> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.
"Hundreds of companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers—the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors that let developers and agents use an API."
What's WILD is people ending up relying on these essentially startup-slops that just serves to give you future technical debt once you have to eventually moved away because they got acquired by $INSERT_BAD_GUY_OF_THE_MONTH
Anthropic is getting extremely petty and especially against oai
- ad in superbowl about how they are the good guys.
- dow public PR stunt (they are the ones to give Palantir their model access).
- sues openclaw.
- threatens every use of cc in oss community.
- prevents other companies using claude saying they cant use when they compete.
- never released a single open weight model.
- Dario told OAI is Yolo'ing in compute and they are now doing the same.
- gas lighting developers and then after weeks acknowledging they fiddled with reasoning juice.
- fear mongoring on mythos and then geting compute later and acknowledging publicly once they realized its not significantly better than gpt 5.5 cyber.
Why? They started the whole chatbot paradigm. They took the leap and are very generous with free tiers.
I know people are upset about the non-profit thing but the fact is that was pretty much the only way forward if they wanted to have LLMs have the impact that they are having today. It's very much a question if they'll ever turn a profit. But overall I'm grateful OpenAI had the vision to get this ball rolling when companies like Google have been sitting on this for nearly a decade and were too afraid to invest a tiny portion of their billions to bring this to fruition because they were afraid of either cannibalization of their search business or offending a vocal minority of internet people.
Maybe you're right about the rest, but about the topic, how does "this!" equal to Anthopic being petty against OpenAI? Is OpenAI using Stainless a lot already, or is it something else? Your comment seems to be missing how the first and last line are related. FWIW, I don't think anyone involved here is "the good guys".
Yeah it's crazy how they're burning developer goodwill. I've personally cancelled and resent them for not being able to delete my claude code session (that button was misteriously the only one in the UI to throw an error, I tried every day for two weeks).
It should be noted that this user is basically an OAI shill account. You can look through their history to see this quite clearly.
Anecdata, but I have a friend at OAI who claims that on both twitter and HN there is mild coordination of OAI employees to signal boost pro-OAI and anti-competitor messaging.
Congrats to the team at Stainless, it's a great team to be joining over at Anthropic.
We were an ealy adopter of their Node SDK generator at Mux (and latterly their Typescript and other generators), and the product worked great, and I'm sad to see it be shut down.
At the same time, it's easy to understand why this is a complciated product/market to be in at the moment - it's very tempting and easy to vibe code SDKs from a OpenAPI spec files right now. I would think a lot of teams will just go in that direction (for better or worse), using the same toolchain that the product developers are using today for the product, for effectively no extra cost.
I get that most of our new customers will use AI to generate client libs. But our existing customer base depends on our Stainless generated client libs. These OpenAPI schema > client lib providers had a bit of lockin since the client libs are all slightly different.
Migration's unfortunately not as easy as just switching to Speakeasy or Openapi generator w/o breaking existing customers.
Some clarity about existing users/SDKs would go a long way. Otherwise this reads like "we just bought OpenAI's front door and we're EOLing it. Hopefully no one was planning to use it in the future". Petty and pointless.
> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.
> If you’re a Stainless customer, visit app.stainless.com/transition for help transitioning from Stainless-managed products to other options. As always, you own the SDKs you’ve generated to date, and have full rights to modify and extend them however you wish.
If you have an account you can go to https://app.stainless.com/transition. The team spent a good amount of time working on a way for customers to switch to self-service
I'm viewing this as a user of non-Ant Stainless SDKs. I don't have an account or relationship with you guys, and thanks to your (excellent!) product, the surfaces I contact don't have a direct dependence on your services. But that surface is intimately informed by the nuances of your product! It'd be nice to allay (or confirm) people's fears about how this might impact your other prominent users!
Good point. FWIW if anyone reading this is a stainless user and is concerned about their situation you can reach out to transition@stainless.com. I check with the team if they can update the article with a mention
I feel like we are seeing agentic coding tools morph into walled gardens with these acquisitions. Anthropic has restricted claude code usage while OpenAI has sort of let Codex fill the void. I am curious to see how this continues to evolve.
I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.
This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.
With respect, you were manipulated (either by founders or by investors). Startups leverage employees' pro-social leanings to make them feel good about a fundamentally anti-social enterprise.
Why wouldn't getting more customers the plan? Anthropic doesn't acquire companies to have a lower market share. There is clearly a consolidation and a rush to get as much of the developer market as possible.
Exactly. The goal of any VC by definition is to return a positive return on investment. I guess you might have a handful of exceptions, funds that are environmentally conscious, but profit remains paramount.
Tale as old as the word "startup" even. Uber/Lyft did it with taxis. DoorDash did it with food delivery. You run at a loss for years while destroying your legacy competition by just outlasting them, then once you have cornered the market you squeeze.
I understand the cynism but it’s not the case here. Stainless isn't a case of blitzscaling or running a loss for years to destroy the competition. The motto of the company is polished and robust and we invested a lot into generating what we think are the highest quality SDKs available. We could have shipped things way, way faster if the focus on design and quality wasn’t such an essential part of the development process
I'm reading "enshitification", and it describes this cycle of first losing money but acquiring customers, then switching focus to catering to businesses, then to themselves and at that point the tool is not what it was supposedly intended to be.
This is the same startup culture. The only innovation here is finding new way to swindle customers and businesses out of money.
Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.
Claude is just a tool. My team members are each free to choose the text editor or IDE that they are happiest with. In the near future, I hope to be able to say the same for coding agents. I really like Claude, but I don't track Claude resources in our repos. If something better comes along, I'm betting it will be perfectly happy to parse the markdown of my existing memory files, and nothing in the repo itself will force anyone else to know that I switched.
It kind of blows my mind that the majority of Claude users have just accepted that CLAUDE.md is a tracked file that the whole team has to standardize on and share. Coding agents are the ultimate API. They conform to however you prefer to interact. Is anyone really expecting to enforce standard operating procedures with this non-deterministic black box of magic?
Just want to take this moment to say thank you to all the customers I had the opportunity to interact with during my time at Stainless as I expect lots of them are likely to be active in this thread. It has been an honor to work with you all and none of what happened over the past 4 years would have been possible without your trust and support
stainless is a great piece of software. it was a really good risk to try to make a business out of openapi generators' maintainers not having enough time to fix bugs. everybody benefits. it sounds like nothing but similar ideas - like uv - save me time every day and turn me into an evangelist.
I had never heard of Stainless, but it is deeply concerning that Anthropic are able to use monopoly money to kill software at their whim. First Bun, and now this. It's one thing for a corporation to do it with their own money, because at some point the board will ask them why they're wasting money. But Anthropic isn't even profitable. They're doing this with billions of dollars of borrowed money. Same thing with OpenAI committing to purchasing an unholy amount of RAM supply and directly causing the 5x price jump, with money they don't have.
I don't understand how investors continue to fund this nonsense. Anthropic wasting money on this should be an overwhelmingly strong signal that the AGI hype is blatant fraud and that software engineers are clearly not being replaced by Anthropic's software if they have to buy more engineers for some tertiary, fifth-order concern so far removed from their main line of business. Yet they just keep getting more and more money dumped on them.
I met him via HN, and somehow got the opportunity to work closely with him on Stainless since the very early days, I can confirm he is awesome! He did such a fantastic work building the team and developing a very unique culture of excellence and kindness
We evaluated Stainless & Fern for our 8+ languages but ultimately I couldn’t justify the cost nor ceding control to another organization for something as important as platform DX.
We evaluated Stainless, Fern [1], and a few others for Docs & SDKs (soon, CLI) and ended up choosing Fern. Definitely glad we did after today's news. Hadn't seen WorkOS's work here though - thanks for sharing.
Anthropic technically use the Stainless docs platform for their docs, in that it’s all rendered by Stainless components. They just don’t use the full suite of Stainless tools for docs. The ability to use as little or as much as you like was a great feature of the Stainless docs product
Hmm. I thought we didn't need libraries or tooling anymore and "AI" could just create everything we needed? I've even been assured that we don't even need programming languages anymore, the LLMs can just write whatever we need in assembly.
Hopefully Stainless' products will remain available to customers in some form, rather than having them hogged for internal use. Give it time, not all is lost.
I'm really disappointed that such a great service is getting taken off the market. Happy for their team, but sad for the ecosystem.
This has to be somewhat anti-competitive. Why else sunset the SDK generator service but to hurt any other company (OpenAI, etc) who relies on these for their SDKs?
Surely part of the value is the talent, the rest comes from removing a tool like this from the open market? I wonder how much of each went into the final valuation.
I don’t think so. They were available to anyone with the money and Anthropic acted first.
I doubt attempting to hurt OpenAI was the primary reason for the acquisition.
Maybe it’s different now; Bill Gates “wanting to cutoff Netscape’s air supply” and threatening to cancel the Windows license of PC manufacturers who shipped Netscape’s browser on their PCs… now that’s anticompetitive. They had 95% market share.
Bill was like “That's a nice PC business you have there; would be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
Yes, but not only the pure SDK generation. The vision has always been to develop a platform that manages the end-to-end release process. In the case of Anthropic and other enterprise customers we also worked closely with their teams on their API and SDKs design, such as the development of the various streaming helpers
The OpenAPI autogenerated clients kinda suck though.
My preferred approach for doing this is to have a hand-rolled SDK generator that reads the request, response and error models out of the microservice project and emits the same in each language targeted by the SDK, along with a minimal stub that calls the API.
You then spend 15 minutes at most, customizing the stub if needed, if you need custom behaviours like streaming.
Not talking about the generated clients, I'm talking about the spec itself. If the majority of API services don't even have an OpenAPI spec, they can't use tools like Stainless even if they wanted to. A lot is being left on the table by not working on that first issue: companies don't have an OpenAPI spec. Been on my mind to explore that issue, because I run one of those API services that don't have an OpenAPI spec, but I have other priorities pulling my attention away from that. I just wish it was all handled.
I generally recommend FastAPI, their OpenAPI generation isn’t always perfect if you have very polymorphic endpoints but it is really good compared to other tools I experienced. And is just a neat library that has been battle tested
Good for them. We built similar tooling at that time, but backed by our own APIs. It's something that has a lot of value, that standardisation needs to exist, but it also makes a lot of sense to fold the team into a company like Anthropic that is so developer centric. Good luck to the team there.
Open source software isn't meaningfully insulated from this. Anthropic purchased Bun's maintainers as well and are effectively killing it, using it as a sacrifice to their AGI hype marketing. Could people fork it, technically yeah. Will anybody? Probably not, the original vision of Bun will probably go unmaintained while the main repo is destroyed with an AI Rust rewrite with 1m loc that no human ever read. If you were using Bun in your stack you're almost certainly going to be forced to switch to an alternative .
For what it’s worth Stainless codegen output has always been owned by customers. The SDKs won’t disappear, and the team did spend quite a lot of time to make it possible to transition to self-service. I don’t see how that could be used against you
> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.
For better or worse, it's an acquihire.
"Hundreds of companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers—the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors that let developers and agents use an API."
not anymore lol
That is WILD to put those statements together in the same article.
They didn’t. The first is from the Stainless blog post, the second is from Anthropic’s.
What's WILD is people ending up relying on these essentially startup-slops that just serves to give you future technical debt once you have to eventually moved away because they got acquired by $INSERT_BAD_GUY_OF_THE_MONTH
FYI the above quote is (sadly) real and is from Stainless's blog post: https://www.stainless.com/blog/stainless-is-joining-anthropi...
A Stainless steal? ;)
Anthropic is getting extremely petty and especially against oai
- ad in superbowl about how they are the good guys.
- dow public PR stunt (they are the ones to give Palantir their model access).
- sues openclaw.
- threatens every use of cc in oss community.
- prevents other companies using claude saying they cant use when they compete.
- never released a single open weight model.
- Dario told OAI is Yolo'ing in compute and they are now doing the same.
- gas lighting developers and then after weeks acknowledging they fiddled with reasoning juice.
- fear mongoring on mythos and then geting compute later and acknowledging publicly once they realized its not significantly better than gpt 5.5 cyber.
- signs a deal with Elon!
- now this!
Where did they acknowledge publicly mythos was fear mongered? Grok returned no evidence.
Maybe you should ask Grok to explain what GP said
Oai deserves everything bad that happens to them.
Why? They started the whole chatbot paradigm. They took the leap and are very generous with free tiers.
I know people are upset about the non-profit thing but the fact is that was pretty much the only way forward if they wanted to have LLMs have the impact that they are having today. It's very much a question if they'll ever turn a profit. But overall I'm grateful OpenAI had the vision to get this ball rolling when companies like Google have been sitting on this for nearly a decade and were too afraid to invest a tiny portion of their billions to bring this to fruition because they were afraid of either cannibalization of their search business or offending a vocal minority of internet people.
Maybe you're right about the rest, but about the topic, how does "this!" equal to Anthopic being petty against OpenAI? Is OpenAI using Stainless a lot already, or is it something else? Your comment seems to be missing how the first and last line are related. FWIW, I don't think anyone involved here is "the good guys".
How is this acquisition relevant to OpenAI or anything else you said?
Yeah it's crazy how they're burning developer goodwill. I've personally cancelled and resent them for not being able to delete my claude code session (that button was misteriously the only one in the UI to throw an error, I tried every day for two weeks).
You know that’s probably just a Db flag right? They will persist your data unless it’s zdr
It should be noted that this user is basically an OAI shill account. You can look through their history to see this quite clearly.
Anecdata, but I have a friend at OAI who claims that on both twitter and HN there is mild coordination of OAI employees to signal boost pro-OAI and anti-competitor messaging.
Let's talk specifics. Codex limits are very generous and developers care greatly about access to affordable compute.
Congrats to the team at Stainless, it's a great team to be joining over at Anthropic.
We were an ealy adopter of their Node SDK generator at Mux (and latterly their Typescript and other generators), and the product worked great, and I'm sad to see it be shut down.
At the same time, it's easy to understand why this is a complciated product/market to be in at the moment - it's very tempting and easy to vibe code SDKs from a OpenAPI spec files right now. I would think a lot of teams will just go in that direction (for better or worse), using the same toolchain that the product developers are using today for the product, for effectively no extra cost.
As a Stainless customer, this is frustrating!
I get that most of our new customers will use AI to generate client libs. But our existing customer base depends on our Stainless generated client libs. These OpenAPI schema > client lib providers had a bit of lockin since the client libs are all slightly different.
Migration's unfortunately not as easy as just switching to Speakeasy or Openapi generator w/o breaking existing customers.
Some clarity about existing users/SDKs would go a long way. Otherwise this reads like "we just bought OpenAI's front door and we're EOLing it. Hopefully no one was planning to use it in the future". Petty and pointless.
Via https://www.stainless.com/blog/stainless-is-joining-anthropi... that's exactly what seems to have happened:
> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.
> If you’re a Stainless customer, visit app.stainless.com/transition for help transitioning from Stainless-managed products to other options. As always, you own the SDKs you’ve generated to date, and have full rights to modify and extend them however you wish.
If you have an account you can go to https://app.stainless.com/transition. The team spent a good amount of time working on a way for customers to switch to self-service
I don't have an account but my colleauges do as my company uses the platform.
By self-service, do you mean that the SDK generators are now source-available so they can be run by end users locally?
Yes, that’s right.
I'm viewing this as a user of non-Ant Stainless SDKs. I don't have an account or relationship with you guys, and thanks to your (excellent!) product, the surfaces I contact don't have a direct dependence on your services. But that surface is intimately informed by the nuances of your product! It'd be nice to allay (or confirm) people's fears about how this might impact your other prominent users!
Good point. FWIW if anyone reading this is a stainless user and is concerned about their situation you can reach out to transition@stainless.com. I check with the team if they can update the article with a mention
I feel like we are seeing agentic coding tools morph into walled gardens with these acquisitions. Anthropic has restricted claude code usage while OpenAI has sort of let Codex fill the void. I am curious to see how this continues to evolve.
I think that's the normal path for new markets as they consolidate...
I don’t really see where the “walled garden” complaint is coming from. Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through trillions of tokens on their flat-rate subscription plan, but that’s a billing detail, and one that I honestly don’t share the outrage about. The technology part of CC is still totally open: skills, MCP, etc. are all open informal standards and there hasn’t been any movement to lock that down.
Claude subscription is restricted to Claude Code harness
Really walled garden is the only direction that makes sense--models will slowly become commodities
No, Anthropic spends a lot of effort to keep you from churning through those tokens with any binary other than their own.
Allowing users to take advantage of their monthly/weekly/daily token limits with the software of their choosing is a perfectly valid expectation.
Restricting it to their own underperforming, buggy TUI client is textbook walled garden.
This is the whole point and the reason for the lofty valuations. Get everyone to shift their work to be dependent on these tooling, to the point they can't imagine working in any other way, and then raise prices. Tale as old as enterprise software.
Actually that wasn’t the plan, no
The moment a group accepts VC money, this becomes the plan
I was at stainless since the very beginning, I can tell you it wasn’t the plan
Yeah, but they now have new owner who might be having different plan.
The plan can change with the right amount of money. Just ask OpenAI.
the plan isn't really up to the recipient of VC money lol
With respect, you were manipulated (either by founders or by investors). Startups leverage employees' pro-social leanings to make them feel good about a fundamentally anti-social enterprise.
But I think that doesn't matter.
If you intend to sell it to the highest bidder eventually then what difference does it make what was your plan?
If a business had real values then they would never sell out (see lichess).
Why wouldn't getting more customers the plan? Anthropic doesn't acquire companies to have a lower market share. There is clearly a consolidation and a rush to get as much of the developer market as possible.
Exactly. The goal of any VC by definition is to return a positive return on investment. I guess you might have a handful of exceptions, funds that are environmentally conscious, but profit remains paramount.
You forgot this: "trust me bro".
Tale as old as the word "startup" even. Uber/Lyft did it with taxis. DoorDash did it with food delivery. You run at a loss for years while destroying your legacy competition by just outlasting them, then once you have cornered the market you squeeze.
I understand the cynism but it’s not the case here. Stainless isn't a case of blitzscaling or running a loss for years to destroy the competition. The motto of the company is polished and robust and we invested a lot into generating what we think are the highest quality SDKs available. We could have shipped things way, way faster if the focus on design and quality wasn’t such an essential part of the development process
I'm reading "enshitification", and it describes this cycle of first losing money but acquiring customers, then switching focus to catering to businesses, then to themselves and at that point the tool is not what it was supposedly intended to be.
This is the same startup culture. The only innovation here is finding new way to swindle customers and businesses out of money.
and this is why i use pi.dev and hotswap models and have no reliance on a single provider
That was always going to be the end point.
The amount of money thrown at it means at some point the words Return on Investment were going to appear.
It’s the classic loss leader applied to trillion dollar (across the market) capital investments.
Frontier AI labs is pivoting to something that can justified their IPO. just like OpenAI shut down other services and pivot more into coding. They want to show profitability before their mega IPO.
I use claude code and pi.dev side by side most days and i'm mostly choosing pi for most work in last couple of weeks.
True. But this sounds: "I feel like Mondays are coming after Sundays...".
Claude is just a tool. My team members are each free to choose the text editor or IDE that they are happiest with. In the near future, I hope to be able to say the same for coding agents. I really like Claude, but I don't track Claude resources in our repos. If something better comes along, I'm betting it will be perfectly happy to parse the markdown of my existing memory files, and nothing in the repo itself will force anyone else to know that I switched.
It kind of blows my mind that the majority of Claude users have just accepted that CLAUDE.md is a tracked file that the whole team has to standardize on and share. Coding agents are the ultimate API. They conform to however you prefer to interact. Is anyone really expecting to enforce standard operating procedures with this non-deterministic black box of magic?
Stainless blog post: https://www.stainless.com/blog/stainless-is-joining-anthropi...
I can't find the word "journey" — I'm disappointed.
<joke>“Journey” was probably removed as a non-load-bearing buzzword during the acquisition due diligence.</joke>
Well nowadays also there are no "force for good", "joining forces", "democratization" and so on. Times have truly changed.
Just want to take this moment to say thank you to all the customers I had the opportunity to interact with during my time at Stainless as I expect lots of them are likely to be active in this thread. It has been an honor to work with you all and none of what happened over the past 4 years would have been possible without your trust and support
You guys should be proud - it was a great service!
stainless is a great piece of software. it was a really good risk to try to make a business out of openapi generators' maintainers not having enough time to fix bugs. everybody benefits. it sounds like nothing but similar ideas - like uv - save me time every day and turn me into an evangelist.
Have you considered open sourcing the SDK generator as part of the shutdown of stainless services?
Does anyone have a good guess as to the strategic reasoning behind this?
I know that common reasons for acquisitions are IP, talent, or reducing competition.
It seems like IP can't be the reason here. How is this strategically advantageous to Anthropic?
I had never heard of Stainless, but it is deeply concerning that Anthropic are able to use monopoly money to kill software at their whim. First Bun, and now this. It's one thing for a corporation to do it with their own money, because at some point the board will ask them why they're wasting money. But Anthropic isn't even profitable. They're doing this with billions of dollars of borrowed money. Same thing with OpenAI committing to purchasing an unholy amount of RAM supply and directly causing the 5x price jump, with money they don't have.
I don't understand how investors continue to fund this nonsense. Anthropic wasting money on this should be an overwhelmingly strong signal that the AGI hype is blatant fraud and that software engineers are clearly not being replaced by Anthropic's software if they have to buy more engineers for some tertiary, fifth-order concern so far removed from their main line of business. Yet they just keep getting more and more money dumped on them.
It's the developers of Carmageddon.
Stainless and Stainless Games seem to be 2 unrelated companies.
OpenAI uses stainless for at least some of their SDKs.
Third sentence in the article:
> Founded in 2022, Stainless has powered the generation of every official Anthropic SDK since the earliest days of our API.
edit: bah. no more HN before coffee.
OpenAI is not Anthropic, the original comment is valid.
Anthropic have bought out a tool their competitor used too, they even have an OpenAI case study still on the Stainless website.
> Anthropic
GP:
> OpenAI
??
I guess they'll be able to vibecode a replacement pretty quickly
I hope they make it open source!
from the very beginning. i remember going through their code and seeing stainless all over the comments. great marketing.
I worked with Alex (founder of stainless) at Stripe and he's awesome. Happy for him and well deserved. Congrats Alex! :)
I met him via HN, and somehow got the opportunity to work closely with him on Stainless since the very early days, I can confirm he is awesome! He did such a fantastic work building the team and developing a very unique culture of excellence and kindness
Utterly shameless plug, but recently at WorkOS I open sourced our OpenAPI spec to SDK pipeline: https://workos.com/blog/handwritten-sdks-are-dead
We evaluated Stainless & Fern for our 8+ languages but ultimately I couldn’t justify the cost nor ceding control to another organization for something as important as platform DX.
We evaluated Stainless, Fern [1], and a few others for Docs & SDKs (soon, CLI) and ended up choosing Fern. Definitely glad we did after today's news. Hadn't seen WorkOS's work here though - thanks for sharing.
[1] https://buildwithfern.com/
Interestingly, Anthropic uses Mintlify for their docs. Not Stainless. Obviously, the focus is on SDK generation, but still strange.
Anthropic technically use the Stainless docs platform for their docs, in that it’s all rendered by Stainless components. They just don’t use the full suite of Stainless tools for docs. The ability to use as little or as much as you like was a great feature of the Stainless docs product
Wow
if u can't replace the tools, then acquire the tool makers & shut down the tools.
Hmm. I thought we didn't need libraries or tooling anymore and "AI" could just create everything we needed? I've even been assured that we don't even need programming languages anymore, the LLMs can just write whatever we need in assembly.
Hmm.
Wait Stainless is not a Rust company???
Worry not, it's just Monday.
How could it possibly be?
Hopefully Stainless' products will remain available to customers in some form, rather than having them hogged for internal use. Give it time, not all is lost.
o qWA#S
Are you okay?
I'm really disappointed that such a great service is getting taken off the market. Happy for their team, but sad for the ecosystem.
This has to be somewhat anti-competitive. Why else sunset the SDK generator service but to hurt any other company (OpenAI, etc) who relies on these for their SDKs?
Surely part of the value is the talent, the rest comes from removing a tool like this from the open market? I wonder how much of each went into the final valuation.
Oh definitely - the talent at Stainless is incredible. Not trying to take away from that at all.
> This has to be somewhat anti-competitive.
I don’t think so. They were available to anyone with the money and Anthropic acted first.
I doubt attempting to hurt OpenAI was the primary reason for the acquisition.
Maybe it’s different now; Bill Gates “wanting to cutoff Netscape’s air supply” and threatening to cancel the Windows license of PC manufacturers who shipped Netscape’s browser on their PCs… now that’s anticompetitive. They had 95% market share.
Bill was like “That's a nice PC business you have there; would be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
Anthropic, it would be nice to actually put a link to the website.
the service is shutting down, there is no point to promoting it anymore
Are they buying these for the tech, the people or to prevent supply chain hacks?
This makes sense, since their business model is built on Steeling everyone's data and feeding it to a monster.
Whats the connection that got them the early in with anthropic?
A useful product that developers who want some easy SDKs across a bunch of languages use?
Yes, but not only the pure SDK generation. The vision has always been to develop a platform that manages the end-to-end release process. In the case of Anthropic and other enterprise customers we also worked closely with their teams on their API and SDKs design, such as the development of the various streaming helpers
I'm guessing it'll be something around spinning up MCPs easily as an evolution of their product. Just right place, right time
Brian Krausz
congrats stainless team!
Now if only we had a service that could generate OpenAPI specs automatically...
The OpenAPI autogenerated clients kinda suck though.
My preferred approach for doing this is to have a hand-rolled SDK generator that reads the request, response and error models out of the microservice project and emits the same in each language targeted by the SDK, along with a minimal stub that calls the API.
You then spend 15 minutes at most, customizing the stub if needed, if you need custom behaviours like streaming.
Not talking about the generated clients, I'm talking about the spec itself. If the majority of API services don't even have an OpenAPI spec, they can't use tools like Stainless even if they wanted to. A lot is being left on the table by not working on that first issue: companies don't have an OpenAPI spec. Been on my mind to explore that issue, because I run one of those API services that don't have an OpenAPI spec, but I have other priorities pulling my attention away from that. I just wish it was all handled.
I generally recommend FastAPI, their OpenAPI generation isn’t always perfect if you have very polymorphic endpoints but it is really good compared to other tools I experienced. And is just a neat library that has been battle tested
Good for them. We built similar tooling at that time, but backed by our own APIs. It's something that has a lot of value, that standardisation needs to exist, but it also makes a lot of sense to fold the team into a company like Anthropic that is so developer centric. Good luck to the team there.
You can't rely on commercial offerings anymore. They vanish with increasing frequency.
Yet another reason to use open source.
Open source software isn't meaningfully insulated from this. Anthropic purchased Bun's maintainers as well and are effectively killing it, using it as a sacrifice to their AGI hype marketing. Could people fork it, technically yeah. Will anybody? Probably not, the original vision of Bun will probably go unmaintained while the main repo is destroyed with an AI Rust rewrite with 1m loc that no human ever read. If you were using Bun in your stack you're almost certainly going to be forced to switch to an alternative .
I am going to assume that anything Anthropic acquires is going to be eventually used against you.
For what it’s worth Stainless codegen output has always been owned by customers. The SDKs won’t disappear, and the team did spend quite a lot of time to make it possible to transition to self-service. I don’t see how that could be used against you
looks like just an excuse to spend capital
This feels like the Apple playbook, but for software tooling--they are becoming vertically integrated.