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Comment by lucrbvi | Hacker News Reader

This is a weird pattern accross OpenAI/Anthropic to buy startups building better toolings.

I don't really see the value for OAI/Anthropic, but it's nice to know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will stay maintained!

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Somebody took a deeper look at Claude Code and claims to find evidence of Anthropic's PaaS offering [1]. There's certainly money to be made by offering a nice platform where "citizen developers" can push their code.

From Astral the (fast) linter and type checker are pretty useful companions for agentic development.

[1] https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084

I wouldn't be surprised if Vercel were bought by Anthropic/OAI (but maybe it would be too expensive?)

No no - SpaceX/xAi must now buy Vercel so that we can deploy our bloated Next apps to space.

Next now renamed to Xext.

At least in space there is lots of space and no heat /s - I'd love for Next to exist in a vacuum

Nothing is too expensive. It will be a bidding war.

`uv agent` and `bun agent` in 3....2.....1....

Totally agree

The value for Anthropic / OAI is that they have a strong interest in becoming the "default" agent.

The one that you don't need to install, because it's already provided by your package manager.

I don't think this holds because we're talking about developers who know how to use a package manager, on a piece of software you have to install anyways. The friction of "uv add $other_llm_software" is too low for it to have a real impact.

I think they're more into the extra context they can build for the LLM with ruff/ty.

until "uv add $openai_competitor" mysteriously breaks in odd, difficult to troubleshoot ways.

You fool think they are targeting developers with this purchase?

I don’t think they’re targeting the C suite with it, because they don’t use uv and Microsoft already has Copilot for the “it’s bad but bundled with stuff you’re already paying for” market.

idk, i think it's the other way around. I imagine in 5 years my new laptop setup will look like:

    $ curl 'claude.ai/install?key=abcd123' | bash -e
    $ claude 'finish laptop setup from http://github.com/justjake/Dotfiles'

claude will be the one to install / set up the system, not the other way around. claude was certainly the one who installed `uv` on my current machine.

Good that they got some money and a longer runaway, but I have my doubts the product will improve rather than be smothered to death.

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Time will tell.

The most straightforward one: They run a lot of computational sandboxes that need fast setup. Making sure you can shape the package manager to your needs is a pretty straightforward desire.

I'm not so sure. I sort of wish they hadn't been acquired because these sort of acquihires usually result in stifling the competition while the incumbent stagnates. It definitely is an acquihire given OpenAI explicitly states they'll be joining the Codex team and only that their existing open-source projects will remain "maintained".

The value is to control the tool chain from idea to production so it can be automated by agents. It's no secret that the final goal is to fully replace developers, the flow "idea to production". It's easier to control that flow if you control each tool and every step.

I won't be surprised if the next step is to acquire CI/CD tools.

> it's nice to know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will stay maintained!

Depends if you think the bubble is going to pop, I suppose. In some sense, independence was insulation.

They probably prompted for what they should do next and got this as a half-hallucinated response lol

Does OpenAI use a lot of python?

There is the literal benefit of "we use the hell out of this tool, we need to make sure it stays usable for us" and then there is what they can learn from or coerce the community in to doing.

I don't know about OpenAI using a lot of Python, but Astral builds all their tools in Rust and just exposes Python bindings. Codex is all Rust. It feels like a reasonable acquisition from that perspective. They're banking on at least in part on the Astral team being able to integrate with and supercharge Codex.

Yeah, it’s all mostly heaps of Python internally aside from Codex.

Why do you think that uv, etc. will stay maintained? They will for now, but as soon as cash is tight at OpenAI, they'll get culled so fast that you won't see it coming. This is the risk.

I'm expecting Anthropic to buy Zed

Isn't this something to do with their paid pyx(as opposed to ty/ruff etc) thingy?

I mean they are “startups” on the way to mega-companies. They need internal tooling to match.

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