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).
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.
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, ...
> We are no longer accepting new customers for Cirrus Runners but will continue supporting the service for existing customers through their existing contract periods.
I mean, it’s no different than any other company who goes out of business. Yeah, their star rating on Yelp is gonna take a major hit, but on the other hand, they don’t exist anymore so shrug feel free to hold a grudge against them, I guess.
This is the risk we run when we get services from companies that aren’t Microsoft, IBM, etc. (I would say Google but LOL, they obviously kill products even faster than the startup death cycle).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? ;)
51 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 64.7 ms ] thread> We never raised outside capital
I guess it worked out though
Do service providers not think customers have other things to do than simply maintain their existing infrastructure?
> We are no longer accepting new customers for Cirrus Runners but will continue supporting the service for existing customers through their existing contract periods.
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
This is the risk we run when we get services from companies that aren’t Microsoft, IBM, etc. (I would say Google but LOL, they obviously kill products even faster than the startup death cycle).
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.
https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
It's kind of like electric cars charged with electricity from coal power plants.
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-computer...
https://github.com/cirruslabs/mtell
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? ;)