alt Hacker NewsIt’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.
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As a point of information: Astral did not, in fact, burn through its VC money. I agree that dev tools are difficult to monetize, though.
(Source: I'm an Astral employee.)
UV is arguably this decade's most important addition to the python ecosystem. They are a small, but they are important.
uv is the best thing to happen to package management in Python.
It's not perfect, but it is light-years better than what preceded it.
I jumped ship to it and have not looked back. (So have many of my clients).
> Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.
I'm on the fence about cancelling my JetBrains subscription I've had for nearly 10 years now. I just don't use it much. Zed and Claude Code cover all my needs, the only thing I need is a serious DataGrip alternative, but I might just sit down with Claude and build one for myself.
That was my feeling - more than 'owning' uv etc I could see this as being about getting people onboard who had a proven track record delivering developer tooling that was loved enough to get wide adoption
Uv is the defacto way to do projects. Ty is really really good. Ruff is the defacto linter. I mean they’ve earned a lot of clout.
They were hyped here without any pushback. Maybe OpenAI thinks the Astral folks will now evangelize and foist Codex and ChatGPT onto the open source "community".
People need to be very careful about resisting. OpenAI wants to make everyone unemployed, works with the Pentagon, steals IP, and copyright whistleblowers end up getting killed under mysterious circumstances.
> tiny part of the Python ecosystem
That's kind of like saying Cargo is a small part of the Rust ecosystem.
It's not there yet, but it's getting there.
uv and ruff is not tiny part anymore, its growing fast
This is so dystopian… they built something that worked and now are being “acquihired” into oblivion, and we’re supposed to be happy about it? I’m glad a few of the early people just got rich I guess, but it seems like a terrible system overall.
Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.