[HN Gopher] Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI
___________________________________________________________________
Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI
Author : seekdeep
Score : 218 points
Date : 2026-04-11 13:01 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cirruslabs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cirruslabs.org)
| emptysongglass wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| awestroke wrote:
| Wow. I have rarely seen a company website with so many buzzwords.
| Still not sure what they do, except "AI". Good riddance
| jeltz wrote:
| Cuirrus does not do AI, they do CI.
| thayne wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You are checking the wrong Cirrus Labs.
| bombcar wrote:
| I liked "our incredible journey" more when it wasn't rushing
| headlong into OpenMawAI
| jeltz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What was good about it? It looks pretty ordinary to me:
| https://cirrus-ci.org/features/
| jeltz wrote:
| Much better UX for viewing logs, more supported platforms.
| Github Actions in particular is also very unstable.
| a1o wrote:
| It gives a better docker based experience and it also has
| measurements of memory and cpu usage to help you dimension
| things quickly.
| seekdeep wrote:
| 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, ...
| rmast wrote:
| FreeBSD CI testing is the part I'll miss the most... time to
| find an alternative for open source projects.
| fnord77 wrote:
| > 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
| fidotron wrote:
| 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?
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Same thoughts. Guess the migration team responsible will have
| to kick up the gear.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| I don't think they care about their customers at all, from the
| statement they consider their business a "byproduct".
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fkorotkov wrote:
| 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
| loevborg wrote:
| What was the USP of their CI service?
| Maxious wrote:
| Ability to virtualize on Apple devices and linux with GPUs
| https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990
| rvnx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Better UX than their competitors and support for many different
| images.
| faangguyindia wrote:
| 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.
| jeltz wrote:
| What software do you use to run your CI?
| rglullis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| a1o wrote:
| Are your self-hosted runner on premise or are you using a
| cloud service for it?
| surgical_fire wrote:
| This is the way.
| causal wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| seekdeep wrote:
| This does raise some concerns in major open-source projects:
|
| https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990
|
| https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...
| maxloh wrote:
| 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.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| It could also be a suite of product acquisition, the CI could
| be a product OpenAI is interested in having, but not sell.
| trollbridge wrote:
| 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.
| fkorotkov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mogili1 wrote:
| If you are interested in yaml backed pipelines check out
| this open source tool I built for exactly this purpose:
|
| https://github.com/smogili1/circuit
| js2 wrote:
| What are your plans for tart licensing going forward?
|
| https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart/blob/main/LICENSE
|
| https://tart.run/licensing/
| tclancy wrote:
| That sounds like a British phrase for pimping.
| fkorotkov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| elAhmo wrote:
| For now.
| koolhead17 wrote:
| Is Sam or family an investor in them anyways?
| fkorotkov wrote:
| We were 100% bootstrapped with no outside capital or
| support/advisory.
| troyvit wrote:
| 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.
| cschmatzler wrote:
| This is making my current work 100 times easier. Very welcome
| timing.
| naikrovek wrote:
| This is awesome because I flippin love tart.
| rmast wrote:
| That part is amazing. Back when I first heard of tart I
| thought it was amazing, with the one downside being the
| license.
|
| Hopefully development on it continues, or a community
| maintained version keeps it going.
| pxc wrote:
| This is a huge deal! I secretly hoped for this. :)
| rmast wrote:
| I mostly clicked the link because I was curious if Cirrus Labs
| operates Cirrus CI and if so how that would be impacted.
|
| Looks like I'll need to move the FreeBSD CI jobs for open
| source projects I maintain to another solution. Anyone have
| suggestions for alternatives?
| a1o wrote:
| I guess qemu over Ubuntu-latest from GitHub Actions running
| freebsd, but it will be a bit flaky
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| Yes, but it's also currently the best one. They have OCI
| compatible Mac VM images that are prebuilt. It's quite good.
| zackify wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| w10-1 wrote:
| 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.
| panchtatvam wrote:
| Another one bites the dust.
| trollbridge wrote:
| 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.
| elcritch wrote:
| 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.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| jitl wrote:
| yes selling things unheard of in business. quite unusual to
| participate in economy
| dangus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Making a statement like this is generally part of the terms of
| the acquisition.
| dangus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| yea yea yea, purchase every last company you find, no one wants
| OpenAI
| spooneybarger wrote:
| 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.
| bartekpacia wrote:
| 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
| dennisy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| vomayank wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dude250711 wrote:
| AI companies need a surprising amount of people.
|
| It's kind of like electric cars charged with electricity from
| coal power plants.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Incredible how many people are perfectly fine working for a
| company making AI powered murder bots.
| taurath wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Killing bad people is changing the world for the better
| diimdeep wrote:
| Looks like tech and talent grab for "Computer use" project
|
| https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-computer...
|
| https://github.com/cirruslabs/mtell
| pxc wrote:
| Tart is really cool, impressive, and useful. Best of luck to the
| team!
| jwpapi wrote:
| So AI company buys devs again, but devs are dead
| darkwater wrote:
| They want to kill the last good ones
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| Part of my $DAYJOB is working on timers.
|
| @sama if you need someone to buy to implement timers for
| ChatGPT I'm your guy - my price is 2 billion dollars.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| A timer?
| Ardren wrote:
| > Then, unprompted, Altman offers up a kind of shocking
| timeline for the groundbreaking feature of counting:
| "Maybe another year before something like that works
| well." Per Altman, ChatGPT's voice model doesn't have the
| capability of starting a timer or keeping track of time.
| "But we will add the intelligence into the voice models,"
| he said.
|
| --
|
| https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-itll-take-another-
| year-b...
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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/
| Duplicake wrote:
| Why are they acquiring seemingly random things, they acquired
| Astral and now this
| WhrRTheBaboons wrote:
| bloating up for the IPO
| prodigycorp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Meh, Gehrig and Ruth are long since dead.
| qqasG12 wrote:
| 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.
| zackify wrote:
| 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?
| jitl wrote:
| "what's the advantage of kubernetes over docker?"
|
| orchestration
|
| docker / virtualization framework is for one machine
|
| this stuff is for 100s - 1000s machines
| danny_codes wrote:
| "We will replace white collar workers"
|
| Proceeds to buy white collar workers.
| bhayanisumit06 wrote:
| Great
| a1o wrote:
| That is a bit sudden, it would be great if it was possible to get
| an extra month for migration.
| elromulous wrote:
| Did anyone else think this was Cirrus Logic?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Logic
| boudin wrote:
| Yes, it brought back some video card memories
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| For a hot second yes, and I even use the modern one's tart cli
| jadar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It won't and I think it will thrive even more. ;)
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Genuinely curious on why I'm getting down voted for the above
| comment
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(page generated 2026-04-11 23:00 UTC)