Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic acquires Stainless

anthropic.com

361–370 of 411 posts

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#361

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.

On the contrary, destroying other people's things is a fundamental part of high-stakes capitalism. If that's what it is, you're describing it as petty and pointless because it's hurting you (or someone like you).

But hurting people can be the intent. If you're selling toys, you can make a business case for going out of your way to smash other people's toys, and that can become the main activity if it's advantageous enough.

'creating new things to make the world a better place' is marketing to a specific audience. There's other audiences who are just as willing to invest in 'will absolutely ruin any rivals', and that's hardly new. Right now it's very much in vogue but could become very unfashionable as people in general react to its inevitable effects.

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re wrong though. Please take a look at https://www.stainless.com/customers/ . For context I was the founding member of our customer eng team, the main drive for Stainless adoption came from engineering teams who didn’t have the time/capacity/expertise to implement high quality SDKs + maintain the whole release pipeline automation across multiple languages. The pitch is „we want you to focus on your domain of expe…

> Which is IMHO very compelling It is indeed, and I totally understand why people want something like that! Shame about the closing of the service though, which will pretty much make everyone turn away from similar solutions in the future if they're provided by a startup, as the rugpull Stainless is about to do will be a bitch to deal with for many. The goal for the customers was to save time, little did they know An…

I see it differently. I don’t think it is fair to describe it as a rug pull, the sdks we generated are owned by customers and aren’t going away. They own the repositories. We also implemented a self-service option just for the transition out from Stainless SaaS.

The most important part in my opinion is that with Stainless we were able to prove that a profitable market for SDK codegen exists and that people do care a lot about the quality of the generated code. New and existing players can take advantage of the segment we contributed developing. We also proved that a whole set of companies are ready to pay to provide an excellent developer experience to their end users.

At the same time the whole ecosystem is being reinvented by AI, it is possible that Stainless as it was doesn’t make sense in a future where everything is agentic, it’s hard to say.

I personally believe there is still a lot of values that can be found in the space Stainless built — and I’m sure Fern and others will continue to grow and develop solutions around OpenAPI

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and their team is joining Anthropic to build, who knows, some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring. Fun fact, I named it "Stainless" after Stainless Steel pipes, likening ourselves to a high-end plumbing supply shop. If you look at the earliest versions of stainlessapi.com on archive.org, you'll see our original motto was "Quality fittings for your REST API".…

In the niches there are riches and boring businesses build wealth. Congrats!

Not all boring businesses build wealth

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even figure out what Stainless does (did)

In short: we take your OpenAPI spec file and generate idiomatic, best in class SDKs in various languages, a highly customizable docs product (for your API and SDKs, with neat specific examples ready to be copy pasted), MCP servers, CLI clients, terraform providers. Going further into it: the expected user experience for your team is that you create a PR in your own API repo, a GitHub action triggers builds for everyt…

Do you work at stainless?

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Yet look at the positions they’re hiring for in marketing, finance etc.: https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?

>Why do they need the best software engineers? I thought their product was supposed to replace such roles. Who claimed that? Their customers will be happy if their product replaces all the junior positions and midwit developers off the payroll. then that's already a huge saving to any company's bottom line. Even if it doesn't directly replace workers, reducing the bargaining power of those spoiled SW devs and not hav…

So you are happy with people losing jobs?

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#367
post #270
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, hence the term software engineer which has programming as just one part of the job.

It isn't a good test for that either. Having a successful business requires a lot of factors that don't really have anything to do with software engineering. Things like luck, connections, access to funding, good marketing, etc. And while have good engineers on the payroll undoubtedly helps, the good engineers aren't necessarily the ones getting a big fallout from the acquisition and may not stick around for long aft…

That is right, a lot goes into having a successful project or team

Re: Anthropic acquires Stainless

#368
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now Uber is profitable what stops a taxi from just competing again, forcing Uber to have to be unprofitable again?

You know very well uber is not doing the transportation industry a good service
Post reply on HN