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throwaway63467 | on: Astral to Join OpenAI
It’s a small tool shop building a tiny part of the Python ecosystem, let’s not overstate their importance. They burned through their VC money and needed an exit and CLI tool chains are hyped now for LLMs, but this mostly sounds like an acquihire to me. Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.
druml | parent | next
Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.
rob | root | parent | next
Just a tiny project with over 100 million downloads every month, over 4 million every day. No big deal. Just a small shop, don't overstate its importance.

https://pypistats.org/packages/uv

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victorbjorklund | root | parent | next
They have some nice ideas. But if they turn to shit you can just fork their tools and use that instead.
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swexbe | root | parent | next
VC money bailing out other VCs. A tale as old as time.
Hamuko | root | parent
Do you have any statistics for that?
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woodruffw | parent | next
As a point of information: Astral did not, in fact, burn through its VC money. I agree that dev tools are difficult to monetize, though.

(Source: I'm an Astral employee.)

nullhole | root | parent | next
> As a point of order: Astral did not, in fact, burn through its VC money.

That's a point of information, not a point of order.

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benterix | root | parent | next
Finally someone competent to answer the crucial question. Taken into account the enormous amount of excellent work you did, and the fact that dev tools are hard to monetize, what was your strategy?
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19205817 | parent | next
They were hyped here without any pushback. Maybe OpenAI thinks the Astral folks will now evangelize and foist Codex and ChatGPT onto the open source "community".

People need to be very careful about resisting. OpenAI wants to make everyone unemployed, works with the Pentagon, steals IP, and copyright whistleblowers end up getting killed under mysterious circumstances.

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giancarlostoro | parent | next
> Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.

I'm on the fence about cancelling my JetBrains subscription I've had for nearly 10 years now. I just don't use it much. Zed and Claude Code cover all my needs, the only thing I need is a serious DataGrip alternative, but I might just sit down with Claude and build one for myself.

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__mharrison__ | parent | next
uv is the best thing to happen to package management in Python.

It's not perfect, but it is light-years better than what preceded it.

I jumped ship to it and have not looked back. (So have many of my clients).

anentropic | parent | next
That was my feeling - more than 'owning' uv etc I could see this as being about getting people onboard who had a proven track record delivering developer tooling that was loved enough to get wide adoption
scuff3d | parent | next
That's kind of like saying Cargo is a small part of the Rust ecosystem.

It's not there yet, but it's getting there.

gigatexal | parent | next
Uv is the defacto way to do projects. Ty is really really good. Ruff is the defacto linter. I mean they’ve earned a lot of clout.
raincole | parent | next
> tiny part of the Python ecosystem

https://xkcd.com/2347/

throwaw12 | parent
uv and ruff is not tiny part anymore, its growing fast
Syntaf | root | parent
Not to mention their language server + type checker `ty` is incredible. We moved our extremely large python codebase over from MyPy and it's an absolute game changer.

It's so fast in fact that we just added `ty check` to our pre-commit hooks where MyPy previously had runtimes of 150+ seconds _and_ a mess of bugs around their caching.