Discussion

Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI

bombcar: I liked “our incredible journey” more when it wasn’t rushing headlong into OpenMawAI

awestroke: Wow. I have rarely seen a company website with so many buzzwords. Still not sure what they do, except "AI". Good riddance

fidotron: Am I reading this right?: a CI company that shuts down CI services with such short notice?Do service providers not think customers have other things to do than simply maintain their existing infrastructure?

seekdeep: This does raise some concerns in major open-source projects:https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...

fkorotkov: 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

JCharante: 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.

faangguyindia: I've moved most companies away from using others stuffToday we use Hertzner and OVH and roll out our own solution whenever possible.Running lean and mean.Depending on such third party services is a trap.

MaxLeiter: FTA:> In 2022, we built Tart, which became the most popular virtualization solution for Apple Silicon, along with several other tools along the way.from Tart's github:> [Tart is for] macOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon to use in CI and other automationsMy (naive?) hypothesis is this kind of expertise is why OpenAI chose to acquihire.

maxloh: Note that this is fundamentally different from the Astral acquisition. At the end of their announcement, they stated:> Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026.This suggests it isn't a product-led acquisition, but rather a talent one.

loevborg: What was the USP of their CI service?

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

panchtatvam: Another one bites the dust.

dangus: I just love how companies like this gaslight the whole world with announcements like this.We started a company to make a big difference in the world and build an engineer’s dream company, and that’s why we have now decided to do the exact opposite and become employee numbers 32,463 through 32,510 at one of the largest tech companies in the world because money is nice.Look, I’d have done the same thing, I’m not criticizing the choice. I just think we don’t need this kind of weird unnatural rhetoric.Please just stop with the tech industry puffery. You’re not Steve Jobs, you’re just the DevOps team at OpenAI now. You’re dumping your worthless code on GitHub, and you’re kicking your customers to the curb.There’s no PR spin left to do anymore. You’re not a company anymore and you’re not a founder anymore.

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

hirako2000: It could also be a suite of product acquisition, the CI could be a product OpenAI is interested in having, but not sell.

trollbridge: Yeah. Much like Astral - acquiring both the product (because they need to use it internally, but don't care about trying to resell / market), and they also want the talent to keep maintaining it / add features they want.

trollbridge: The level of aqui-hires is getting interesting - 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.It certainly makes the idea of a career progression / promotion more challenging than it used to be, but perhaps it also opens up some new opportunities. It becomes far more "high stakes" since you have to take the risk of starting and running a startup that ultimately fails if it does not get acqui-hired.

threecheese: 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 …).

a012: I think “tiny startup” is too underselling Astral. At least to me they have a game changing product, or in the start up dream: make the (Python) world a better place

0dayman: yea yea yea, purchase every last company you find, no one wants OpenAI

elcritch: 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.

bartekpacia: 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)

dangus: Sure, but I imagine the terms of the acquisition doesn’t say you have to write it in this specific style.I’m sure there’s a way to say the same thing without coming across as a bullshitter.

rvnx: 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.You can use: Anka, a "contact-us for pricing" closed-source projet, where you have to pay per-core licensing (easy 3000 USD/yr per machine) or tart, which is a lightweight wrapper around the official Apple API. But you have to know that on MacOS, there is an artificial limit of 2 VMs per Mac... but well:https://github.com/cirruslabs/orchard/commit/3cfa2445500f45f...mhh...So conveniently, using https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html and tart instead of having to buy 25 Mac Mini you might need only 5 (and no licensing to pay to Anka).

dbalatero: I just don't think there's much upside to telling it how it is in the press release that gets buried after a week and everyone moves on. For better or worse.

jeltz: Cuirrus does not do AI, they do CI.

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

bartekpacia: Wow, this is surprising.I’m happy for the founders, they’re great folks. I contributed to CirrusCI a bit in the past and it was a great experience. I even advocated for Cirrus in a couple of my last $DAYJOBs (with varied success). Congrats Fedor!I’m very sad they’re shutting down, though. IMHO CirrusCI was very close to a perfect CI system (I wrote a blogpost about it [0]). I’ll now have to find something to replace it with in my personal projects. I guess I’ll run their cirrus-cli in GitHub Actions for a while. But GitHub Actions is really poor. I heard some good things about Buildkite.[0]: https://garden.pacia.tech/cirrus_ci_is_the_best.html

jeltz: What software do you use to run your CI?

mcmcmc: [delayed]

dennisy: Congratulations!Can you talk a bit more about your journey without raising funds?Also what does HN think of that path today when trying to launch a new AI startup?

fkorotkov: 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.

CompoundEyes: If your scope includes making the Codex web app environments have additional functionality I look forward to it. More enterprise features and yaml backed pipelines.

vomayank: Interesting move. Cirrus Labs has been doing solid work in mobile CI/CD infrastructure — curious to see how their expertise gets integrated into OpenAI’s tooling and developer ecosystem.

koolhead17: Is Sam or family an investor in them anyways?

fkorotkov: 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.

dude250711: AI companies need a surprising amount of people.It's kind of like electric cars charged with electricity from coal power plants.

fkorotkov: We were 100% bootstrapped with no outside capital or support/advisory.