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> ... and their team is joining Anthropic to build, who knows, some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring.

Fun fact, I named it "Stainless" after Stainless Steel pipes, likening ourselves to a high-end plumbing supply shop. If you look at the earliest versions of stainlessapi.com on archive.org, you'll see our original motto was "Quality fittings for your REST API".

All that is to say, the incredibly "boring" infrastructural work of making "boring" APIs like Hubspot's more usefully accessible is absolutely the kind of thing I'm excited to do at Anthropic :)

(It also happens to be what got us all excited to work at stainless in the first place, but of course, we understand it's not for everyone!)

Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Yet look at the positions they’re hiring for in marketing, finance etc.: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs

Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?

The top trading firms had top-end recruiting figured out for ages, without jumping through all these hoops.

There are plenty of other reasons to acqui-hire, but it is not the only or even the most effective way to hire the strongest engineers

> Successfully building a company, and using that company's products, is actually the best job interview you can ask for if you can pay for that caliber of candidate.

This tests for very different skills than being an exceptional programmer.

The world’s best software engineers aren’t optimising for comp — they’re optimising to be the world’s best software engineers

I'm not sure how you can equate building a startup and selling to a bigger company as a great interview for developers. Maybe they have great engineers, but IME it's far more likely they've got good founders, marketing or sales on top of (perhaps) some stellar engineering.

All that's moot though if your fundamental premise is wrong. Why does Anthropic need "the world's best software engineers" to build on top of the models? Compentent developers can build APIs - sorry - MCP servers and other integration plumbing.

Wouldn't that be a misuse of data and likely illegal?

If Anthropic can rummage through your data and workflows to deem you worthy of their grace, then that is seriously wrong.

"Hundreds of companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers—the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors that let developers and agents use an API."

not anymore lol

FYI the above quote is (sadly) real and is from Stainless's blog post: https://www.stainless.com/blog/stainless-is-joining-anthropi...

A Stainless steal? ;)

Wow, OpenAI is a stainless customer right?

Via https://www.stainless.com/blog/stainless-is-joining-anthropi... that's exactly what seems to have happened:

> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.

> If you’re a Stainless customer, visit app.stainless.com/transition for help transitioning from Stainless-managed products to other options. As always, you own the SDKs you’ve generated to date, and have full rights to modify and extend them however you wish.

If you have an account you can go to https://app.stainless.com/transition. The team spent a good amount of time working on a way for customers to switch to self-service

This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.

Claude is just a tool. My team members are each free to choose the text editor or IDE that they are happiest with. In the near future, I hope to be able to say the same for coding agents. I really like Claude, but I don't track Claude resources in our repos. If something better comes along, I'm betting it will be perfectly happy to parse the markdown of my existing memory files, and nothing in the repo itself will force anyone else to know that I switched.

It kind of blows my mind that the majority of Claude users have just accepted that CLAUDE.md is a tracked file that the whole team has to standardize on and share. Coding agents are the ultimate API. They conform to however you prefer to interact. Is anyone really expecting to enforce standard operating procedures with this non-deterministic black box of magic?

That was always going to be the end point.

The amount of money thrown at it means at some point the words Return on Investment were going to appear.

It’s the classic loss leader applied to trillion dollar (across the market) capital investments.

Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.

I use claude code and pi.dev side by side most days and i'm mostly choosing pi for most work in last couple of weeks.

True. But this sounds: "I feel like Mondays are coming after Sundays...".

I think that's the normal path for new markets as they consolidate...

I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.

Have you considered open sourcing the SDK generator as part of the shutdown of stainless services?

You guys should be proud - it was a great service!

stainless is a great piece of software. it was a really good risk to try to make a business out of openapi generators' maintainers not having enough time to fix bugs. everybody benefits. it sounds like nothing but similar ideas - like uv - save me time every day and turn me into an evangelist.

I can't find the word "journey" — I'm disappointed.

Might I recommend trying APIMatic out: https://migrate-from-stainless.apimatic.io/

TypeSpec is awesome!!

(disclaimer: founder of Stainless and also friends with creator of TypeSpec)

I worked with both Alex (stainless) and Jarred (bun) at Stripe, and they were both notable for their high energy and output. I did find it amusing that Anthropic picked both the Xtripes up and wonder how many Xtripes at at Anthropic hiring their ex-coworkers.

Congrats to them both, and I'm not at all surprised! Great acquihires.

I met him via HN, and somehow got the opportunity to work closely with him on Stainless since the very early days, I can confirm he is awesome! He did such a fantastic work building the team and developing a very unique culture of excellence and kindness

Aww, well this thread is a nice surprise :) thanks for the kind words!

I worked with him at Hired. Great dude!

It should be noted that this user is basically an OAI shill account. You can look through their history to see this quite clearly.

Anecdata, but I have a friend at OAI who claims that on both twitter and HN there is mild coordination of OAI employees to signal boost pro-OAI and anti-competitor messaging.

How is this acquisition relevant to OpenAI or anything else you said?

Yeah it's crazy how they're burning developer goodwill. I've personally cancelled and resent them for not being able to delete my claude code session (that button was misteriously the only one in the UI to throw an error, I tried every day for two weeks).

Maybe you're right about the rest, but about the topic, how does "this!" equal to Anthopic being petty against OpenAI? Is OpenAI using Stainless a lot already, or is it something else? Your comment seems to be missing how the first and last line are related. FWIW, I don't think anyone involved here is "the good guys".

> dow

I was wondering what the Dow jones stock index thing was...

It took me a minute, but I am guessing this means department of war? It feels strange to see terminology evolve like this over my lifetime.

At first I thought this might've been a 'freedom fries' thing, but I guess it's pretty official now.

> signs a deal with Elon!

Expect grok to improve dramatically as Musk reverse-engineers the Anthropic services running on his hardware.

Curious - are you affiliated with OpenAI?

They didn't sue OpenClaw; they sent a C&D over the name. That's how trademark law works. If they didn't defend their name then anyone can use it.

if this is petty, then i'd love to know where openai employees having claude derangement syndrome sits on the petty scale

I can live with those but not their token cost.

For some reason I don't see you calling OAI petty when they donated $20M to Trump & worked a secret deal with Hegseth to usurp Anthropic and erase the red lines they had in place.

Starting a race to the bottom where every AI company agrees to "all lawful use" such as mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, probably increasing p(doom) by some amount.

All to stick it to Anthropic. That's not petty to you?

To me it is an order of magnitude bigger than all of the stuff you've described. I suspect some people here just work for OAI.

It's really insulting to the Stainless team to dismiss this acquisition as some sort of chess move against OpenAI. Give me a break.

Oai deserves everything bad that happens to them.

Where did they acknowledge publicly mythos was fear mongered? Grok returned no evidence.

It’s the fourth tenet of the Cook Doctrine:

“We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.”

I guess they'll be able to vibecode a replacement pretty quickly

I hope they make it open source!

from the very beginning. i remember going through their code and seeing stainless all over the comments. great marketing.

Third sentence in the article:

> Founded in 2022, Stainless has powered the generation of every official Anthropic SDK since the earliest days of our API.

edit: bah. no more HN before coffee.

Helpful link: https://migrate-from-stainless.apimatic.io/

We evaluated Stainless, Fern [1], and a few others for Docs & SDKs (soon, CLI) and ended up choosing Fern. Definitely glad we did after today's news. Hadn't seen WorkOS's work here though - thanks for sharing.

[1] https://buildwithfern.com/

> Did they just want to hire some extra skilled engineers?

This. Probably to work on Anthropic's SDKs and tooling.

Worry not, it's just Monday.

How could it possibly be?

100% agree with everything you said. To your point, I don't understand why every acquisition like this isn't treated as a total failure on the part of the AI companies. If Claude is so good and software engineering is a dead career, why couldn't they have Claude Code fix its ridiculous resource consumption or rewrite itself in better fit language instead of buying a JS runtime? And I've never heard of Stainless, but generating API clients from a spec seems like the exact thing AI should be good at! It's totally ridiculous, the tech industry is completely rotten and I feel bad being a part of it.

> but it is deeply concerning that Anthropic are able to use monopoly money to kill software at their whim. First Bun, and now this.

It almost sounds like you want Lina Khan back :-D

[EDIT: I'm an idiot, sorry, completely misread your comment. I agree on all counts]

AI companies are the new tech companies

in what sense did Anthropic “kill” Bun?

It's the developers of Carmageddon.

Hmm. I thought we didn't need libraries or tooling anymore and "AI" could just create everything we needed? I've even been assured that we don't even need programming languages anymore, the LLMs can just write whatever we need in assembly.

Hmm.

Anthropic uses Stainless Docs for the API reference. It’s a custom integration that embeds the Stainless Docs react components directly in the Claude dashboard application.

(I worked on the Stainless Docs product at Stainless and implemented support for Anthropic’s embedding use case)

Anthropic technically use the Stainless docs platform for their docs, in that it’s all rendered by Stainless components. They just don’t use the full suite of Stainless tools for docs. The ability to use as little or as much as you like was a great feature of the Stainless docs product

Surely part of the value is the talent, the rest comes from removing a tool like this from the open market? I wonder how much of each went into the final valuation.

> This has to be somewhat anti-competitive.

I don’t think so. They were available to anyone with the money and Anthropic acted first.

I doubt attempting to hurt OpenAI was the primary reason for the acquisition.

Maybe it’s different now; Bill Gates “wanting to cutoff Netscape’s air supply” and threatening to cancel the Windows license of PC manufacturers who shipped Netscape’s browser on their PCs… now that’s anticompetitive. They had 95% market share.

Bill was like “That's a nice PC business you have there; would be a shame if something were to happen to it.”

Acquihire, with a side of shutting down a vendor that OpenAI prominently uses

A useful product that developers who want some easy SDKs across a bunch of languages use?

Brian Krausz

I'm guessing it'll be something around spinning up MCPs easily as an evolution of their product. Just right place, right time

For what it’s worth Stainless codegen output has always been owned by customers. The SDKs won’t disappear, and the team did spend quite a lot of time to make it possible to transition to self-service. I don’t see how that could be used against you

The OpenAPI autogenerated clients kinda suck though.

My preferred approach for doing this is to have a hand-rolled SDK generator that reads the request, response and error models out of the microservice project and emits the same in each language targeted by the SDK, along with a minimal stub that calls the API.

You then spend 15 minutes at most, customizing the stub if needed, if you need custom behaviours like streaming.

Open source software isn't meaningfully insulated from this. Anthropic purchased Bun's maintainers as well and are effectively killing it, using it as a sacrifice to their AGI hype marketing. Could people fork it, technically yeah. Will anybody? Probably not, the original vision of Bun will probably go unmaintained while the main repo is destroyed with an AI Rust rewrite with 1m loc that no human ever read. If you were using Bun in your stack you're almost certainly going to be forced to switch to an alternative.