| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 9 hours ago |
| Company that repeatedly tells you software developers are obsoleted by their product buys more software developers instead of using said product to create software. Hmm. |
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| ▲ | tedsanders 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | This seems like a reasonable take. Maybe you could inform your CEO, the media and influencer sycophants, the tech companies that are laying off tens of thousands of developers while mandating the use of your company's tool, and everyone else responsible for us being inundated with outlandish claims that software engineering is dead on a literally daily basis. Hey, while I'm asking for wishes that won't be granted, maybe get people in your company to stop thinking they're so important that it's okay to buy 40% of the world's RAM supply with borrowed money, making it cost 4.5x as much for the rest of us? |
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| ▲ | lm28469 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They said it'll be good enough in two weeks, give them some time! |
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| ▲ | siva7 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They're not buying developers, they are buying the whole ecosystem to produce software. Still aligned with their original message. |
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| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | If the product did what it was advertised to do, they could simply build their own ecosystem for producing software and train the model to use it. | | |
| ▲ | siva7 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Or, they could use a battle-proven existing solution because they can. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Because they can", after spending a bunch of money to acquire an existing solution. I suppose when it's other people's money, there's no problem with burning it by the fistful. Apparently, "because they can" does not extend to building solutions with their own product. | | |
| ▲ | UqWBcuFx6NV4r 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | They should just halt development immediately and build their own operating system from scratch! You realise that there’s certainly at least one Astral dev that uses Copilot or Claude Code or whatever, right? You’re so anti-AI that you’re making nonsensical arguments. The existence of AI doesn’t mean that human effort and skill and care is worth nothing. OpenAI has never argued that. Nothing is incongruent here except for the completely fictionalised worldview you’ve conjured up and attributed to…a company? |
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| ▲ | wiseowise 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And then what? History is laden with technically superior software that lost to popular one. They can create uw tomorrow, but who will use it when everyone uses uv and its good enough for them? | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | The "then what" is that their model uses it. Technically superior software loses to popular software on marketing. But LLM owners have the ultimate marketing tool, because they can make their model use the tool. Anyone who asks how to do X in Python gets recommended "OpenAI-Python-Tool-For-X". Anyone who asks Codex to do X, Codex automatically installs "OpenAI-Tool-For-X". It would be very easy for them to launch even technically inferior software into a prime position. On top of that, if software developers are being replaced altogether as we are bashed in the head with such tales again and again, the marketing of dev tools wouldn't even matter, only what models are trained to use. | | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | This comment section is the evidence that your strategy won’t work. Why fight against community if you can buy it? Or you seriously think this is some ideological war where they need to prove that their offering is so good by reinventing all of software? Why won’t you stretch it further? They should’ve written their browser, their OS and their mobile phones instead of offering ChaGPT on existing ones. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > where they need to prove that their offering is so good by reinventing all of software? They could start by inventing any software with their agents. They probably should prove their offering is good enough to do that considering they're hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, owing truckloads of money they currently have no hope of repaying to investors who are being promised a literal revolution. | | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why would they diffuse their attention when competition is not sleeping? | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Their attention apears to already be quite diffuse if buying a python package manager is an item anywhere on their agenda. Also, once again, if the tool did what it was promised -- it wouldn't even be a diffusion of attention. The entire schtick is that software engineers are being replaced and that you can just run a model to create the product for you. Unless, of course, the thing does not do what is promised. | | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Their attention apears to already be quite diffuse if buying a python package manager is an item anywhere on their agenda. According to the blog [0], their whole monorepo is in Python, their models are obviously trained using Python, their experiments are written using Python and core and CLI of their Codex is written using Rust. Uv brings both Python and Rust expertise. You’re talking nonsense because of your blind hate of LLMs. Even though I agree that they’re capitalizing on the fear of SWE being redundant. 0 - https://calv.info/openai-reflections | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Blind hate of LLMs? I don't hate LLMs, in fact I do contract work off-and-on for a bootstrapped startup in the field (which is profitable on its own merits, imagine that!). What I hate is blind sycophancy, that Sam Altman is a huckster who is in the process of defrauding investors of what will probably be over a trillion dollars when all is said and done, and the corresponding completely batshit environment he's created with this bubble of his. I can't even get through reading the vomit-inducing blog you linked. "It's entirely possible that the quality of the work will draw me back. It's hard to imagine building anything as impactful as AGI, and LLMs are easily the technological innovation of the decade". Ugh. Obviously, buying skilled Rust devs makes sense for any normal software company that develops in Rust. I wouldn't be making a point out of it if the headline were "Amazon buys Rust developers". Or if OpenAI were honest about what their product is. |
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| ▲ | largbae 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They're writing the software to end all softwares! |
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| ▲ | tripledry 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| When someone at work talks about all software devs being replaced I link them to the Anthropic career pages. |
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| ▲ | avaer 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this case. |
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| ▲ | suddenlybananas 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | What are they buying? | | |
| ▲ | rvnx 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series B They are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs. The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more liquidity for investors). The acquisition is just a collateral effect. | | |
| ▲ | tgtweak 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Are you implying that the revenue multiple on this acquisition is lower than openAIs and that they'd be making money by acquiring and folding into their valuation multiple? I think that's not the case and I would wager non existent. This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is part of the team at Astral). So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery. I don't even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything, candidly. | | |
| ▲ | rvnx 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | They raised 4M USD, they have 26 full-time employees (they pay 120<->200K / yr, cf https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/523411-93 ). It means the company almost reached their runway, so all these employees would have to find a job. It's a very very good product, but it is open-source and Apache / MIT, so difficult to defend from anyone just clicking on fork. Especially a large company like OpenAI who has massive distribution. Now that they hired the employees, they have no more guarantees than if they made a direct offer to them. | | |
| ▲ | tgtweak 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So I don't see how the acquisition is collateral - it's an acquihire plain and simple, if anything else it would be supply chain insurance as they clearly use a lot of these tools downstream. As you noted the licensing is extremely permissive on the tools so there appears to be very little EV there for an acquirer outside of the human capital building the tools or building out monetized features. I'm not too plugged into venture cap on opensource/free tooling space but raising 3 rounds and growing your burn rate to $3M/yr in 24 months without revenue feels like a decently risky bag for those investors and staff without a revenue path or exit. I'd be curious to see if OpenAI went hunting for this or if it was placed in their lap by one of the investors. OpenAI has infamously been offering huge compensation packages to acquire talent, this would be a relative deal if they got it at even a modest valuation. As noted, codex uses a lot of the tooling that this team built here and previously, OpenAI's realization that competitors that do one thing better than them (like claude with coding before codex) can open the door to getting disrupted if they lapse - lots of people I know are moving to claude for non-coding workflows because of it's reputation and relatively mature/advanced client tools. | |
| ▲ | zanie 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A brief note, your numbers are way off here — Astral subsequently raised a Series A and B (as mentioned in the blog post) but did not announce them. We were doing great financially. (I work at Astral) | | |
| ▲ | rvnx 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It seems you are one of the most active contributors there. I would sincerely have understood better (and even wished) if OpenAI made you a very generous offer to you personally as an individual contributor than choose a strategy where the main winners are the VCs of the purchased company. Here, outside, we perceive zero to almost no revenues (no pricing ? no contact us ? maybe some consulting ?) and millions burned. Whether it is 4 or 8 or 15M burned, no idea. Who's going to fill that hole, and when ? (especially since PE funds have 5 years timeline, and company is from 2021). The end product is nice, but as an investor, being nice is not enough, so they must have deeper motives. | |
| ▲ | tgtweak 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean you pirouetted onto the AI hype train before running out of working capital - I guess that's doing great financially by some definitions. |
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| ▲ | waynesonfire 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > They raised 4M USD What was their pitch? | | |
| ▲ | tgtweak 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | To raise $4m seed from AAA partners usually requires connections + track record/credability of the founders - looks like they have that here since they raised 3 rounds with zero revenue. |
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| ▲ | jon-wood 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I can see why the former investors and Astral founders would like that, what I don't see is what OpenAI get out of the deal. | | |
| ▲ | rvnx an hour ago | parent [-] | | Maybe OpenAI literally considers themselves as the ultimate non-profit company. Hmm… |
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| ▲ | KeplerBoy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | mindshare and a central piece of the python package management ecosystem. | | |
| ▲ | bootsmann 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Most popular product on the planet acquires a random python packaging org for mindshare? What am I not seeing here? | | |
| ▲ | nilkn 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I feel like it's pretty easy to predict what OpenAI is trying to do. They want their codex agent integrated directly into the most popular, foundational tooling for one of the world's most used and most influential programming languages. And, vice versa, they probably want to be able to ensure that tooling remains well-maintained so it stays on top and continues to integrate well with their agent. They want codex to become the "default" coding agent by making it the one integrated into popular open source software. | | |
| ▲ | MoreQARespect 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | This makes much more sense as an zoom-buys-keybase style acquihire. I bet within a month the astral devs will be on new projects. Bundling codex with uv isnt going to meaningfully affect the number of people using it. It doesnt increase the switching costs or anything. |
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| ▲ | __float 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "uv" is a very widely used tool in the Python ecosystem, and Python is important to AI. Calling it "a random Python packaging org" seems a bit unfair. | |
| ▲ | everforward 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think this is more about `ruff` than `uv`. Linting is all about parsing the code into something machines can analyze, which to me feels like something that could potentially be useful for AI in a similar way to JetBrains writing their own language parsers to make "find and replace" work sanely and what not. I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text, and need software/expertise to manage the text->AST->text pipeline in a way that preserves the structure of your files/text. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Writing a parser is not that much of work to buy a company in order to do it. Piggybacking on LSP servers and treesitter would be more efficient. | | |
| ▲ | dcreager 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The parser is not the hard part. The hard part is doing something useful with the parse trees. They even chose "oh is that all?" and a picture of a piece of cake as the teaser image for my Strange Loop talk on this subject! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2R1PTGcwrE | |
| ▲ | everforward 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Writing a literal parser isn’t too hard (and there’s presumably an existing one in the source code for the language). Writing something that understands all the methods that come in a Django model goes way beyond parsing the code, and is a genuine struggle in language where you can’t execute the code without worrying about side effects like Python. Ty should give them a base for that where the model is able to see things that aren’t literally in the code and aren’t in the training data (eg an internal version of something like SQLAlchemy). | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you’re talking about magic methods/properties enabled by reflection and macros, then you’re no longer statically analyzing the code. |
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| ▲ | OJFord 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What you're not seeing, edited inline, is: Not-most popular LLM software development product on the planet acquires most popular/rapidly rising python packaging org for mindshare. | |
| ▲ | mcmcmc 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This just seems like panic M&A. They know they aren’t on track to ever meet their obligations to investors but they can’t actually find a way to move towards profitability. Hence going back to the VC well of gambling obscene amounts of money hoping for a 10x return… somehow | |
| ▲ | KeplerBoy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The dev market? Anthropic's services are arguably more popular among a certain developer demographic. I guess this move might end up in a situation where the uv team comes up with some new agent-first tooling, which works best or only with OAI services. | |
| ▲ | aldanor 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One of the popular products on the planet acquires the most popular python packaging org | |
| ▲ | Ygg2 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I didn't know Claude bought Astral! /S |
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| ▲ | contagiousflow 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why can't they just vibe code a uv replacement? | | |
| ▲ | KeplerBoy 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | They can, everyone can. Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool. | | |
| ▲ | freetonik 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | OpenAI could vibe-code marketshare by introducing bias into ChatGPT's responses and recommendations. "– how to do x in Python? – Start by installing OpenAI-UV first..." | |
| ▲ | drgiggles 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This. It's valuable b/c if you have many thousands of python devs using astral tooling all day, and it tightly integrates with subscription based openai products...likelihood of openai product usage increases. Same idea with the anthropic bun deal. Remains to be seen what those integrations are and if it translates to more subs, but that's the current thesis. Buy user base -> cram our ai tool into the workflow of that user base. | |
| ▲ | cesarvarela 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But new tools (like uv) start with no market share. | |
| ▲ | suddenlybananas 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why would that marketshare be valuable? |
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| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | huqedato 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | IMO, they are buying business just to put them down later to avoid potential competition. The recipe is not new, it has been practiced by Google/Microsoft for many years. | | |
| ▲ | ainch 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | What competition was OpenAI likely to face from a team working on fast Python tooling? | | |
| ▲ | huqedato 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I have no idea but for sure they did their homework before making this step. I suppose they're grabbing these business just to stay ahead, in order to prevent the competitors to buy those instead. | | | |
| ▲ | cozzyd 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | $ uv install claude-agent-sdk
I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that
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| ▲ | noodletheworld 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | uv |
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| ▲ | waynesonfire 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And, they buy a company writing tooling for Python in not Python. |
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| ▲ | UqWBcuFx6NV4r 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Next you’ll complain about CPython being written in C. | |
| ▲ | LollipopYakuza 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A tool might not be the best tool to build itself, doesn't mean it is not good.
You don't use a screwdriver to craft screwdrivers. Doesn't mean screwdrivers are inherently bad |
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| ▲ | AlexCoventry 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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| ▲ | dewey 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And buying a niche developer tool is helping with that? | | |
| ▲ | throawayonthe 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | i think the point that comment is making is that it's an acquihire, that they bought it to poach the developers |
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| ▲ | sidsud 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | which AI company hasn't? | |
| ▲ | MrBuddyCasino 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Fascism" is when military. The more military, the more fascist. According to this metric, the USSR / DDR with its "anti-fascist wall" was super extra fascist because they were armed to the teeth. | | |
| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | orbifold 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | they were definitely totalitarian, slightly different mix of ideology. Fascist is a fairly good description here, it describes close collaboration of government with corporations to advance national goals. US had somewhat fascist tendencies for a long time now. | | |
| ▲ | edgyquant 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That is most certainly not a definition of fascism nor a thing unique to it. |
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