Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI
cirruslabs.org

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196 points

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seekdeep

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7 hours ago

109 comments

maxloh ・ 6 hours ago

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.

And earlier in the article:

> 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.

It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.

  • troyvit ・ 3 hours ago

    This is kind-of neat too, at least in the near term:

    > In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.

    • naikrovek ・ 6 minutes ago

      This is awesome because I flippin love tart.

    • cschmatzler ・ 31 minutes ago

      This is making my current work 100 times easier. Very welcome timing.

  • fkorotkov ・ 6 hours ago

    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.

    • js2 ・ 3 hours ago

      What are your plans for tart licensing going forward?

      https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart/blob/main/LICENSE

      https://tart.run/licensing/

      • fkorotkov ・ 3 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Updates in the coming weeks.

        > In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.

        • naikrovek ・ 3 minutes ago

          MIT or Apache2 or FreeBSD licenses would be preferable in my case, but GPLv2 or even AGPLv3 (if you have to) would work.

          If you’re taking requests…

      • tclancy ・ 3 hours ago

        That sounds like a British phrase for pimping.

    • CompoundEyes ・ 5 hours ago

      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.

    • elAhmo ・ an hour ago

      For now.

  • hirako2000 ・ 6 hours ago

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

    • trollbridge ・ 5 hours ago

      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.

  • koolhead17 ・ 4 hours ago

    Is Sam or family an investor in them anyways?

    • fkorotkov ・ 4 hours ago

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

jwpapi ・ 4 hours ago

So AI company buys devs again, but devs are dead

  • darkwater ・ an hour ago

    They want to kill the last good ones

bombcar ・ 6 hours ago

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

  • jeltz ・ 5 hours ago

    Every great journey must have an end. As far as I understand Cirrus CI was struggling due to Github Actions eating their market. Cirrus CI was in my opinion much better than Github Actions but it is hard to compete with a bundled solution.

    • esafak ・ 4 hours ago

      What was good about it? It looks pretty ordinary to me: https://cirrus-ci.org/features/

      • a1o ・ 3 hours ago

        It gives a better docker based experience and it also has measurements of memory and cpu usage to help you dimension things quickly.

      • jeltz ・ 3 hours ago

        Much better UX for viewing logs, more supported platforms. Github Actions in particular is also very unstable.

MaxLeiter ・ 6 hours ago

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 automations

My (naive?) hypothesis is this kind of expertise is why OpenAI chose to acquihire.

  • threecheese ・ 6 hours ago

    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 …).

  • jen20 ・ 4 hours ago

    Not to sell Tart short (it is quite good), but it's "just" a wrapper around Virtualization.framework with a few extra pieces. This is the kind of thing that Codex driven by experts _should_ be able to build very easily.

    • w10-1 ・ an hour ago

      Agreed. The benefit from not having anyone else or any partial (container) solutions in the computing chain is huge for secure isolation. Getting rid of the intermediary solves a universe of possible problems.

      That said, I've been free-riding on tart because they've often surfaced issues I needed to address. Free riders like me are possibly the reason these companies can't make their own way.

    • TheTaytay ・ 3 hours ago

      Yes, but it’s also currently the best one. They have OCI compatible Mac VM images that are prebuilt. It’s quite good.

    • zackify ・ 3 hours ago

      interesting that was what i thought this was, it keeps boggling my mind the sums being paid for what really could be built by experienced devs on their own teams

      • MaxLeiter ・ 30 minutes ago

        Short term: they don’t need devs to build it, it’s already built

        Long term: they now have experienced dev(s?) to build their next products and features

faangguyindia ・ 6 hours ago

I've moved most companies away from using others stuff

Today 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.

  • Aurornis ・ 4 hours ago

    Been there, done that, and I still find value in 3rd party services despite the occasional need to migrate.

    Self hosting is the way to go if you need to keep monthly services spend as low as possible but you have extra time to spend, such as with a hobby project.

    Whenever I’ve worked on real startup projects, self-hosting became a constant source of little tasks for the engineering team to mix into our weekly workload. There were always little tasks to upgrade this service, investigate why that one server was slow, or to migrate something to a bigger server because we were bottlenecked on some resource. Then we had to manage backups and do our recovery drills, along with changing the backup strategy every 6 months because someone had a better idea.

    When we started to add up all of the time spent managing everything it starts to look like spending dollars (of engineer time) to save pennies on SaaS bills.

    Probably not a popular thing to say on HN, but I now try to stay away from teams that go to extremes to self-host everything because I just want to get my work done, not also be constantly involved in running the underlying services. I do it for my own hobby projects at home but I don’t want to be doing it at work where we have money to spend to lighten the load. If the cost is the occasional migration to a different 3rd party service that’s not a big workload relative to everything involved in self-hosting.

  • causal ・ 4 hours ago

    That is something of a broken promise in the SaaS world; it was supposed to be convenience but instead it became a hundred broken integration points as you struggle to keep up with deprecated APIs and acqui-hires killing off shims you wouldn't have needed if everything had been on-prem to begin with.

  • jeltz ・ 5 hours ago

    What software do you use to run your CI?

    • rglullis ・ 4 hours ago

      Not OP, but to me the answer is:

        - gitea
  - woodpecker CI
  - my own docker registry
  - portainer running on my docker swarm
      I then define the docker stack in the git repository, and CI builds the images and pushes to build the new image to the docker repository. The portainer API allows to deploy a stack, with the image tag as a parameter.
    • zackify ・ 3 hours ago

      not op either, github actions, self hosted runner on bare metal with lxc containers for each runner.

      Cost savings are insane and the speed of latest amd epycs are miles ahead of the default ci instances on github and other places.

qqasG12 ・ 3 hours ago

It looks like OpenAI has no clue what to do and does what every software company without a plan does: create new dev tools and a new dev stack.

So they want an integrated solution with CI, Python packaging and vibe coding.

That is a $100 million valuation at best, not a $1 trillion one.

  • danny_codes ・ an hour ago

    “We will replace white collar workers”

    Proceeds to buy white collar workers.

  • zackify ・ 3 hours ago

    yeah super confused, it looks like some tools to manage vms in ci? what is unique about that vs lxc or docker or apple's native container cli?

yoyohello13 ・ 4 hours ago

Incredible how many people are perfectly fine working for a company making AI powered murder bots.

  • taurath ・ 4 hours ago

    This is a VC site. Morality or changing the world for the better is window dressing on earning as much money as possible and damn anyone who gets in the way. Morality is only good in as much as it’s good for business to be seen as moral. Money people have been majority running things for over 2 decades at least but the mythos lives on.

    • brap ・ an hour ago

      Killing bad people is changing the world for the better

emptysongglass ・ 7 hours ago

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).

  • fkorotkov ・ 6 hours ago

    Thank you! Cirrus CLI is still around and can run your tasks locally in either Podman or Docker. Can also be used in any other CI.

    • emptysongglass ・ 2 hours ago

      I mean, yes it is, but we all know what happens to these projects when their primary devs move on or get acquihired. Keybase, anyone?

seekdeep ・ 6 hours ago

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, ...

bartekpacia ・ 5 hours ago

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

prodigycorp ・ 3 hours ago

I don't think people have been keeping track but OpenAI has been hiring a murderer's row of developers for their Codex team.

  • tclancy ・ 3 hours ago

    Meh, Gehrig and Ruth are long since dead.

trollbridge ・ 5 hours ago

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.

  • mcmcmc ・ 5 hours ago

    It also kills competition and disincentivizes providing long term value. I’m not sure how making the job market more like gambling does anything positive for the majority of people

  • michaelcampbell ・ 4 hours ago

    > 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

    This has been popular for 25+ years. Likely before, but that's when I first started noticing a significant number of companies that were clearly in business solely TO BE BOUGHT.

  • elcritch ・ 5 hours ago

    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.

jadar ・ 2 hours ago

Tart is an amazing tool, and I have been very grateful for it. There's almost no other way I've found to stand up ephemeral CI/CD macOS VMs for self-hosted Git forge solutions. I really hope this doesn't mean that Tart will eventually die the death of unmaintained projects (e.g. Realm post-Mongo-acquisition.)

  • fkorotkov ・ 2 hours ago

    It won’t and I think it will thrive even more. ;)

spooneybarger ・ 5 hours ago

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.

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.

vomayank ・ 5 hours ago

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.

  • mrweasel ・ 3 hours ago

    It's hard not to imaging that OpenAI is attempting to build an developer tools eco-system. It makes sense as it's one of the few fields in AI that are currently able to generate sales.

drzaiusx11 ・ an hour ago

As a tart cli user, I'd love to know more about their "more open" licensing of that particular project that they call out that will follow the merger.

That said, I find their aqui-hire by OpenAI disappointing for a number of (mostly personal) reasons. However, I wish them the best regardless.

  • drzaiusx11 ・ 8 minutes ago

    Genuinely curious on why I'm getting down voted for the above comment

Duplicake ・ 4 hours ago

Why are they acquiring seemingly random things, they acquired Astral and now this

pxc ・ 4 hours ago

Tart is really cool, impressive, and useful. Best of luck to the team!

a1o ・ 3 hours ago

That is a bit sudden, it would be great if it was possible to get an extra month for migration.

fidotron ・ 6 hours ago

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?

  • fkorotkov ・ 6 hours ago

    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

  • 999900000999 ・ 6 hours ago

    Realistically this is what you agree to when you want to use someone else's computer. They can just as easily ran out of money.

  • JCharante ・ 6 hours ago

    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.

  • mcmcmc ・ 6 hours ago

    I don’t think they care about their customers at all, from the statement they consider their business a “byproduct”.

  • 8cvor6j844qw_d6 ・ 6 hours ago

    Same thoughts. Guess the migration team responsible will have to kick up the gear.

dennisy ・ 5 hours ago

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 ・ 4 hours ago

    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.

    • dennisy ・ 40 minutes ago

      That is good advice!

      I am too late for that as I am full time but also lucky to have had a previous exit.

      I am planning to go the VC route this time, because the problem I am going after feels VC size.

      However I feel bootstrap or small F&F round gives you more flexibility when it comes to exits.

      Congrats again!

fnord77 ・ 6 hours ago

> I wanted to work on fun and challenging engineering problems, in the hope of bootstrapping a business as a byproduct.

> We never raised outside capital

I guess it worked out though

Philip-J-Fry ・ 4 hours ago

We have AI companies constantly fear-mongering that their next model is somehow too dangerous to release. But they just continue to go on an acquisition spree.

This just confirms to me that we are no where near AI being able to write any complicated software. I mean, if it could woudln't OpenAI just prompt it into existence? ;)

  • neuronexmachina ・ 3 hours ago

    > We have AI companies constantly fear-mongering that their next model is somehow too dangerous to release

    I'm guessing you're referring to this recent report of the security vulnerabilities Mythos found and submitted patches for? That just seems like they don't want the negative press and/or liability if their new model ends up being used to create 0-days that cause widespread damage.

    https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/

loevborg ・ 6 hours ago

What was the USP of their CI service?

  • rvnx ・ 5 hours ago

    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.

    For most CI use, you can choose between:

      Anka, a "contact-us for pricing" closed-source projet, where you have to pay expensive license (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...

    With https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html

    Some people might find it very attractive:

      Instead 25 Mac Mini you might need only 5.
  + No licensing to pay to Anka.
    Even without bypassing the limit it is great actually
  • jeltz ・ 5 hours ago

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

dude250711 ・ 4 hours ago

AI companies need a surprising amount of people.

It's kind of like electric cars charged with electricity from coal power plants.

dangus ・ 5 hours ago

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 ・ 5 hours ago

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

    • dangus ・ 5 hours ago

      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.

      • dbalatero ・ 5 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        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.

        • dangus ・ 2 hours ago

          Why is telling it like it is not the rational default?

          If this is a forgettable press release isn't it lower effort than coming up with this type of nonsense?

  • bartekpacia ・ 5 hours ago

    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)

0dayman ・ 5 hours ago

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

panchtatvam ・ 6 hours ago

Another one bites the dust.

bustah ・ 3 hours ago

[dead]

awestroke ・ 7 hours ago

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

  • jeltz ・ 5 hours ago

    Cuirrus does not do AI, they do CI.

    • thayne ・ 4 hours ago

      There is a theme in a lot of products (and open source projects) of plastering AI all over the description, even if it isn't really related to AI. The first thing I see on the CirrusLabs website is "Accelerate AI Adoption Without Compromising Safety". How am I supposed to know this is a CI product, and even if I figure that out, how am I supposed to know it is a genral CI tool and not something AI specific?

      I don't understand why these sites just put a bunch of buzzwords instead of telling you what it actually is.

      • fkorotkov ・ 4 hours ago

        You are checking the wrong Cirrus Labs.