22 ms·

Astral to Join OpenAI

• duskdozer 7mo ago
  Not surprised at all on this. I've been really suspicious about how hard `uv` was being pushed in 24/25.
  • zemo 7mo ago
    "was being pushed" ... by whom? I think there's widespread grassroots support for it because it's a good tool.
  • moregrist 7mo ago
    I think the push has been entirely organic. Compared to existing tooling, uv is fantastically fast. One of the bigger pain points I’ve faced in Python is dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes in some cases. uv took seconds. A serious quality of life improvement.
    • optionalsquid 7mo ago
      uv replaces pip (and venv, and pipx, and more), not conda. If you want a uv-equivalent that replaces conda, then look at pixi: https://pixi.prefix.dev/ https://pixi.prefix.dev/
      • moregrist 7mo ago
        Sure, it replaces pip, but _we used conda_ for env management. And the slow part was still _dependency resolution_, much like pip. Was there a better option? I’m sure. Choices were made. Regrets were had. Switching to uv was a huge improvement for our purposes.
        • optionalsquid 7mo ago
          If all you are installing using conda is pypi packages and different versions of Python, then sure, uv is a fine replacement. I use it for that as well. But if you are using other conda/conda-forge/bioconda packages, then uv isn't a replacement since it cannot install those. However, Pixi can replace conda for that use-case and it's about as fast as uv since it uses uv's dependency resolution code
    • edelbitter 7mo ago
      > dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes Quite literally this is what first raised the alarm bells for me. Dependency resolution complexity is more of a symptom. If that delay ends up being the point where Ops finally agrees that things have gone very wrong, then fixing that delay is not really helping hire the maintenance folks that can make those dependencies.. well, "dependable" again.
  • a_t48 7mo ago
    Hey now, I was a completely organic shill! I worked for free!
  • yoyohello13 7mo ago
    uv and ruff are incredible tools for python development, and I've loved my time using ty. This acquisition is absolutely terrible.
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    Are you legitimately unable to tell the difference between something being “pushed” and people just legitimately liking and using something? If you’re going to be a grump about everything, sometimes your broken clock is going to be right. It’s still not worth showing off.
• rockstar2001 7mo ago
  All other devtools now will follow suit - to get acquihired by openai or anthropic.
• A7OM 7mo ago
  [dead]
• lucrbvi 7mo ago
  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!
  • itissid 7mo ago
    Isn't this something to do with their paid pyx(as opposed to ty/ruff etc) thingy?
  • 0x3f 7mo ago
    > 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.
  • synthc 7mo ago
    `uv agent` and `bun agent` in 3....2.....1....
    • rgilliotte 7mo ago
      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.
      • everforward 7mo ago
        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.
        • siva7 7mo ago
          You fool think they are targeting developers with this purchase?
• fnands 7mo ago
  Woah, first Anthropic buys Bun, now OpenAI Astral? Seems like the big AI players love buying up the good dev tooling companies. I hope this means the Astral folks can keep doing what they are doing, because I absolutely love uv (ruff is pretty nice too).
  • dcreager 7mo ago
    > I hope this means the Astral folks can keep doing what they are doing, because I absolutely love uv (ruff is pretty nice too). That is definitely the plan!
    • piva00 7mo ago
      Being in this industry for over 20 years probably jaded me a lot, I understand that's the plan but it's almost always the plan (or publicly stated as). Only time will tell if it will not affect the ecosystem negatively, best of luck though, I really hope this time is different™.
      • dcreager 7mo ago
        I've been in the industry for similarly long, and I understand and sympathize with this view. All I can say is that _right now_, we're committed to maintaining our open-source tools with the same level of effort, care, and attention to detail as before. That does not change with this acquisition. No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not "software disappears forever".
        • Rapzid 7mo ago
          > All I can say is that _right now_ I've also been in the industry for similarly long and I believe you 100% that's "all you can say" ;)
        • bbkane 7mo ago
• Mxbonn 7mo ago
  uv and ruff are one of the best things that happened in the python ecosystem the last years. I hope this acquisition does not put them on a path to doom.
• suddenlybananas 7mo ago
  If they just give Astral money to keep going, great, but I have difficulty believing they would be so altruistic. This is quite an upsetting acquisition.
• backwardation_b 7mo ago
  I like uv, but not sure this is a good path forward for the python ecosystem.
  • pas 7mo ago
    why? lot's of good work came to Python by people who were sponsored by big tech companies. make Python better for them, and for a lot of other people too. (sure, it's a bit different than contributing to CPython, but I'd argue not that different)
    • rkangel 7mo ago
      It is VERY different. One company now has complete control of the activities of the team developing these tools. Contributing to Python (money or time) gets you some influence, but doesn't allow you to dictate anything - there's still a team making the decisions.
    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
      Your heuristic is terrible. It’s not about it being a “big tech company”. I’m sure that you can be more intelligent and nuanced than that. It’s about fit, aligned goals, aligned vision, aligned incentives. I do not see any alignment between the Astral that I want Astral to be, and OpenAI.
• incognito124 7mo ago
  Possibly the worst possible news for the Python ecosystem. Absolutely devastating. Congrats to the team
  • vdfs 7mo ago
    On the other hand, we get to see what other thing will try to replace pip
    • politelemon 7mo ago
      wx
  • blitzar 7mo ago
    I hope they got paid, I will be very sad if they didn't at least get G5 money.
    • fortuitous-frog 7mo ago
      Curious how well upstream contributors or projects get contributed for these sort of headline-gathering acquisitions (probably not at all, unfortunately). OpenClaw notably was built around Mario Zechner's pi[0]; uv I believe was highly adapted from Armin Ronacher's rye[1], and uses indygreg's python-build-standalone[2] for distributing Python builds (both of which were eventually transferred to Astral). [0]: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono [1]: https://github.com/astral-sh/rye https://github.com/astral-sh/rye [2]: https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone
      • benrutter 7mo ago
        Pretty sure the answer will definitely be "not at all". For Rye and Python Standalone Builds, I know those where both projects that had a lot of use but where the maintainers didn't want it to become an all consuming workload, so Astral taking ownership made a lot of sense. I guess it's kind of a shame that a lot of the financial value for UV is added by people who won't see any of that - it seems like that's a wider open source problem/question to be honest.
• fnands 7mo ago
  Related (OpenAI announcement): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716
• hijodelsol 7mo ago
  This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years has adopted many of these technologies. Having their future depend on a cap-ex heavy company that is currently (based on reporting) spending approx. 2.5 dollars to make a dollar of revenue and must have hypergrowth in the next years or perish is less than ideal. This should discourage anybody doing serious work to adopt more of the upcoming Astral technologies like ty and pyx. Hopefully, ruff and uv are large enough to be forked should (when) the time comes.
  • rst 7mo ago
    On the flip side, I'm not sure I ever saw a revenue plan or exit strategy for Astral other than acquihire. And most plausible bidders are unfortunate in one way or another.
    • hijodelsol 7mo ago
      They could have joined projects like the Linux Foundation which try to not depend on any single donor, even though complete independence from big tech is not possible. I don't know the motivation behind Astral's approach, but this acquisition does leave a weird taste behind about how serious they were about truly open source software. Time will tell, I guess. (Edit: typo)
      • colesantiago 7mo ago
        > I don't know the motivation behind Astral's approach, but this acquisition does leave a weird taste behind about how serious they were about truly open source software. It was because Astral was VC funded. https://astral.sh/blog/announcing-astral-the-company-behind-ruff https://astral.sh/blog/announcing-astral-the-company-behind-...
    • japhyr 7mo ago
      Astral was building a private package hosting system for enterprise customers. That was their stated approach to becoming profitable, while continuing to fund their open source work.
• geophph 7mo ago
  Welp. Guess we just wait for the next package management tool to come around. Really thought uv was gonna be the one. Good for Astral though I guess, they do great work. Just not optimistic this is gonna be good for python devs long term.
• moralestapia 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Philpax 7mo ago
    Astral's tooling is excellent and almost makes up for Python being a badly-designed language. Almost.
    • yoyohello13 7mo ago
      I work in Python every day and Astral's tools are really what made it bearable. This acquisition is so disappointing.
      • moralestapia 7mo ago
        Agree. As many others have expressed, uv and ruff have brought some sanity to the Python toolkit. This is a massive backward step for the Python ecosystem, but it's not like a hundred-billion dollar company will care about that.
  • dang 7mo ago
    Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? We've warned/asked you countless times. You should know not to post like this by now. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • moralestapia 7mo ago
      Thanks for chiming in, dang. While I do see that the tone of the comment was stingy, it was aimed towards the frustration I have experienced while developing for Python and this piece of news as well. I didn't see it as a bad thing as it not really aimed at anybody in particular, more like an opinion on Python's shortcomings. I will try to post more substantive/less emotional comments going forward.
• tom1337 7mo ago
  As a non python dev I really thought UV and TY are great tools and liked their approaches but I don't know how good it is that they are privately held... no a fan
  • incognito124 7mo ago
    Technically the tools are not privately held, they're OSS with a permissive licence. It's just that the bulk of work was done by them. The acquisition (ostensibly) changes none of that
• phlakaton 7mo ago
  I hope OpenAI realizes they cannot buy developer goodwill.
  • this_user 7mo ago
    They are not trying to buy developer goodwill, they are trying to catch up with Antrophic in terms of getting those B2B contracts, which is currently the most realistic path towards not running out of money.
    • phlakaton 7mo ago
      1. The Register reports OpenAI is well ahead of Anthropic in B2B contracts. It's Anthropic playing catch-up, not OpenAI. 2. In any case, the announcement strongly suggests that customer acquisition had little to do with this. The stated purpose of the acquisition, as I read it, is an acquisition (plus acquihire?) to bolster their Codex product. 3. But if they were hoping for some developer goodwill as a secondary effect... well, see my note above.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• colesantiago 7mo ago
  If you don't pay for your tools and support OSS financially, this is what happens. Although Astral being VC funded was already headed this way anyway. Deno, Pydantic (Both Sequoia) will go the same way as with many other VC backed "open source" dev tools. It will go towards AI companies buying up the very same tools, putting it in their next model update and used against you. Rented back to you for $20/mo.
  • smahs 7mo ago
    There is nothing wrong with big money backing, often is necessary for long term bets, but rug pulling is a serious threat. VC funded open source has become a pattern/playbook.
    • colesantiago 7mo ago
      It would have been fine if the Astral team was acqui-hired and uv, ruff, etc were donated to the PSF or Linux Foundation for further sponsorship and support. But the pressure because they raised VC funding, I would imagine Astral needed an actual exit and OpenAI saw Astral's tools as an asset.
• weakfish 7mo ago
  What happens when OpenAI’s burn dries up their cash?
  • sourcegrift 7mo ago
    RAM prices go down. My hope though is that the period RAM prices stay up will put electron apps out of market.
    • genthree 7mo ago
      All the vibe-coded webshitware these companies are putting out seems too be doing the opposite: it's all even more memory- and cycle-hungry than the webshit we were lovingly pooping out by hand for the last decade.
  • Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
    They get more money from investors, go public, or get bought.
  • throwa356262 7mo ago
    They mysteriously gain a lot of government contracts. In a completely unrelated event, Donald sues Sam for 10M$ for calling him old, Sam grudingly agrees to pay him 16M$ and a beer.
  • prodigycorp 7mo ago
    $110B will surely last for at least a year.
    • morphology 7mo ago
      That money is going directly to Jensen as quickly as possible to secure OpenAI's place in the delivery queue
      • prodigycorp 7mo ago
        The investment version of "can you climb up a falling ladder fast enough to not fall"
• dinosor 7mo ago
  I'm confused as to what will happen to their platform product which was in closed beta - pyx. Since they no longer need to worry about money (I assume) they no longer need to chase after enterprise customers?
  • T-A 7mo ago
    "OpenAI is focusing employee and investor attention on its enterprise business as the artificial intelligence startup gears up to go public, potentially by the end of the year, CNBC has learned." https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/openai-preps-for-ipo-in-2026-says-chatgpt-must-be-productivity-tool.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/openai-preps-for-ipo-in-2026...
• applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
  Company that repeatedly tells you software developers are obsoleted by their product buys more software developers instead of using said product to create software. Hmm.
  • avaer 7mo ago
    As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this case.
    • suddenlybananas 7mo ago
      What are they buying?
      • KeplerBoy 7mo ago
        mindshare and a central piece of the python package management ecosystem.
        • bootsmann 7mo ago
          Most popular product on the planet acquires a random python packaging org for mindshare? What am I not seeing here?
          • __float 7mo ago
            "uv" is a very widely used tool in the Python ecosystem, and Python is important to AI. Calling it "a random Python packaging org" seems a bit unfair.
          • nilkn 7mo ago
            I feel like it's pretty easy to predict what OpenAI is trying to do. They want their codex agent integrated directly into the most popular, foundational tooling for one of the world's most used and most influential programming languages. And, vice versa, they probably want to be able to ensure that tooling remains well-maintained so it stays on top and continues to integrate well with their agent. They want codex to become the "default" coding agent by making it the one integrated into popular open source software.
• KolmogorovComp 7mo ago
  It's a good news to me considering their open-source nature. If/when they go downhill there will be still the option to fork, and the previous work will still have been funded. Now for those wondering who would fork and maintain it for free, that is more of a critic of FOSS in general.
• ragebol 7mo ago
  Not often that I audibly groan at a HN headline :-(
  • alex_suzuki 7mo ago
    Same here. I’ve adopted uv across all of my Python projects and couldn’t be happier. ty looks very promising as well. Probably inevitable, and I don’t blame the team, I just wish it were someone else.
    • ragebol 7mo ago
      Ty, Ruff, UV, all great tools I recently started really using and I couldn't be happier with them. Sigh
    • pprotas 7mo ago
      Monkey paw curls tight Microsoft acquires Astral Wish comes with a cost
      • BoorishBears 7mo ago
        That'd be fine, MS is a blue-chip I'm not worried about OpenAI messing up uv, I'm worried about OpenAI running out of money and cutting an unnecessary team.
    • saalweachter 7mo ago
      I kind of feel like the nature of the Python ecosystem is a dozen or so extremely useful frameworks/tools that everyone uses heavily for 3 years and then abandons and never speaks of again. I'm not very deep in Python anymore, but every time I dip my toes back in it's a completely different set of tools, with some noticably rare exceptions (eg, numpy).
      • fastasucan 7mo ago
        I cant see how the ecosystem evolves being a bad thing?
• huksley 7mo ago
  UV_DISABLE_AGENT=1 UV_DISABLE_AI_HINTS=1 uv add
  • emmettm 7mo ago
    lol, underrated comment
  • rafaelgoncalves 7mo ago
    :D, and i think they would add some optout telemetry flags too to make this even funnier
• photon_collider 7mo ago
  Reading this news only leaves me worried about long-term future of these open source tools.
  • Ekaros 7mo ago
    I have long since found the VC model for open source questionable. If you are not selling popular enough direct enterprise support what is the model to actually make money. Take ruff, I have used it, but I had no idea it even had a company behind it... And I must not be only one and it must not be only tool like it...
• readitalready 7mo ago
  I'd expect OpenAi to make some type of Github clone next, perhaps with Astral, or maybe with jujutsu.
  • PurpleRamen 7mo ago
    Why? Github is already owned by Microsoft, who are deep in with OpenAI. And what worth would a Github-clone even have for the world? It's not like there is any important innovation left in that space at the moment, or are there any?
    • 0x500x79 7mo ago
      Better uptime? https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-is-developing-alternative-microsofts-github-information-reports-2026-03-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-is-developing-altern...
      • PurpleRamen 7mo ago
        Ok, seems reasonable, but still a bit strange. If uptime is their problem, then a dedicated personal instance for their own projects seems good enough? But might be they have some other problems too. On the other side, thinking about, if all the AI-Slope is moving to their own platform, it would be a big benefit for Github. And maybe this is their real goal? To let Github continue being a source of good high quality human-maintained training-material?
• WhereIsTheTruth 7mo ago
  Greed knows no limit OpenAI is Microslop, so it's the classic EEE, nothing new to see It's like with systemd now planning to enforce gov. age verification People will censor you if you dare say something negative on this website So i guess, wears a clown hat "congrats!"
• jedahan 7mo ago
  great for astral, sucks for uv. was nice to have sane tooling at least for a few years, thanks for the gift.
  • ziml77 7mo ago
    I really hope they don't kill off uv or turn it into some way to sell OpenAI services. But I suspect that's exactly what's going to happen :(
    • butlike 7mo ago
      I don't know. yarn never really turned into a vehicle to sell Facebook, though you always kind of transiently knew it was FB that offered it. I imagine that sort of transient advertising is it's own value, too.
      • mrbombastic 7mo ago
        As much as I dislike facebook they have been pretty good stewards of their open source projects and mostly seem to let them stay isolated.
  • pennomi 7mo ago
    Time for the PSF to consider something inspired by uv as a native solution.
    • Kwpolska 7mo ago
      The core-adjacent people have completely failed to produce reasonable packaging tools for decades, why would you want another new tool from them?
      • zahlman 7mo ago
        Who said anything about it coming from core-adjacent people? Was Kenneth Reitz "core-adjacent" when Requests was brought under the PSF umbrella?
• FergusArgyll 7mo ago
  Hn's favorite company meets hn's most hated company. Hilarity in the comments will ensue
  • incognito124 7mo ago
    Thank you n-gate
  • Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
    Genuinely. UV is so awesome and OpenAI is so meh. I am not even sure how to feel about this news but feel a bit disappointed as a user even if I might be happy for the devs that they got money for such project but man, I would've hoped any decent company could've bought them out rather than OpenAI of all things. Maybe OpenAI wants to buy these loved companies to lessen some of the hate but what its doing is lessening the love that we gave to corporations like astral/uv sadly, which is really sad because uv is/(was?) so cool but now we don't know where this tool might be headed next given its in the hands of literally OpenAI :(
• sakesun 7mo ago
  Pyright and ty are under the same roof now.
  • codethief 7mo ago
    How so? Pyright is being developed by Microsoft.
    • sakesun 7mo ago
      The pioneer is now at Codex team.
      • codethief 7mo ago
        Eric Traut is at OpenAI now?
• Hackbraten 7mo ago
  Don’t you dare enshittify my uv.
  • odie5533 7mo ago
    Can we rename it to Codex?
• 999900000999 7mo ago
  Congrats! This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since a successful exit is a positive signal.
  • baq 7mo ago
    Funding is as good as gone until the Iran mess is over.
  • bogwog 7mo ago
    > a successful exit is a positive signal This is peak finance brainrot. In no scenario is abandoning ship a positive signal, even if you managed to pocket some valuables on the way out. Let's stop celebrating dysfunctional business models and consolidation of the industry around finance bros who give zero fucks about said industry.
• afavour 7mo ago
  And so, more core functionality developers depend on becomes dependent on a continuing stream of billions in VC funding. What could go wrong?
  • philipallstar 7mo ago
    [flagged]
• hollow-moe 7mo ago
  rip uv
• holografix 7mo ago
  Solid move by Altman - good signal they’re serious about capturing the Claude Code market from Anthropic. What I don’t understand is why hasn’t anyone bought Jetbrains yet. Atlassian? AWS? Google?
  • hirako2000 7mo ago
    Because Jetbrain strategy wasn't to burn money with free tools to eventually exit with the jackpot. They have been profitable for over a decade, simply asking users to pay a fair price for great product.
    • wiseowise 7mo ago
      Judging by all their mistakes in the last years, Russian war and AI, it’s only a matter of time until someone buys them out.
      • rkomorn 7mo ago
        With the way they're going, I'm less and less convinced there will be much left to buy, unless it's for pennies. I've only been a JetBrains user for five years but it's felt like it's only getting worse the whole time.
        • mrweasel 7mo ago
          To be fair, everything is getting worse the whole time.
  • user34283 7mo ago
    Atlassian? Bitbucket as a platform for agentic development.. shudder
  • KeplerBoy 7mo ago
    Most likely because Jetbrains is not for sale. Google almost certainly offered to buy at some point.
• amterp 7mo ago
  Happy for the devs, they deserve the presumably massive payout for the amount of value they’ve brought to the Python community.
• pjmlp 7mo ago
  Great that I keep using traditional Python tools.
• throwa356262 7mo ago
  "Sir, you now have twice as many private jets as Dario" "But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("
• world2vec 7mo ago
  Just when I moved from poetry to uv.
• sublime_happen 7mo ago
  these (uv and bun) are not acquihires, they're acqui-rootaccess
  • OutOfHere 7mo ago
    We need to explore this angle. With OpenAI already strongly being intelligence gathering apparatus for the US, now with this acquisition, it will potentially have access to the code and environment variables of a good chunk of private projects even when Codex doesn't.
    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
      [flagged]
  • edelbitter 7mo ago
    Have you looked at the .github/ folder of any actively developed python packages lately? It has become difficult to find one where there isn't a few interesting people with code-execution-capable push/publish/cache-write access somewhere along the blown up transitive dependency/include chains.
• AnishLaddha 7mo ago
  F*CK. take everything from me why dontcha?
• noodletheworld 7mo ago
  I really love uv. Its always hard to really trust these corporate funded open source products, but they've honestly been great. …but I find it difficult to believe openai owning the corner stone of the python tooling ecosystem is good thing for the python ecosystem. There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex (and codex subscriptions) with uv. I dont think I want my package manger doing that.
  • bethekidyouwant 7mo ago
    “There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex (and codex subscriptions) with uv.” What does that even mean?
• NiloCK 7mo ago
  A concern: More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now. As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Claude-Code or Codex are interfaces to cloud devenvs, then the models can get faster feedback cycles against build / test / etc tooling. But when the tooling authors are employees of one provider or another, you can bet that those providers will be at least a few versions ahead of the public releases of those build tools, and will enjoy local economies of scale in their pipelines that may not be public at all.
  • rTX5CMRXIfFG 7mo ago
    If it ever goes bad, well I hope that that’s an impetus for new open source projects to be started — and with improvements over and lessons learned from incumbent technologies, right at the v1 of said projects.
    • Maxion 7mo ago
      If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.
      • runarberg 7mo ago
        That would be accepting the framing of your class enemy, there is no reason to do that.
      • metalliqaz 7mo ago
        unless they are also pirate LLMs, I don't see how any open source project could have pockets deep enough for the datacenters needed to seriously contend
      • fnordpiglet 7mo ago
        The problem is even if an OSS had the resources (massive data centers the size of NYC packed with top end custom GPU kits) to produce the weights, you need enormous VRAM laden farms of GPUs to do inference on a model like Opus 4.6. Unless the very math of frontier LLMs changes, don’t expect frontier OSS on par to be practical.
• pjmlp 7mo ago
  Great someone cashed out, time for the next startup idea.
  • AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
    Selling out is good?
    • hrmtst93837 6mo ago
      [flagged]
• overflowy 7mo ago
  Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• kkirsche 7mo ago
  Happy for the team, sad for users. I just don’t believe their work will continue under new ownership
• time0ut 7mo ago
  I love uv and the other tooling Astral has built. It really helped reinvigorate my love for Python over the last year. Something like this was always inevitable. I just hope it doesn’t ruin a good thing.
• nusl 7mo ago
  I am actually quite saddened by this. It's very unlikely that' I'll keep using uv, now. I don't trust this kind of shit.
• prodigycorp 7mo ago
  Codex team now has the legends who created Pyright and UV/Ruff/Ty.
• hmokiguess 7mo ago
  Mixed feelings, happy for the guy, he deserves it. Unhappy about whom he went with, though not sure if he had other buyers / offers in the mix?
• riteshyadav02 7mo ago
  [dead]
• Hamuko 7mo ago
  So, any good alternatives to uv?
  • ragebol 7mo ago
    pixi? https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/ https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/ Have not tried it too much yet because I was pretty content with `uv`, but I've heard lots of good things about it
    • Zizizizz 7mo ago
      Pretty sure that uses UV to do it's magic
      • notatallshaw 7mo ago
        pixi offloads PyPI ecosystem stuff to uv, but pixi is conda first. The team were actually the first to build a Rust based Python package resolver (rip), but after uv was released they migrated to uv's resolver (Python package resolvers are hard and a lot of work to build and must be tested against the whole ecosystem).
    • __siru__ 7mo ago
      It literally says on the homepage/the page you linked, that pixi is just a frontend for uv in the background to interface with PyPI and the project TOML files.
      • jawknee4000 7mo ago
        that isn't quite true, it defaults to conda packages (and so supports non-pypi things, its main advantage), I believe only when you are mixing these with pypi packages does it then also use the same resolution library backend as uv (and indeed directly at the rust level) https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/concepts/conda_pypi/ https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/concepts/conda_pypi/
    • roflcopter69 6mo ago
• jjice 7mo ago
  Not who I would've liked to acquire Astral. As long as OpenAI doesn't force bad decisions on to Astral too hard, I'm very happy for the Astral team. They've been making some of the best Python tooling that has made the ecosystem so much better IME.
  • smallpipe 7mo ago
    If Codex’s core quality is anything to go by, it’s time to create a community fork of UV
    • pronik 7mo ago
      Maybe they are being acquired to improve the quality of Codex.
      • OutOfHere 7mo ago
        That's the thing. To me that says that as soon as cash becomes tight at OpenAI, the Astral staff will no longer get to work on Python tooling anymore, namely uv, etc.
        • shimman 7mo ago
          Tale as old as time in SV, why we keep trusting venture capital to be the community's stewards I have no idea. We need public investment in open source, in the form of grants, not more private partnerships that somehow always seem to hurt the community.
          • hun3 7mo ago
            > why we keep trusting venture capital to be the community's stewards I have no idea. They bought the trust.
          • JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
            > we keep trusting venture capital to be the community's stewards OpenAI isn't a VC. It's VC-backed. But so is Astral.
• Tyrubias 7mo ago
  I think it’s impossible to predict what will happen with this new trend of “large AI company acquires company making popular open source project”. The pessimist in me says that these products will either be enshittified over time, killed when the bubble bursts, or both. The pragmatist in me hopes that no matter what happens, uv and ruff will survive just like how many OSS projects have been forked or spun out of big companies. The optimist in me hopes that the extra money will push them to even greater heights, but the pessimist and the pragmatist beat the optimist to death a long time ago.
  • renewiltord 7mo ago
    It’s open source. If you want it to go in a different direction fork it and take it in that direction. Instead of the optimist, the pessimist, and the pragmatist the guy you need is the chap who does some work.
    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
      And which one are you again? The least useful of them all.
• acedTrex 7mo ago
  damn it, another one bites the dust sadly
• bobajeff 7mo ago
  This might not be bad as long as Astral is allowed to continue to work on improving ty, uv and ruff. I do worry about they'll get distracted by their Codex job duties though.
• cess11 7mo ago
  If I were to engage in Python development, what's the alternative to uv?
  • umren 7mo ago
    no real alternative
  • bikelang 7mo ago
    Poetry was the best alt-package manager before uv came along. That said - uv completely outclassed it.
    • cess11 7mo ago
      Looks like I can wrap my head around it, thanks.
  • duskdozer 7mo ago
    What are you having an issue with? Environments? pyenv. Dependency management? pip+requirements.
    • cess11 7mo ago
      I'll make a note of this, thanks.
• japhyr 7mo ago
  This has me thinking about VS Code and VS Codium. I've used VS Code for a while now, but recently grew annoyed at the increasingly prevalent prompts to subscribe to various Microsoft AI tools. I know you can make them go away, but if you bounce between different systems, and particularly deal with installing VS Code on a regular basis, it becomes annoying. I started using VS Codium, and it feels like using VS Code before the AI hype era. I wonder if we're going to see a commercial version of uv bloated with the things OpenAI wants us all to use, and a community version that's more like the uv we're using right now.
  • sschueller 7mo ago
    MS is actively making your life using VS Codium a pain. They removed the download button the extension marketrplace making it very difficult to download extensions and installing them in VS Codium since VS Codium does not have access to the official MS extension marketplace. Many don't publish outside the marketplace for example Platformio. [1] [1] https://github.com/platformio/platformio-vscode-ide/issues/1802#issuecomment-3370225987 https://github.com/platformio/platformio-vscode-ide/issues/1...
    • matkoniecz 7mo ago
      Luckily I avoided extensions before switching to VS Codium. Glad to hear that I am avoiding Microsoft's spam.
    • barnabee 7mo ago
      I've not struggled to find the things I need at https://open-vsx.org https://open-vsx.org (usually by searching directly within VSCodium), but then I only use it for editing things like markdown docs and presentations, LaTeX/Typst, rather than coding, which I prefer to do in a terminal and with a modal editor.
    • NewsaHackO 7mo ago
      Also, Microsoft does not allow use of their LSP for python. You have to use the barebones Jedi LSP.
• Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  I really loved uv, I am happy for the developers at astral but I am sad as a user seeing this :( Any good alternatives to uv/plans for community fork of uv?
• articsputnik 7mo ago
  to be expected at some point, but for the independence and best interest of the Python ecosystem, I don't think it's a plus.
• JoshTriplett 7mo ago
  Welp. I used to respect Astral. I hope someone responsible forks their Python tooling and maintains it. Ideally a foundation rather than a company.
  • krick 7mo ago
    Yeah, well, the fact is that every person who ever touches Python needed uv, but only Astral folks created it. So, nope, there's no one capable of filling the void, just accept that it's fucked now. The best die first.
    • MoonZ 7mo ago
      25 years of Python behind me, please let me tell you that hopefully you're wrong : we don't "need" uv :)
      • jredwards 7mo ago
        Need is definitely too strong a word, but I think we can agree that uv has so far been the best solution to a problem that plagued python development for a really long time.
        • globular-toast 7mo ago
          At least we know what the solution should look like now, and now we can rewrite it in Python and make sure it works with pypy so it's fast.
        • JackSlateur 7mo ago
          https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html
    • JoshTriplett 7mo ago
      If that were true, Astral wouldn't have been able to build it in the first place. It's an Open Source tool. Perhaps folks excited about working on it can move to the Python Foundation and maintain it there. Perhaps companies who saw today's acquisition and became deeply worried about the future of this tooling could help support and fund such an effort.
• petercooper 7mo ago
  I feel some "commoditize your complements" (Spolsky) vibes hearing about these acquisitions. Or, potentially, "control your complements"? If you find your popular, expensive tool leans heavily upon third party tools, it doesn't seem a crazy idea to purchase them for peanuts (compared to your overall worth) to both optimize your tool to use them better and, maybe, reduce the efficacy of how your competitors use them (like changing the API over time, controlling the feature roadmap, etc.) Or maybe I'm being paranoid :-)
• zoobab 7mo ago
  Undisclosed amount?
• ddxv 7mo ago
  This is why I still like to setup projects and environments with my own `make` `venv` and `pip`.
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    No it’s not. You do it because you didn’t see the point in changing what you do. Don’t pretend that this is your “I told you so” moment. The QOL improvement offered by uv over your approach is certainly substantial, but it’s also easy to get off of uv. Nobody here feels legitimately “trapped” in the uv “ecosystem”. For 99.999% of Python projects, if they need to get off of uv, it’s going to be a very quick thing to do. The disappointment and anger is because we’ve had a nice QOL improvement which is now more directly threatened in a way that it was before, and it’s always hard to go backwards. A QOL improvement that you never had in the first place. So…congrats? Unless your point is “this is why I deprive myself of nice things, because they can go away”…which is just silly.
    • ddxv 7mo ago
      Yes, I think we are mostly in agreement. I tried `uv` several times and never wanted to add it as a dependency because I wasn't convinced by the QOL. That being said, the biggest concern I always had was just that it was adding another layer of complexity and similar to Conda or pyenv it just wasn't something I was going to like. I probably did come off a bit 'told you so' but I guess it was more that it felt like this was finally an answer to a question/curiosity I've had about `uv` where I didn't understand the dissonance between how others felt about it and how I did.
  • JackSlateur 7mo ago
    Hopefully, you are writing PEP621-style pyproject.toml, yes ? Then replacing uv with poetry or probably other thing is easy, because this is the standard packaging format
• CuriouslyC 7mo ago
  The Bun acquisition made a little sense, Boris wanted Daddy Jarred to come clean up his mess, and Jarred is 100% able to deliver. This doesn't make as much sense. OpenAI has a better low level engineering team and they don't have a hot mess with traction like Anthropic did. This seems more about acquiring people with dev ergonomics vision to push product direction, which I don't see being a huge win.
  • morphology 7mo ago
    They do have a hot mess with traction amongst developers. Codex is far behind Claude Code (in both the GUI and TUI forms), and OpenAI's chief of applications recently announced a pivot to focus more on "productivity" (i.e. software and enterprise verticals) because B2B yields a lot more revenue than B2C.
    • cute_boi 7mo ago
      Honestly, I like codex performance compared to claude code.
    • JoshPurtell 7mo ago
      Codex is not far behind Claude Code
• cozzyd 7mo ago
  This will solve the problem of when the package you want to install doesn't exist yet.
  • kaffekaka 7mo ago
    It will simply create it?
• clickety_clack 7mo ago
  I don’t know who I would’ve like to see but them, buy OpenAI is not it. Sad day for uv, ruff and ty users.
• h1fra 7mo ago
  what happen when openai goes brankrupt?
• jimmydoe 7mo ago
  It’s meant to be bought so at least no more guessing. Ant is building their app distribution platform, so no wonder OpenAI thinking the same, it will only surprise me if they move so slow.
• catlover76 7mo ago
  [dead]
• tgtweak 7mo ago
  Amusing that the best python tools are written entirely in rust.
  • Kwpolska 7mo ago
    That's what you get with toy languages.
  • wiseowise 7mo ago
    …amusing how? CPython is written in C, JVM is written in mix of cpp and Java, Rust was written using OCaml initially. Don’t know why you’re snickering. Do you also find it amusing that by the time cpp/rust team scaffolds and compiles initial boilerplate, python team is already making money?
• Heer_J 7mo ago
  [dead]
• ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
  Associated OpenAI post: https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/ https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716)
• petterroea 7mo ago
  How does this make sense
• wrqvrwvq 7mo ago
  So instead of finally building an enterprise-grade package manager where you could pay for validated, verified and secure packages, we're going to vibe project management and let a slop-spiggot fill the trough. Brilliant. Incredibly pleased that the last sane tools in the entire python ecosystem are getting gutted to discourage the last few non-braindead devs from bothering.
  • wrqvrwvq 7mo ago
    Don't get me wrong I love getting 300 dependabot updates per day. It's a huge productivity booster and even if you devote 1/2 your dev team to keeping this shit up to date, you'd still be vulnerable to repo-jacking, because the entire pkg ecosystem is broken. The other thing i love about npm and pypi is the way a single small team will re-download in ci (regardless of caching) a TiB of packages all day long for no reason. Love waiting for gh actions to re-import infinite packages for the nth time before it times out and you restart it manually. makes so much sense. Great work all. glad openai is putting the nails in this retard coffin.
• 0xDEFACED 7mo ago
  will private packages hosted on pyx be available for openai to use as training data?
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    Dude, no. That’s not how licenses work. That’s absurd. You really think that whatever little code is in pyx is providing any material training edge over the code that OpenAI already has access to? Get off it.
• maltelau 7mo ago
  Wtf!? Is this an early April's fools? I've been recommending astral tools left and right, Looks like I'm out a good chunk of social capital on that. Who's organizing a fork, or is python back to having only shitty packaging available? :(
  • the__alchemist 7mo ago
    I can get pyflow back to a maintained state and iron out the bugs if that would help. It's the same concept as uv, just kind of buggy and I haven't touched it in 6 years.
• kseniamorph 7mo ago
  i feel like moves like this make it even harder for new open-source tools to break through. there's already evidence that LLMs are biased toward established tools in their training data (you can check it here https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-picks https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-picks). when a dominant player acquires the most popular toolchain in an ecosystem, that bias only deepens. not because of any skewing, but because the acquired tools get more usage, more documentation, more community content. getting a new project into model weights at meaningful scale is already really hard. acquisitions like this make it even harder.
  • fortuitous-frog 7mo ago
    I'm also concerned about this, but I feel as though uv and ruff's explosive growth happening alongside and despite that of LLMs demonstrates that it's not a show-stopper. I vividly recall LLM coding agents defaulting to pip/poetry and black/flake8, etc. for new projects. It still does that to some extent, but I see them using uv and ruff by default -- without any steering from me -- with far greater frequency. Perhaps it's naive optimism, but I generally have hope that new and improved tools will continue to gain adoption and shine through in the training data, especially as post-training and continual learning improve.
    • dheatov 7mo ago
      However when improved tools are obtained by these capitalists whose business model has no hint of sustainability, what's next is a modern Phoebus cartel situation where further improvement will be restricted or even prohibited to fabricate need for things like "uv Enterprise Pro".
• merrvk 7mo ago
  Who advises on these acquisitions? Or are they just using a dartboard?
• Fervicus 7mo ago
  I (along with many others) always thought that Astral being VC backed is going to lead to a future disappointment for the community.
  • duskdozer 7mo ago
    I don't understand how anyone is surprised at this point. VC project trying to build a brand just isn't going to lead to some utopic community.
  • yoyohello13 7mo ago
    I at least thought we'd get a few more good years before the rug pull.
• Bnjoroge 7mo ago
  It was pretty obvious that some sort of acquisition was imminent. Astral is vc-funded and has to somehow generate returns for investors. An IPO is extremely unlikley in this market.
• am17an 7mo ago
  Welp, back to pip
• Bnjoroge 7mo ago
  This was pretty obvious to just about anyone tbh. FastAPI is probably next
  • incognito124 7mo ago
    Don't even joke
    • Bnjoroge 7mo ago
      vcs gotta eat somehow, and iirc they were building a "fastapi cloud platform"
  • incognito124 7mo ago
    I thought some more about it, and unfortunately it makes sense. IIRC there were several "insider" blogposts from OpenAI that said something along the lines of "Yeah almost every service we write is FastAPI"
    • wiseowise 7mo ago
      Where can I find some of those?
      • incognito124 7mo ago
        here's one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44573195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44573195
        • wiseowise 7mo ago
          Thanks.
    • Bnjoroge 7mo ago
      yeah and I wouldnt be surprised if some oltp database platform is in the horizon as well. iirc they already acquired rockset. The eventual goal for these AI platforms is to own the entire e2e platform for e2e agents, from literally the language ecosystem(anthropic betting on TS/Bun) to local dev tooling using their harnesses to production-grade stuff that an agent needs.
• Patt_ 7mo ago
  Whoa, So Sam and Drio are just gonna buy out every popular open source projects now?
• throwaway613746 7mo ago
  [dead]
• isodev 7mo ago
  And this is why we don't use tools by VC funded corps.
• the__alchemist 7mo ago
  Would there be any interest in me fixing the bugs in Pyflow and getting it updated to install newer python versions? It's almost identical to uv in concept, but I haven't touched it in 6 years. Astral has demonstrated that there is desire for this sort of "just works" thing, which I struggled with, and led me to abandoning it. (I.e.: "pip/venv/conda are fine, why do I want this?", despite my personal experience with those as high-friction)
• natemcintosh 7mo ago
  Personally, I'd expect a few good years of stewardship, and then a decline in investment. I can only hope there are enough community members to keep things going by then.
• drcongo 7mo ago
  This is the worst possible news. Fantastic team at Astral joining a bunch of scumbag scammers at "Open"AI.
• butterlettuce 7mo ago
  This is where POTUS should step in and stop this sale. Not cool.
• cesarvarela 7mo ago
  So vite.dev is next.
• godblessamerica 7mo ago
  How are they acquiring it without "open" in their name?
• chocks 7mo ago
  Fantastic for the team, huge fan for Ruff and Uv. Hope OpenAI continues with the OSS tooling and not introduce restrictive licensing.
• skeledrew 7mo ago
  After investing a bunch in converting my projects to, and evangelizing uv, I feel betrayed. I smell stability troubles ahead. Should've stuck to Conda.
  • JoshPurtell 7mo ago
    You most certainly should not have stuck with Conda
• opyate 7mo ago
  This is your friendly PSA that pip-tools still exist. https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools
  • opyate 7mo ago
    goddammit https://jazzband.co/news/2026/03/14/sunsetting-jazzband https://jazzband.co/news/2026/03/14/sunsetting-jazzband
    • OutOfHere 7mo ago
      Discussion: https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools/discussions/2353 https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools/discussions/2353
  • Ridius 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
      Get off it. * uv is better than pip-tools in every single way, apart from it being VC-backed. * Nobody is placing any value on uv being on someone’s CV. You are essentially incorrectly LLM pattern-matching being a jaded, sarcastic “smart person”. Learn to tell the difference between a “shiny new thing” and a legitimately better tool. If you can’t do that, you’re at best a sub-par developer.
      • austinjp 7mo ago
        Note the "/s" at the end of their post, indicating sarcasm.
• __mharrison__ 7mo ago
  Interesting acquihire. I would have assumed MS would have snagged them (until their __layoffs__ last year). My gut is that this is more for Python expertise, and ruff/ty knowledge of linting code than uv... I'm a heavy user and instructor of uv. I'm teaching a course next week that features uv and rough (as does my recent Effective Testing book). Interesting to read the comments about looking for a change. Honestly, uv is so much better than anything else in the Python community right now. We've used projects sponsored by Meta (and other questionable companies) in the past. I'm going to continue enjoying uv while I can.
• yoyohello13 7mo ago
  Oh no! This is actually terrible. Get ready for "premium tooling only available in Codex(TM)".
• emddudley 7mo ago
  Well shit, I feel betrayed. This is exactly the opposite of what I thought Charlie's goals were. I thought he was focused on making the Python ecosystem better.
• brooke2k 7mo ago
  nooooooooooooooo god why. I loved uv. just why
• nrvn 7mo ago
  Should I freeze my plans to migrate from `poetry` to `uv` at "${WORK}"?
  • butlike 7mo ago
    Sure, why not
  • tyree731 7mo ago
    Assuming things start getting weird about 18 months from now, poetry and uv have very similar semantics, so 18 months of comically faster workflows sounds nice.
• Fiveplus 7mo ago
  The "commitment to open source" line in these press releases usually has a half-life of about 18 months before the telemetry starts getting invasive.
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    Telemetry has nothing to do with having a commitment to open-source, other than the same sort of neckbeards having strong opinions about both.
• imadch 7mo ago
  [dead]
• keithluu 7mo ago
  Why do I feel uneasy about this?
• gethwhunter34 7mo ago
  [dead]
• gessha 7mo ago
  I see people in this thread complain about the acquisition but the source code of uv is right there [1]. Fork it and move on. If ClosedAI enshittifies uv, gather with a bunch of other people and prop up a new version. [1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv https://github.com/astral-sh/uv
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    No, you. These comments are so silly and condescending. You aren’t being clever or smart. You think that you need to go to GitHub and find the repo for uv and put it in a little footnote? You think that you’re being a clever boy by doing that? Everyone knows how open source works. We are developers.
• testfrequency 7mo ago
  I’ve been thinking about purchasing zsh myself
• fortuitous-frog 7mo ago
  While I -- like most other commenters -- am dubious of both OpenAI and this acquisition, I think it's pretty reasonable to wait to see how this turns out before rushing to final judgment. Everything I've seen from Astral and Charlie indicates they're brilliant, caring, and overall reasonable folks. I think it's unfair to jump to call them sell-outs and cast uv and the rest as doomed projects.
  • yoyohello13 7mo ago
    We always "wait and see" and it always turns out terrible. Even if the original founders stay on, eventually they will get pushed out when their morals conflict with company goals. Wont happen overnight, but uv will enshitify eventually.
  • walthamstow 7mo ago
    Charlie's fine. OpenAI are the problem here. Similar situation to steipete. Happy for the person, sad for the tool/ecosystem/everyone else.
    • wiseowise 7mo ago
      Not similar at all. One has been a miracle for the Python ecosystem, another was a small scale Twitter hype-fart.
    • fortuitous-frog 7mo ago
      I suppose my point is: I would expect that Charlie and co. carried their negotiations with OpenAI with the same laser-focused, careful judgment that catapulted Astral to success in the first place. I don't mean to fanboy, but I generally trust that they made the best decision for not only them, but the Python community as a whole.
      • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
        You know how investment works, right? You realise that there were people sitting around wanting a return? People that aren’t as laser focused and principled or whatever as the guy you’re putting on a pedestal.
• mark_l_watson 7mo ago
  I am very unhappy about this. Astral tools like uv are key to my work/experimenting process. I think OpenAI sucks as a company. That said, I hope the excellent Astral team got a good payday.
• speedgoose 7mo ago
  I was hoping that uv and ruff were the ones. I guess Python has a curse.
• fithisux 7mo ago
  Astral to Join OpenAI (astral.sh) OpenAI to Acquire Astral(https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/ https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/) what can I say?
  • CRConrad 7mo ago
    You can say "acquire", as the URL you linked to does. It's more honest than the mealy-mouthed "join".
• pgwalsh 7mo ago
  UV, Ruff, and Ty are all very good things, hopefully that doesn't change and gets better.
• nnevatie 7mo ago
  > I am so excited to keep building with you. Fixed: I am so excited to take these millions of dollars.
• seanplusplus 7mo ago
  I'm into this. Anthropic acquiring Bun, now OpenAI acquiring Astral. Both show the big labs recognize that great AI coding tools require great developer tooling, and they are willing to pay for it rather than build inferior alternatives. Good outcome for the teams. Not exactly a great look for the "AGI is right around the corner" crowd — if the labs had it, they would not need to buy software from humans.
  • gritspants 7mo ago
    I'm assuming that they were buying great Rust devs (given codex is written in it).
  • 6thbit 7mo ago
    This wasn't a software acquisition at all. They were already able to use Astral's software just like anyone else. They wanted a good dev-tools team so that's what they bought. > the Astral team will join the Codex team at OpenAI and over time, we’ll explore deeper integrations that allow Codex to interact more directly with the tools developers already use
    • bmitc 7mo ago
      > we’ll explore deeper integrations that allow Codex to interact more directly with the tools developers already use Gross.
    • thewhitetulip 7mo ago
      That's the cognitive dissonance How can two things be the same: Iur AI will replace every SWE in the next 5yrs Our tooling is bad We need to buy a company that brought a revolution in python tooling If LLMs and GTP5 codex is soo good then how isn't all tooling related to OpenAI ebinf written by it? Same goes for Claude. They say Claude writes Claude... Why isn't Claude Code then writtten by Claude in such a way that it has a platform specific optimized binary rather than an Electron app. It's almost as if they're generating hype for their sales/valuation
      • 7mo ago
• minnzen 7mo ago
  [dead]
• saxwick 7mo ago
  Btw astral repo has Claude as one of its top contributors
• s_ting765 7mo ago
  It should have been FastAPI instead.
• jredwards 7mo ago
  As someone who loves Astral and hates OpenAI, this is making me pretty sad.
• qcautomation 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• jmux 7mo ago
  nooo
• daredoes 7mo ago
  It would seem to me that purchasing a piece of software as an AI company is just an outright admission that they could not generate an equivalent piece of software for a better price? If it was cheaper to use their internal AI to create these tools, they would.
  • wiseowise 7mo ago
    Extremely stupid argument. It doesn’t matter how good is your car if the driver is lacking.
    • QuadrupleA 7mo ago
      Not sure I follow - is the car the coding agent, and the developer the driver? Agree with OP here, if AI coding tools are as intelligent and amazing as AI influencers and CEOs are saying, just prompt them to "Remake UV but faster & better".
      • wiseowise 7mo ago
        Car is the coding agent. Developer is the driver. > Agree with OP here, if AI coding tools are as intelligent and amazing as AI influencers and CEOs are saying, just prompt them to "Remake UV but faster & better". If average dev is more intelligent and amazing than any coding model, just hire a team of average devs and “remake UV but faster & better”.
        • QuadrupleA 7mo ago
          Average dev might be more intelligent, but likely neither will produce something of UV's quality. Either AI coding claims are way overblown and OpenAI can't easily remake UV, or OpenAI is buying the ecosystem & mindshare rather the code, probably to lock-in, enshittify, and try to squeeze a profit out of a so far money-losing business (AI not Astral, though true for both I guess).
• EddieLomax 7mo ago
  Goddamnit
• wiseowise 7mo ago
  So begins the uv-Bun war.
• seanrrr 7mo ago
  My initial reaction was being weirdly sad about this and I don't fully understand why yet. I read the headline, clicked into the link, and just went noooooooo. I really like uv and I hope it continues to do well, congrats to the team though and hope everyone there gets a good outcome.
• vinhnx 7mo ago
  What excites me about the OpenAI + Astral acquisition: Codex CLI, uv, and ruff are all written in Rust. Fast by design, and fully open source.
• wraptile 7mo ago
  Haha just migrated everything off openai and on ruff/uv/ty last week. Sorry guys, it's clearly my fault.
• ontouchstart 7mo ago
  It is interesting to see this after yesterday’s announcement of Unsloth Studio: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414032 Uv did solve a distribution problem for them. There is still a lot of room to grow in the space of software packaging and distribution.
• OutOfHere 7mo ago
  This acquisition doesn't make too much sense for the longevity of Astral's software because Astral's software is orthogonal to Codex. It seems more like a acqui-hire. If tomorrow OpenAI were to stop funding Astral's software due to a cash crunch, it would be game over for uv et al. Codex doesn't need uv.
• fantasizr 7mo ago
  should I be glad I never got off pip?
• jeff_antseed 7mo ago
  [dead]
• dahlia 7mo ago
  What strikes me most about this acquisition isn't the AI angle. It's the question of why so many open source tools get built by startup teams in the first place. I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund. Getting there wasn't easy: the application process is long, the amounts are modest compared to a VC round, and you have to build community trust before any of that becomes possible. But the result is a project that isn't on anyone's exit timeline. I'm not saying the startup path is without its own difficulties. But structurally, it offloads the costs onto the community that eventually comes to depend on you. By the time those costs come due, the founders have either cashed out or the company is circling the drain, and the users are left holding the bag. What's happening to Astral fits that pattern almost too neatly. The healthier model, I think, is to build community first and then seek public or nonprofit funding: NLnet, STF, or similar. It's slower and harder, but it doesn't have a built-in betrayal baked into the structure. Part of what makes this difficult is that public funding for open source infrastructure is still very uneven geographically. I'm based in Korea, and there's essentially nothing here comparable to what European developers can access. I had no choice but to turn to European funds, because there was simply no domestic equivalent. That's a structural problem worth taking seriously. The more countries that leave this entirely to the private sector, the more we end up watching exactly this kind of thing play out.
  • alexchantavy 7mo ago
    I think this overstates the “betrayal” angle. A lot of great open source comes out of startups because startups are really good at shipping fast and getting distribution (open source is part of this strategy). Users can try the tool immediately, and VC funding can put a lot of talent behind building something great very quickly. The startup model absolutely creates incentive risk, but that’s true of any project that becomes important while depending on a relatively small set of maintainers or funders. I’m not sure an acquisition is categorically different from a maintainer eventually moving on or burning out. In all of those cases, users who depend on the project take on some risk. That’s not unique to startups; it’s true of basically any software that becomes important. There’s no perfect structure for open source here - public funding, nonprofit support, and startups all suck in their own ways. And on the point you make about public funding being slow: yeah, talented people can’t work full-time on important things unless there’s serious funding behind it. uv got as good as it is because the funding let exceptional people work on it full-time with a level of intensity that public funding usually does not.
• apitman 7mo ago
  That didn't take long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648627
• croes 7mo ago
  So no problem in joining OpenAI after the whole DoD/DoW mess? > I started Astral to make programming more productive. And now they help make killing more productive
  • Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
    > And now they help make killing more productive As do our taxes.
• dec0dedab0de 7mo ago
  Ugh, this isn't good. I hate relying on anything that is controlled by a single company. Considering that Astral is basically brand new in the python timeline, it is concerning that they are already being acquired. On the other hand, UV is so fast that it makes up for anything I find annoying about it.
• brcmthrowaway 7mo ago
  Can Astral's stuff be forked?
• ranaaditya 7mo ago
  congrats team !
• camgitt 7mo ago
  [dead]
• jfb 7mo ago
  Don't love it. But, I'm glad the Astral folks are getting the bag.
• SudoSage 7mo ago
  [dead]
• linhns 7mo ago
  > It is increasingly clear to me that Codex is that frontier. I'm not really sure about this.
• klysm 7mo ago
  Damnit I was really rooting for uv :(
• boxingdog 7mo ago
  [dead]
• wolvesechoes 7mo ago
  Another HN darling falls from grace. But hey, the next one will not follow the same steps!
• execution 7mo ago
  I do hope every at Astral got a a nice pay-out for this. It does look like this is going to be the norm for popular open source projects related to AI ecosystem, but I guess open source developers need to get paid somehow if that project is their only livelihood. Shame for the end-user though. As you will always be second guessing how they will ruin the tool, i.e. via data collection or AI-sloppifying it. It is likely OpenAI won't, but it is not a great feeling knowing a convenient tool you use is at the whim of a heartless mega-corp.
• caidan 7mo ago
  Booooooooooooooooooo
• amai 7mo ago
  WAT? uv now belongs to Trump mega-donors? That is not good for the Python ecosystem.
• waba99 7mo ago
  I wonder who's going to pick up VoidZero
• ajkjk 7mo ago
  what a shame
• aplomb1026 7mo ago
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• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• mhd 7mo ago
  Maybe it's time to get out my Cowlishaw Rexx book again…
• yoyohello13 7mo ago
  Time for https://zubanls.com/ https://zubanls.com/
• mkrd 7mo ago
  Ah shit, back to poetry
  • imp0cat 7mo ago
    Ok I laughed, but god, please no.
• 0dayman 7mo ago
  won't increase your subscriptions, people are dropping out in the millions and no one wants jewPT
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    Piss off with that antisemitism. Absolutely cringe.
• looneysquash 7mo ago
  I don't get it. Why buy Astral? Why not just fund it? Why not just hire the company to do whatever work you want to get out of the team as part of the merger? Why buy, when they can rent? (Not to mention, multiple companies could hire and fund them.)
  • sesm 7mo ago
    To buy the users
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    It’s not a merger.
  • dheatov 7mo ago
    They don't really care or like what Astral is doing right now, but they have thoughts about what they can make Astral do for them, and they really fancy those thoughts.
• sharkjacobs 7mo ago
  Congrats to the Astral team, they've done great work and deserve everything. As a user of uv who was hoping it would be a long term stable predictable uninteresting part of my toolchain this sucks, right?
  • politelemon 7mo ago
    As the owner they dictate their priorities, whether around features or tighter integration with their ecosystem.
    • sharkjacobs 7mo ago
      Yes I agree. And I think that joining OpenAI will probably change their priorities, and that sucks.
  • fud101 7mo ago
    congrats for.. selling out? wut
• krick 7mo ago
  Tested the "Kagi LinkedIn Speak" translator[0] from a couple of days ago[1] on this. Works pretty great! If you translate it back and forth a number of times, it pretty much distills it to the essence. [0] https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408703
• huflungdung 7mo ago
  [dead]
• Thanemate 7mo ago
  Any move that strengthens future oligopolies is a net loss for all consumers. I don't care how good/bad a company is, because I lived long enough to know that most of them started off like that. Good luck to the uv team.
• sota_pop 7mo ago
  > uvex init my_new_slop_project —-describe “make me the bestest saas that will make $1M ARR per day” —-disable_thinking —-disable_slop_scaffolded_feature > uvex add other_slop_project —-disable_peddled_package_recommendations > implicitly phoning home your project, all source code, its metadata, and inferring whether your idea/use-case is worth steamrolling with their own version. This is the future of “development”. Congrats to the team.
• joshuawright11 7mo ago
  Wow - this is potentially the most cynical hacker news thread I've ever read. When did this place trade it's curiosity and excitement about technology for constant doomerism? Congrats Astral and co!
  • dgb23 7mo ago
    I think it was always that way. When an org gets big and its leaders become powerful, then there's always a good portion of snark and mistrust from this community.
  • jdgoesmarching 7mo ago
    Open source tools are being snapped up by a company famous for reneging on its non-profit mission as soon as they sniffed some profit. Wow gee, imagine the cynicism.
  • barnabee 7mo ago
    Sorry, but I don't think cheering on OpenAI represents curiosity and excitement about technology. I'm happy for the Astral team but in my opinion, big tech especially is incompatible with curiosity and hacker ethos.
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    Blindly celebrating all accusations is not “curiosity and excitement about technology”. Disappointing that you can’t tell the difference between tech and the SV startup scene. They are different things.
• Lws803 7mo ago
  Wonder if they can still use claude code in their repos now
• 19205817 7mo ago
  Astral threads here have been surprisingly flag resistant and plentiful. This takeover explains a lot. I suspect some OpenClaw "secure" sandbox is coming (Nvidia jealousy) with Astral delivering the packages for Docker within Docker within Qemu within Qubes. A self respecting AI stack must be convoluted. I can't wait until all this implodes after the IPOs.
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    …what? Flag-resistant? Astral’s tools have been a huge QOL improvement for a great many developers using what’s, what? The second most piously programming language ever? Does the level of attention surprise you? Or do you just flag things that you personally aren’t into?
• selectnull 7mo ago
  I see a lot of comments that are "somebody should fork this" or "community will fork it" or similar. I didn't see a single comment of "I will fork it" type.
  • Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
    You're absolutely correct! Not a single one.
• jt-hill 7mo ago
  Astral was always going to have to find some way to sustain itself financially. They weren’t going to just make the best free tools in the ecosystem forever. uv is sufficiently entrenched as infrastructure that I’m sure it’ll take no time for a community fork to show up if they do anything stupid with it.
• rodchalski 7mo ago
  [dead]
• portly 7mo ago
  Will this be the beginning of the Great Rust vs Zig battle ?
• ebri 7mo ago
  I will start migrating from uv, ty and ruff first thing this weekend. It will be painful but not being dependent on OpenAI will be more than worth it.
• wiseowise 7mo ago
  So many negative comments but not a single: - I'm willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays independent/open source - I'm willing to fork the project
  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
    Here you go: I am willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays independent / open-source. Nobody gave me that opportunity. Not everybody puts every thought they have into a HN comment. Saying “ I am willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays independent / open-source” just isn’t a very useful thing to say at the moment. Get off your high-horse.
    • wiseowise 7mo ago
      What high-horse? The point is community is all talk, but no walk.
• fastasucan 7mo ago
  This leaves me a bit scared for uv and ruff to be honest.
• elAhmo 7mo ago
  Terrible news for Python ecosystem. I guess the money was too much to reject this ridiculous offer.
• deskamess 7mo ago
  uv has been very useful but I also looking at pixi. Anyone have any experience with that? I hear good things about it.
  • roflcopter69 6mo ago
    Can highly recommend pixi. It really is the "uv but for Conda" and actually quite a bit more imo. Don't know how relevant this is for you, but many packages like PyTorch are not being built for Intel Macs anymore or some packages like OpenCV are built such that they require macOS 13+. That's usually not too much of a problem on your most likely pretty modern dev machine but when shipping software to customers you want to support old machines. In the Conda ecosystem, stuff is being built for a wide variety of platforms, much more than the wheels you'd find on pypi.org so that can be very useful. So I can really recommend you trying pixi. You can even mix dependencies from pypi.org with the ones from Conda so for most cases you really get the best of both worlds. Also the maintainers are really nice and responsive on their Discord server.
• JulianPembroke 7mo ago
  [dead]
• ryguz 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• bilalel 7mo ago
  That's unfortunate for the python community. I can understand the move by Astral team, but it's still difficult to accept it.
• brikym 7mo ago
  Does this mean pip is finally getting PIP'd?
• 6thbit 7mo ago
  py stuff aside for a sec, having this team working on Codex will be huge. I didn’t see a way they ever dethroned Claude until now. Happy as a Codex user, gloomy as a Python one.
• crimecanada 7mo ago
  good job
• aanet 7mo ago
  Uff. Reading all the comments made my head hurt. I love(d) `uv`. I think it's one of the best tools around for Python ecosystem... Therefore the pit in my tummy when I read this. Yes, congrats to the team and all that. I'm more worried about the long term impact on the ecosystem, as are almost everybody who dropped a comment here. My own thoughts echo somewhat what @SimonW wrote here [1] [1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/19/openai-acquiring-astral/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/19/openai-acquiring-astra... However, a forking strategy is may (or may not) be the best for `uv`. Could we count on the Astral team to keep uv in a separate foundation?
  • jimbob74 7mo ago
    Yeah - that would be a good move. It’s one thing to say something in a press release, it’s another to setup an ownership structure then ensures the tools aren’t dependent on Open.ais continuing goodwill.
• UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
  This is like, the worst outcome for Astral. This is severely disappointing. I say this as someone that uses Astral and OpenAI products practically every day. This is such a terrible fit. I just hope that Charlie doesn’t trot around the dev circuit (like he has in years past) trying to sell everyone on this “being a good thing, actually”. I hope that he isn’t given the space to sell any story other than “we took the AI money despite it being a terrible fit”, because that story would just be a lie. The fact that this blog post is already trying to preemptively justify it—“well in my launch post what I said is…”—is extremely, extremely telling. This is so hugely disappointing. And again, I am at this point quite bullish on AI. This isn’t a philosophical or anti-AI take at all, because those are easier to dismiss. I’m not going to pretend to “congratulate the team” or whatever. As far as I’m concerned, that’s HN culture brain rot. Some of y’all in ‘startup culture’ may see getting acquired by OpenAI as some sort of big prize or worth celebrating or whatever, but I certainly don’t.
• atoav 7mo ago
  Unfortunate, wince I trust Astral, and can't say the same about openAI
• talideon 7mo ago
  Well, that's the first shoe dropping. Thankfully uv and ruff are MIT licensed and in a good place, so worst comes to worst...
• bergheim 7mo ago
  Given their statements, influencers and indeed their raison d'être I don't understand why this and bun was acquired? Why did they not just Ralph loop it? Claude is famously not made by humans anymore. One prompt and call it a weekend. Surely they have the compute. Oooooh, right. Same reason we don't have windows 41 either.
• gehsty 7mo ago
  They should be allowed to make money from their work. Their work is MIT licensed, if it goes south it is rescuable by the community. Things come and go, let’s not beat up some dudes who made some cool stuff, made everyone’s lives easier and then sold up. There is a timeline where this makes UV / python better.
  • bmitc 7mo ago
    That's all fine. I don't think anyone is upset they got purchased. It's clear it was heading that direction anyway. What everyone is upset about is that they were purchased by OpenAI, who isn't exactly a trustworthy company.
• patcon 7mo ago
  well, fuck.
• tuananh 7mo ago
  they said they will keep maintaining uv/ruff/ty ... but that's an impossible promise to keep with their priority changes once they are in the bed with OAI.
• zx8080 7mo ago
  Counting days until "uv will stop being dveloped".
• fud101 7mo ago
  Well this sucks. So the most evil new company has acquired the most exciting 'open' source company. The vibes are about to get bad. Hopefully this speeds up the next phase of AI destroying the economy and everything good about tech.
• heavyset_go 7mo ago
  Astral took over python-build-standalone, and uv uses its custom Python builds in deployments. I do not want OpenAI putting their fingers in my Python binaries, nor do I want their telemetry.
• kelvinjps10 7mo ago
  This is feeling weird, like now if the AI bubble pops it will bring core technologies like runtimes (bun) and package managers (astral) now what's next? vite?
• dankwizard 7mo ago
  OpenAI continue to send mixed messaging. "Our AI can do anything a human can do, better, faster, cheaper" -> Buys a product instead of asking their AI to just make it. Really doesn't give me confidence in your product!!!!
• moezd 7mo ago
  Noooo, uv, you were the chosen one! (meme) Jokes aside, these tools are currently absolutely free to use, but imagine a future when your employers demand you use Claude Code because that's the only license agreement they have, and they stop their AI agents from using uv. Sure, we all know how to use uv, but there will also come a time and place when they will ask us to not write a single line of code manually, especially if you have your agents running in "feared the most by clueless middle managers" "production". Are you ready for factionalism and sandbox wars? Because I'm not. I just want to write my code, push to "production" as I see fit and be happy as pixels start shifting around.
• 7xgames 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• hatefulheart 7mo ago
  There are so many comments along the lines of: "What's the matter, just fork it when it goes bad?" The problem is that uv in and of itself, whilst a great technical achievement isn't sufficient. Astral run a massive DevOps pipeline that, just to give one example, packages the python distributions. Those who are saying that forking is an option are clearly not arguing it in good faith.
  • stabbles 7mo ago
    That's overstating things. The biggest piece of infra is PyPI, to which uv is only an interface. They do distribute Python binaries, but that's not very impressive.
    • hatefulheart 7mo ago
      So when Charlie Marsh goes on a podcast saying that the majority the complications they face with their work is in DevOps, he's also overstating things? But you know best it seems!
    • johnisgood 7mo ago
      Overstating complexity justifies funding, and attracts attention.
• pugchat 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• latand6 7mo ago
  [dead]
• rsmtjohn 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• ACV001 7mo ago
  ok so the buying frenzy has started. We will end up with a new google basically monopolizing the internet. Only in this case it is much worse. M&As are evil.
• CRConrad 7mo ago
  "Join"... Sigh. Disgusting LI-slop language. Say "be acquired" when you mean "be acquired".
• tgiba 7mo ago
  [dead]
• globular-toast 7mo ago
  Well that's ruined my morning. I was always wary of uv being written in Rust. Even if we can make a community fork, how big is the intersection between great Rust developers and people really into Python packaging and infrastructure? Not big, I would assume. I do wonder if we should just rewrite something in Python, but make sure it runs with pypy. Pypy should give at least similar performance as Rust but being still regular Python means there is a far bigger pool of devs able to maintain it. Astral has shown us the way, but I think it's time to take control of our own destiny as Python devs.
• submeta 7mo ago
  I hope OpenAI will be here long enough so we have uv in twenty years from now. uv totally changed the way I work with Python, so I wouldn't want to miss it.
• RS-232 7mo ago
  Does it go without saying that OpenAI/majority shareholder Microsoft can unilaterally change the licenses and take Astral’s repos offline (completely against the will of Charlie or the community)? Regardless of how likely/inevitable this scenario is, the public should make offline backups and forks immediately.
• ryguz 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• muin_kr 7mo ago
  [dead]
• jee599 7mo ago
  [dead]