For our teams, Codex is a massive productivity booster that actually increases the value of each dev. If you check our hiring page, you’ll see we are still hiring aggressively. Our ambitions are bigger than our current workforce, and we continue to pay top dollar for talented devs who want to join us in transforming how silicon chips provide value to humans.
Akin to how compilers reduced the demand for assembly but increased the demand for software engineering, I see Codex reducing the demand for hand-typed code but increasing the demand for software engineering. Codex can read and write code faster than you or me, but it still lacks a lot of intelligence and wisdom and context to do whole jobs autonomously.
You realise that there’s certainly at least one Astral dev that uses Copilot or Claude Code or whatever, right?
You’re so anti-AI that you’re making nonsensical arguments. The existence of AI doesn’t mean that human effort and skill and care is worth nothing. OpenAI has never argued that. Nothing is incongruent here except for the completely fictionalised worldview you’ve conjured up and attributed to…a company?
They could start by inventing any software with their agents. They probably should prove their offering is good enough to do that considering they're hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, owing truckloads of money they currently have no hope of repaying to investors who are being promised a literal revolution.
According to the blog [0], their whole monorepo is in Python, their models are obviously trained using Python, their experiments are written using Python and core and CLI of their Codex is written using Rust. Uv brings both Python and Rust expertise. You’re talking nonsense because of your blind hate of LLMs. Even though I agree that they’re capitalizing on the fear of SWE being redundant.
Obviously, buying skilled Rust devs makes sense for any normal software company that develops in Rust. I wouldn't be making a point out of it if the headline were "Amazon buys Rust developers". Or if OpenAI were honest about what their product is.
They are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs.
The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more liquidity for investors).
The acquisition is just a collateral effect.
This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is part of the team at Astral).
So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery. I don't even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything, candidly.
It means the company almost reached their runway, so all these employees would have to find a job.
It's a very very good product, but it is open-source and Apache / MIT, so difficult to defend from anyone just clicking on fork. Especially a large company like OpenAI who has massive distribution.
Now that they hired the employees, they have no more guarantees than if they made a direct offer to them.
I'm not too plugged into venture cap on opensource/free tooling space but raising 3 rounds and growing your burn rate to $3M/yr in 24 months without revenue feels like a decently risky bag for those investors and staff without a revenue path or exit. I'd be curious to see if OpenAI went hunting for this or if it was placed in their lap by one of the investors.
OpenAI has infamously been offering huge compensation packages to acquire talent, this would be a relative deal if they got it at even a modest valuation. As noted, codex uses a lot of the tooling that this team built here and previously, OpenAI's realization that competitors that do one thing better than them (like claude with coding before codex) can open the door to getting disrupted if they lapse - lots of people I know are moving to claude for non-coding workflows because of it's reputation and relatively mature/advanced client tools.
(I work at Astral)
I would sincerely have understood better (and even wished) if OpenAI made you a very generous offer to you personally as an individual contributor than choose a strategy where the main winners are the VCs of the purchased company.
Here, outside, we perceive zero to almost no revenues (no pricing ? no contact us ? maybe some consulting ?) and millions burned.
Whether it is 4 or 8 or 15M burned, no idea.
Who's going to fill that hole, and when ? (especially since PE funds have 5 years timeline, and company is from 2021).
The end product is nice, but as an investor, being nice is not enough, so they must have deeper motives.
What was their pitch?
Bundling codex with uv isnt going to meaningfully affect the number of people using it. It doesnt increase the switching costs or anything.
I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text, and need software/expertise to manage the text->AST->text pipeline in a way that preserves the structure of your files/text.
Writing something that understands all the methods that come in a Django model goes way beyond parsing the code, and is a genuine struggle in language where you can’t execute the code without worrying about side effects like Python.
Ty should give them a base for that where the model is able to see things that aren’t literally in the code and aren’t in the training data (eg an internal version of something like SQLAlchemy).
Not-most popular LLM software development product on the planet acquires most popular/rapidly rising python packaging org for mindshare.
I guess this move might end up in a situation where the uv team comes up with some new agent-first tooling, which works best or only with OAI services.
Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.
$ uv install claude-agent-sdk
I'm sorry Dave, I can't do thatAnt is building their app distribution platform, so no wonder OpenAI thinking the same, it will only surprise me if they move so slow.