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This is kind-of neat too, at least in the near term:

> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.

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.

It could also be a suite of product acquisition, the CI could be a product OpenAI is interested in having, but not sell.

Is Sam or family an investor in them anyways?

Yes, it brought back some video card memories

They want to kill the last good ones

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.

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 …).

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.

“We will replace white collar workers”

Proceeds to buy white collar workers.

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?

Been there, done that, and I still find value in 3rd party services despite the occasional need to migrate.

Self hosting is the way to go if you need to keep monthly services spend as low as possible but you have extra time to spend, such as with a hobby project.

Whenever I’ve worked on real startup projects, self-hosting became a constant source of little tasks for the engineering team to mix into our weekly workload. There were always little tasks to upgrade this service, investigate why that one server was slow, or to migrate something to a bigger server because we were bottlenecked on some resource. Then we had to manage backups and do our recovery drills, along with changing the backup strategy every 6 months because someone had a better idea.

When we started to add up all of the time spent managing everything it starts to look like spending dollars (of engineer time) to save pennies on SaaS bills.

Probably not a popular thing to say on HN, but I now try to stay away from teams that go to extremes to self-host everything because I just want to get my work done, not also be constantly involved in running the underlying services. I do it for my own hobby projects at home but I don’t want to be doing it at work where we have money to spend to lighten the load. If the cost is the occasional migration to a different 3rd party service that’s not a big workload relative to everything involved in self-hosting.

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.

What software do you use to run your CI?

This is the way.

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.

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.

Meh, Gehrig and Ruth are long since dead.

It won’t and I think it will thrive even more. ;)

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

> 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.

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.

bloating up for the IPO

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.

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

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.

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.

I don’t think they care about their customers at all, from the statement they consider their business a “byproduct”.

Same thoughts. Guess the migration team responsible will have to kick up the gear.

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.

> 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/

Ability to virtualize on Apple devices and linux with GPUs https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990

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)

  tart, which is a lightweight wrapper around the official Apple API.

https://github.com/cirruslabs/orchard/commit/3cfa2445500f45f...

With 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.

Better UX than their competitors and support for many different images.

Making a statement like this is generally part of the terms of the acquisition.

More like employees number 32,463 and 32,464 - they’re two people from what I seen on GitHub over the years. (Incredibly strong two people)

Cuirrus does not do AI, they do CI.