Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI
by seekdeep on 4/11/2026, 1:01:34 PM
Comments
by: dennisy
Congratulations!<p>Can you talk a bit more about your journey without raising funds?<p>Also what does HN think of that path today when trying to launch a new AI startup?
4/11/2026, 3:27:01 PM
by: maxloh
Note that this is fundamentally different from the Astral acquisition. At the end of their announcement, they stated:<p>> Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026.<p>And earlier in the article:<p>> Joining OpenAI allows us to extend the mission we started with Cirrus Labs: building new kinds of tooling and environments that make engineers more effective, for both human engineers and agentic engineers.<p>It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.
4/11/2026, 2:31:27 PM
by: seekdeep
This does raise some concerns in major open-source projects:<p><a href="https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990</a><p><a href="https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67noplncqhesl5eyb6wgol4ccjxynspv%40yatlykpribmm" rel="nofollow">https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...</a>
4/11/2026, 2:24:12 PM
by: bartekpacia
Wow, this is surprising.<p>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!<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://garden.pacia.tech/cirrus_ci_is_the_best.html" rel="nofollow">https://garden.pacia.tech/cirrus_ci_is_the_best.html</a>
4/11/2026, 3:19:26 PM
by: MaxLeiter
FTA:<p>> In 2022, we built Tart, which became the most popular virtualization solution for Apple Silicon, along with several other tools along the way.<p>from Tart's github:<p>> [Tart is for] macOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon to use in CI and other automations<p>My (naive?) hypothesis is this kind of expertise is why OpenAI chose to acquihire.
4/11/2026, 2:32:50 PM
by: bombcar
I liked “our incredible journey” more when it wasn’t rushing headlong into OpenMawAI
4/11/2026, 1:53:08 PM
by: spooneybarger
Cirrus gave a ton of support for years to open source projects. I congratulate them on cashing out. Running a business like Cirrus did is always a hard road and I will never fault folks who gave time and resources on their platform away for taking the money.<p>I wish Fedor and everyone at Cirrus the best of luck and OpenAI and thank them immensely for the years of free CI they gave to us in the Pony programming language despite it not having any marketing value to them.
4/11/2026, 3:04:25 PM
by: faangguyindia
I've moved most companies away from using others stuff<p>Today we use Hertzner and OVH and roll out our own solution whenever possible.<p>Running lean and mean.<p>Depending on such third party services is a trap.
4/11/2026, 2:17:00 PM
by: emptysongglass
Wow Cirrus was like the one cool CI thing with first-class Podman support. RIP. Guess I'm looking elsewhere (and not at Dagger which refuses to support rootless Podman).
4/11/2026, 1:34:49 PM
by: 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.<p>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.
4/11/2026, 2:50:39 PM
by: seekdeep
A pity. Cirrus has been providing quite decent CI facilities, for free. One of the advantages (among many) compared to GitHub Actions is the large variety of runner images, e.g., Debian, Fedora, Alpine, FreeBSD, ...
4/11/2026, 1:56:07 PM
by: fidotron
Am I reading this right?: a CI company that shuts down CI services with such short notice?<p>Do service providers not think customers have other things to do than simply maintain their existing infrastructure?
4/11/2026, 2:00:27 PM
by: fnord77
> I wanted to work on fun and challenging engineering problems, in the hope of bootstrapping a business as a byproduct.<p>> We never raised outside capital<p>I guess it worked out though
4/11/2026, 1:58:08 PM
by: loevborg
What was the USP of their CI service?
4/11/2026, 2:08:34 PM
by: awestroke
Wow. I have rarely seen a company website with so many buzzwords. Still not sure what they do, except "AI". Good riddance
4/11/2026, 1:47:50 PM
by: panchtatvam
Another one bites the dust.
4/11/2026, 2:41:45 PM
by: dangus
I just <i>love</i> how companies like this gaslight the whole world with announcements like this.<p><i>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.</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>There’s no PR spin left to do anymore. You’re not a company anymore and you’re not a founder anymore.
4/11/2026, 2:51:32 PM
by: 0dayman
yea yea yea, purchase every last company you find, no one wants OpenAI
4/11/2026, 3:01:04 PM