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.
Just want to note that we will continue maintaining and improving our virtualization solutions actually with even greater attention. SaaS options like Cirrus CI and Cirrus Runners will eventually wind down so we can focus on incorporating pieces internally.
If your scope includes making the Codex web app environments have additional functionality I look forward to it. More enterprise features and yaml backed pipelines.
Yeah. Much like Astral - acquiring both the product (because they need to use it internally, but don't care about trying to resell / market), and they also want the talent to keep maintaining it / add features they want.
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.
Same; the reason everyone ran out to buy Mac Minis last month is it gave their Claw access to iMessage, their browser cookies, and a residential IP. Cirrus provides a way to provision and orchestrate MacOS VMs, which is exactly what I did for running Openclaw (for a minute …).
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.
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.
It also kills competition and disincentivizes providing long term value. I’m not sure how making the job market more like gambling does anything positive for the majority of people
It’s been true for a while, but AI seems to have exaggerated it. To me it reinforces the idea that LLMs created a “K” shaped talent market. Those whose are good become even more valuable.
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).
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, ...
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.
Interesting move. Cirrus Labs has been doing solid work in mobile CI/CD infrastructure — curious to see how their expertise gets integrated into OpenAI’s tooling and developer ecosystem.
Thank you! Full journey is too long for a comment here.
It was hard and I was lucky with my previous pre-IPO gigs at Airbnb and Twitter so I had some bootstrap fund. In retrospective a dev tools startup in 2017 with no network and no VC support was a crazy idea but I was young and didn’t think thought too much.
Then it was long 8 years of raw work and constant questioning this choice. Then finally a third component: luck. In 2024-2025 it kind of grew organically due to market changes and back in October 2025 I finally stopped questioning the future of Cirrus Labs.
My only advice if I may, try to get your first dollar from your startup while you are employed.
> We are no longer accepting new customers for Cirrus Runners but will continue supporting the service for existing customers through their existing contract periods.
To create an ephemeral (docker-like) MacOS VM on a Mac with full performance and access (e.g. GPU) you have to use a virtualization API provided by Apple.
For most CI use, you can choose between:
Anka, a "contact-us for pricing" closed-source projet, where you have to pay expensive license (easy 3000 USD/yr per machine)
or
tart, which is a lightweight wrapper around the official Apple API.
But you have to know that on MacOS, there is an artificial limit of 2 VMs per Mac... but well:
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.
I just don't think there's much upside to telling it how it is in the press release that gets buried after a week and everyone moves on. For better or worse.
> 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.
https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...
> 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.
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
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.
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 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.
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 was hard and I was lucky with my previous pre-IPO gigs at Airbnb and Twitter so I had some bootstrap fund. In retrospective a dev tools startup in 2017 with no network and no VC support was a crazy idea but I was young and didn’t think thought too much.
Then it was long 8 years of raw work and constant questioning this choice. Then finally a third component: luck. In 2024-2025 it kind of grew organically due to market changes and back in October 2025 I finally stopped questioning the future of Cirrus Labs.
My only advice if I may, try to get your first dollar from your startup while you are employed.
It's kind of like electric cars charged with electricity from coal power plants.
Do service providers not think customers have other things to do than simply maintain their existing infrastructure?
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
> We are no longer accepting new customers for Cirrus Runners but will continue supporting the service for existing customers through their existing contract periods.
> We never raised outside capital
I guess it worked out though
For most CI use, you can choose between:
or But you have to know that on MacOS, there is an artificial limit of 2 VMs per Mac... but well:https://github.com/cirruslabs/orchard/commit/3cfa2445500f45f...
With https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html
Some people might find it very attractive:
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’m sure there’s a way to say the same thing without coming across as a bullshitter.