alt Hacker NewsThis is a weird pattern accross OpenAI/Anthropic to buy startups building better toolings.
I don't really see the value for OAI/Anthropic, but it's nice to know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will stay maintained!
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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.
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.
> 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
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.
Isn't this something to do with their paid pyx(as opposed to ty/ruff etc) thingy?
The most straightforward one: They run a lot of computational sandboxes that need fast setup. Making sure you can shape the package manager to your needs is a pretty straightforward desire.
I'm expecting Anthropic to buy Zed
I mean they are “startups” on the way to mega-companies. They need internal tooling to match.
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'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".
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