set of maintainers or funders.

I’m not sure an acquisition is categorically different from a maintainer eventually moving on or burning out. In all of those cases, users who depend on the project take on some risk. That’s not unique to startups; it’s true of basically any software that becomes important.

There’s no perfect structure for open source here - public funding, nonprofit support, and startups all suck in their own ways.

And on the point you make about public funding being slow: yeah, talented people can’t work full-time on important things unless there’s serious funding behind it. uv got as good as it is because the funding let exceptional people work on it full-time with a level of intensity that public funding usually does not.

Most likely, because it is less money :-p. But also because it is less known and harder, as you already mentioned. Personally, I'm based in Mexico, and I would never have thought about trying to get nonprofit funding for a community project, nor would I know where to start to get that.

> I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund.

I would absolutely love to know more about this if you are willing to share the story?

open source allows you to build community trust must faster, and community trust/adoption is key

I don't see any betrayal here, since the tools are still OSS - yeah OpenAI might take it a different direction and add a bunch of stuff I don't like/want, but I can still fork

On the flip side, I'm not sure I ever saw a revenue plan or exit strategy for Astral other than acquihire. And most plausible bidders are unfortunate in one way or another.

My hope would be that this eventually pushes pip to adopt a similar feature-set and performance improvements. It's always a better story when the built-in tool is adequate instead of having to pick something. And yes UV is rust but it's pretty clear that Python could provide something within 2-5x the speed.

These tools are open source, if they lock them down the community will just fork them.

I never adopted them, keep using mostly Python written stuff.

Either pay for the product, or use stuff that isn't dependent on VC money, this is always how it ends.

As opposed to Pip, which is obviously free and sustainable forever.

Would single maintainers of critical open source projects be a better situation?

> This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years has adopted many of these technologies.

At worst, it's just Anaconda II AI Boogaloo. The ecosystems will evolve and overcome, or will die and different ecosystems rise to meet the need going forward.

I anticipate OpenAI will get bored and ignore Astral's tools. Software entropy will do its thing and we will remember an actively developed uv as the good old days until something similar to cargo gets adopted as part of Python's standard distribution.

I don't know how to search for that report, can you share it?

Can't blame you for not trusting OpenAI, but it seems to me they would gain very little from fucking up uv (or more precisely doing things that have a side effect of fucking up uv), and they have tons of incentive to cultivate developer good will. Better to think of buying and supporting a project like this as a very cheap way to make developers think they're not so bad.

One thing to keep in mind is that uv was the product of a whole lot of packaging PEPs finally landing and standards being set. That combined with not having to support all the old baggage meant they could have an effect modernizing community packaging standards.

I hope those two factors mean that if things go really wrong, then the clean(ish) break with all the non standard complex legacy means an easier future for community packaging efforts.

I hope they got paid, I will be very sad if they didn't at least get G5 money.

On the other hand, we get to see what other thing will try to replace pip

Yeah, no. there are many worse news than this.

In the worst case, Astral will stop developing their tools, someone else will pick them up and will continue polishing them. In the best case, they will just continue as they did until now, and nothing will really change on that front.

Astral is doing good work, but their greatest benefit for the ecosystem so far was showing what's possible and how it's down. Now everyone can take up the quest from here and continue. So any possible harm from here out will be not that deep, at worst we will be missing out on many more cool things they could have built.

Let the forks roll!

lol, underrated comment

If Codex’s core quality is anything to go by, it’s time to create a community fork of UV

Eh, if it turns out to be too bad I guess I’ll just end up switching back to pipenv, which is the closest thing to uv (especially due to the automatic Python version management, but not as fast).

The priorities of the tooling will change to help agents instead of human users directly. That's all that's happening.

I really wanted to use vscodium but had to go back to vscode proper because the remote ssh extension is just nowhere near as good. The open source one uses a JS library to implement the SSH protocol rather than using a system binary which means many features (GSSAPI) aren't supported. Also just seems like a bad idea to use an SSH implementation that's not nearly as battle tested as openssh...

MS is actively making your life using VS Codium a pain. They removed the download button the extension marketrplace making it very difficult to download extensions and installing them in VS Codium since VS Codium does not have access to the official MS extension marketplace. Many don't publish outside the marketplace for example Platformio. [1]

[1] https://github.com/platformio/platformio-vscode-ide/issues/1...

Same here. I’ve adopted uv across all of my Python projects and couldn’t be happier. ty looks very promising as well.

Probably inevitable, and I don’t blame the team, I just wish it were someone else.

I think, it may be the first time I am actually upset by acquire announcement. I am usually like "well, it is what it is", but this time it just feels like betrayal.

Somebody took a deeper look at Claude Code and claims to find evidence of Anthropic's PaaS offering [1]. There's certainly money to be made by offering a nice platform where "citizen developers" can push their code.

From Astral the (fast) linter and type checker are pretty useful companions for agentic development.

[1] https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084

The value is to control the tool chain from idea to production so it can be automated by agents. It's no secret that the final goal is to fully replace developers, the flow "idea to production". It's easier to control that flow if you control each tool and every step.

I won't be surprised if the next step is to acquire CI/CD tools.

`uv agent` and `bun agent` in 3....2.....1....

Good that they got some money and a longer runaway, but I have my doubts the product will improve rather than be smothered to death.

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Time will tell.

I'm expecting Anthropic to buy Zed

Does OpenAI use a lot of python?

There is the literal benefit of "we use the hell out of this tool, we need to make sure it stays usable for us" and then there is what they can learn from or coerce the community in to doing.

> it's nice to know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will stay maintained!

Depends if you think the bubble is going to pop, I suppose. In some sense, independence was insulation.

They probably prompted for what they should do next and got this as a half-hallucinated response lol

Isn't this something to do with their paid pyx(as opposed to ty/ruff etc) thingy?

I'm not so sure. I sort of wish they hadn't been acquired because these sort of acquihires usually result in stifling the competition while the incumbent stagnates. It definitely is an acquihire given OpenAI explicitly states they'll be joining the Codex team and only that their existing open-source projects will remain "maintained".

Why do you think that uv, etc. will stay maintained? They will for now, but as soon as cash is tight at OpenAI, they'll get culled so fast that you won't see it coming. This is the risk.

I mean they are “startups” on the way to mega-companies. They need internal tooling to match.

Time for the PSF to consider something inspired by uv as a native solution.

I really hope they don't kill off uv or turn it into some way to sell OpenAI services. But I suspect that's exactly what's going to happen :(

> I hope this means the Astral folks can keep doing what they are doing, because I absolutely love uv (ruff is pretty nice too).

That is definitely the plan!

JS vs Python wars, redux?

>Seems like the big AI players love buying up the good dev tooling companies.

Would be a good mustache-twirling cartoon villain tactics, you know, try to prevent advances in developer experience to make vibecoding more attractive =)

I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of the (stale) tooling that Astral replaced were managed by foundations instead of companies...

Yeah, well, the fact is that every person who ever touches Python needed uv, but only Astral folks created it. So, nope, there's no one capable of filling the void, just accept that it's fucked now. The best die first.

I have long since found the VC model for open source questionable. If you are not selling popular enough direct enterprise support what is the model to actually make money.

Take ruff, I have used it, but I had no idea it even had a company behind it... And I must not be only one and it must not be only tool like it...

They mysteriously gain a lot of government contracts.

In a completely unrelated event, Donald sues Sam for 10M$ for calling him old, Sam grudingly agrees to pay him 16M$ and a beer.

That's where taxpayers come in a the ultimate bagholder.

They get more money from investors, go public, or get bought.

Taxpayers bail them out.

$110B will surely last for at least a year.

RAM prices go down. My hope though is that the period RAM prices stay up will put electron apps out of market.

"We must be regulated to contain the nuclear bomb like power of our products. Oh look it escaped again!", etc

As the owner they dictate their priorities, whether around features or tighter integration with their ecosystem.

why? lot's of good work came to Python by people who were sponsored by big tech companies. make Python better for them, and for a lot of other people too.

(sure, it's a bit different than contributing to CPython, but I'd argue not that different)

goddammit

https://jazzband.co/news/2026/03/14/sunsetting-jazzband

Ah but that's not a shiny new tool I can add to my cv /s

I'm assuming that they were buying great Rust devs (given codex is written in it).

Sure, I don't think anybody disagrees, I sure don't. You never know, and all. It's just that we (the imaginary crowd you are arguing with) are not hopeful. And your "but wait, guys, I think they are good people!" is some quite pitiful attempt to console us. Sure, good, brilliant and caring, that's why we are upset in the first place. Always more sad when it's somebody you liked that dies.

And framing it as "sell-outs" is cheap rhetoric that means nothing. The fact is, they were the company who never really had a solid business model, but provide a lot of value for the community. Being acquired by some infinite-money company was always the best outcome they could hope for. Well, they did. Probably got a ton of money. Will it require some sacrifice? Well, some people would say that working for a company who makes products for the Department of War of the USA on conditions that even Anthropic found too ugly to satisfy, is enough of a sacrifice on its own. I am pretty sure though that most people would be willing to make this sacrifice for the right amount of money (with "right amount" being a variable part). So calling someone a sell-out is usually just bitterness about the fact that it wasn't you who managed to sell out. I mean, not judging someone for a sacrifice they make isn't the same thing as pretending they didn't make a sacrifice. Sometimes we (the world, they were trying to make better) are a sacrifice. That's all.

Charlie's fine. OpenAI are the problem here. Similar situation to steipete. Happy for the person, sad for the tool/ecosystem/everyone else.

We always "wait and see" and it always turns out terrible. Even if the original founders stay on, eventually they will get pushed out when their morals conflict with company goals. Wont happen overnight, but uv will enshitify eventually.

Technically the tools are not privately held, they're OSS with a permissive licence. It's just that the bulk of work was done by them. The acquisition (ostensibly) changes none of that

I'm also concerned about this, but I feel as though uv and ruff's explosive growth happening alongside and despite that of LLMs demonstrates that it's not a show-stopper. I vividly recall LLM coding agents defaulting to pip/poetry and black/flake8, etc. for new projects. It still does that to some extent, but I see them using uv and ruff by default -- without any steering from me -- with far greater frequency.

Perhaps it's naive optimism, but I generally have hope that new and improved tools will continue to gain adoption and shine through in the training data, especially as post-training and continual learning improve.

They are not trying to buy developer goodwill, they are trying to catch up with Antrophic in terms of getting those B2B contracts, which is currently the most realistic path towards not running out of money.

You most certainly should not have stuck with Conda

"OpenAI is focusing employee and investor attention on its enterprise business as the artificial intelligence startup gears up to go public, potentially by the end of the year, CNBC has learned."

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/openai-preps-for-ipo-in-2026...

Have you looked at the .github/ folder of any actively developed python packages lately? It has become difficult to find one where there isn't a few interesting people with code-execution-capable push/publish/cache-write access somewhere along the blown up transitive dependency/include chains.

We need to explore this angle. With OpenAI already strongly being intelligence gathering apparatus for the US, now with this acquisition, it will potentially have access to the code and environment variables of a good chunk of private projects even when Codex doesn't.

They do have a hot mess with traction amongst developers. Codex is far behind Claude Code (in both the GUI and TUI forms), and OpenAI's chief of applications recently announced a pivot to focus more on "productivity" (i.e. software and enterprise verticals) because B2B yields a lot more revenue than B2C.

Open source tools are being snapped up by a company famous for reneging on its non-profit mission as soon as they sniffed some profit. Wow gee, imagine the cynicism.

I think it was always that way. When an org gets big and its leaders become powerful, then there's always a good portion of snark and mistrust from this community.

Sorry, but I don't think cheering on OpenAI represents curiosity and excitement about technology.

I'm happy for the Astral team but in my opinion, big tech especially is incompatible with curiosity and hacker ethos.

I think the push has been entirely organic. Compared to existing tooling, uv is fantastically fast.

One of the bigger pain points I’ve faced in Python is dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes in some cases. uv took seconds.

A serious quality of life improvement.

"was being pushed" ... by whom? I think there's widespread grassroots support for it because it's a good tool.

Hey now, I was a completely organic shill! I worked for free!

uv and ruff are incredible tools for python development, and I've loved my time using ty. This acquisition is absolutely terrible.

Why? Github is already owned by Microsoft, who are deep in with OpenAI. And what worth would a Github-clone even have for the world? It's not like there is any important innovation left in that space at the moment, or are there any?

They said it'll be good enough in two weeks, give them some time!

They're not buying developers, they are buying the whole ecosystem to produce software. Still aligned with their original message.

I work at OpenAI. Software developers are not obsoleted by Codex or Claude Code, nor will they be soon.

For our teams, Codex is a massive productivity booster that actually increases the value of each dev. If you check our hiring page, you’ll see we are still hiring aggressively. Our ambitions are bigger than our current workforce, and we continue to pay top dollar for talented devs who want to join us in transforming how silicon chips provide value to humans.

Akin to how compilers reduced the demand for assembly but increased the demand for software engineering, I see Codex reducing the demand for hand-typed code but increasing the demand for software engineering. Codex can read and write code faster than you or me, but it still lacks a lot of intelligence and wisdom and context to do whole jobs autonomously.

They're writing the software to end all softwares!

When someone at work talks about all software devs being replaced I link them to the Anthropic career pages.

As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this case.

And, they buy a company writing tooling for Python in not Python.

They probably have retention issues, due to selling out to fascism recently.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/openai-sam-altman-pentagon-d...

I know I stopped using them.

I can get pyflow back to a maintained state and iron out the bugs if that would help. It's the same concept as uv, just kind of buggy and I haven't touched it in 6 years.

Assuming things start getting weird about 18 months from now, poetry and uv have very similar semantics, so 18 months of comically faster workflows sounds nice.

Sure, why not

Extremely stupid argument. It doesn’t matter how good is your car if the driver is lacking.

It’s open source. If you want it to go in a different direction fork it and take it in that direction. Instead of the optimist, the pessimist, and the pragmatist the guy you need is the chap who does some work.

The lead dev seems to think about using AI with FastAPI already: https://tiangolo.com/ideas/library-agent-skills/

I thought some more about it, and unfortunately it makes sense. IIRC there were several "insider" blogposts from OpenAI that said something along the lines of "Yeah almost every service we write is FastAPI"

Don't even joke

Don't get me wrong I love getting 300 dependabot updates per day. It's a huge productivity booster and even if you devote 1/2 your dev team to keeping this shit up to date, you'd still be vulnerable to repo-jacking, because the entire pkg ecosystem is broken. The other thing i love about npm and pypi is the way a single small team will re-download in ci (regardless of caching) a TiB of packages all day long for no reason. Love waiting for gh actions to re-import infinite packages for the nth time before it times out and you restart it manually. makes so much sense. Great work all. glad openai is putting the nails in this retard coffin.

…amusing how? CPython is written in C, JVM is written in mix of cpp and Java, Rust was written using OCaml initially. Don’t know why you’re snickering. Do you also find it amusing that by the time cpp/rust team scaffolds and compiles initial boilerplate, python team is already making money?

That's what you get with toy languages.

There is nothing wrong with big money backing, often is necessary for long term bets, but rug pulling is a serious threat. VC funded open source has become a pattern/playbook.

How so? Pyright is being developed by Microsoft.

Poetry was the best alt-package manager before uv came along. That said - uv completely outclassed it.

What are you having an issue with? Environments? pyenv. Dependency management? pip+requirements.

no real alternative

I don't understand how anyone is surprised at this point. VC project trying to build a brand just isn't going to lead to some utopic community.

I at least thought we'd get a few more good years before the rug pull.

“There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex (and codex subscriptions) with uv.” What does that even mean?

Genuinely. UV is so awesome and OpenAI is so meh.

I am not even sure how to feel about this news but feel a bit disappointed as a user even if I might be happy for the devs that they got money for such project but man, I would've hoped any decent company could've bought them out rather than OpenAI of all things.

Maybe OpenAI wants to buy these loved companies to lessen some of the hate but what its doing is lessening the love that we gave to corporations like astral/uv sadly, which is really sad because uv is/(was?) so cool but now we don't know where this tool might be headed next given its in the hands of literally OpenAI :(

Thank you n-gate

Ok I laughed, but god, please no.

pixi? https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/

Have not tried it too much yet because I was pretty content with `uv`, but I've heard lots of good things about it

Can we rename it to Codex?

Funding is as good as gone until the Iran mess is over.

> a successful exit is a positive signal

This is peak finance brainrot. In no scenario is abandoning ship a positive signal, even if you managed to pocket some valuables on the way out.

Let's stop celebrating dysfunctional business models and consolidation of the industry around finance bros who give zero fucks about said industry.

Because Jetbrain strategy wasn't to burn money with free tools to eventually exit with the jackpot. They have been profitable for over a decade, simply asking users to pay a fair price for great product.

Atlassian? Bitbucket as a platform for agentic development.. shudder

Most likely because Jetbrains is not for sale. Google almost certainly offered to buy at some point.