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.
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
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
Because they need tooling in the next few months and not in 5 years.
Ofc its hype-based, when they say Claude writes Claude they mean Claude types most code, but the product decisions are made by people.
AI atm is not good without proper steering and most importantly AI doesn't decide what to build.
I'd wager astral team won't end up typing as much code for Codex, but they sure will architect and design the way people will interact through codex with a lot of dev tools in the ecosystem. That's what I would pay for in their shoes, access to their vision and already proven track record to design good tools.
I think it could use improvement. Look at https://api.slack.com/methods/chat.postMessage and explain how "as_user" makes any sense. And it gets more convoluted depending on other parameters used (IM channels, etc.)
Also, why can't I use a secret key with my basic postMessage script? I have to navigate OAuth2 just to make a post? Argh the pain!
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.