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#stainless#anthropic#openai#claude#software#company#don#why#product#engineers
Discussion (380 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Stainless seems to do that boring but very important work of turning API specs into clean SDKs and tools.
This makes sense since they may want the team inside if they are serious about making Claude agents actually useful in real products. Good move I think.
What you should be paying attention to: Stainless is shutting down, 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. But, Stainless was successful. Be the next Stainless. The idea is already validated, these AI companies have already done this to a handful of companies and they're going to keep doing it.
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".
All that is to say, the incredibly "boring" infrastructural work of making "boring" APIs like Hubspot's more usefully accessible is absolutely the kind of thing I'm excited to do at Anthropic :)
(It also happens to be what got us all excited to work at stainless in the first place, but of course, we understand it's not for everyone!)
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 everything and gives you a summary via PR comments where you can directly see diagnostic feedback, see the exact diff for each SDKs, provide the commit message for your end users. Once your PR is merged we push changes to all your SDK/docs repos and prepare a release PR ready for your team to review and merge. You merge it, everything gets released to your end users.
Now what we build goes way further than that: we have a web platform where you can live edit your Stainless config file and preview your SDKs, a fairly complex diagnostic system, a really cool system that allows you to add your own custom code on top of any generated SDK directly via git — the whole repo is something you can modify to your wishes, we keep track of your custom changes and always reapply on top of the latest codegen output. And a lot of other features (I’m biased because I designed and implemented the public version but I personally really like our spec transforms, they let you apply changes to your spec file downstream, just by modifying your stainless config file).
Does that make sense?
edit: they sure do
They might be a big part of the reason why claude code can edit notion docs for you pretty easily
Why aren’t they dogfooding their own products to replace such roles?
And seeing how people use it: good programmers review output and iterate to get better output. But bad programmers simply trust the output is good: they have no ability to review it themselves and often don't try.
For example, a recent story about the openclaw creator using $1.3M of tokens/month. And let's assume he's getting paid $5M/yr which is probably a vast under estimate.
Is he providing value that a traditional software development org with normal developers couldn't provide for $20M/yr?
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 having to give them huge raises all the time or they leave, is still enough. That's the whole point of layoffs and offshoring anyway.
Dario Amodei
Possibly not if they are paying the full cost of inference
Oh, they do. That's why they buy actual engineers to fix the vibe-coded slop they produce en masse: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
Unfortunately those engineers slowly succumb to the same slopcoding vibes, so they go and buy a bunch of new engineers.
There are plenty of other reasons to acqui-hire, but it is not the only or even the most effective way to hire the strongest engineers
Successful founder is deeply filtering for very uncommon skills. Effectiveness, grit, decision making, independence, technical plus sales ability.
University is a shit filter in comparison.
The current word is "taste" but even that is way too narrow. Intelligence is close, although usually too academic (hence the VC uni dropout theme).
The other big problem with a independent capable people is that they rarely apply for jobs.
It also only self selects for those who want to work in stressful/long working day environments, rather than those who value stability.
This tests for very different skills than being an exceptional programmer.
The reason why I avoided this term is that in Germany, there exists a quite strict of whatx an engineer (Ingenieur) is, which is defined in the laws of many federal states (Ingenieurgesetz [engineering law]). "Ingenieur" (engineer) is a protected professional title:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2... (*)
Falsely claiming that you are an Ingenieur when you aren't (by the definition in the Ingenieurgesetz) is a punishable crime in Germany:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Missbrauch_von_Ti...
There exist some boundary cases under which as a software developer you can call yourself an "Ingenieur", but you have to be insanely careful about whether you actually satisfy the legal criteria (see (*)) - in most cases you don't and you are thus a criminal if you do.
I think you're overestimating the rationality of this game.
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 after the acquisition, especially if they get put on a project they don't care about.
What's the difference between a software developer and a software engineer?
The honest answer is that in most day-to-day contexts, the distinction is more about company culture and title preference than actual job duties. A "software developer" at one company might do more rigorous engineering work than a "software engineer" at another.
All that's moot though if your fundamental premise is wrong. Why does Anthropic need "the world's best software engineers" to build on top of the models? Compentent developers can build APIs - sorry - MCP servers and other integration plumbing.
Normally I would say those Engineers would leave eventually, because there are not enough technical challenges and/or the pace is slower. But I guess when you pay much above market rate that doesn't really matter.
I see a lot of AI openings though.
For what, to write regex to check for number of "fucks" given in prompts, or to write 20k LoC files with 20 levels of nesting ? As we saw in that Claude code leak recently.
If Anthropic can rummage through your data and workflows to deem you worthy of their grace, then that is seriously wrong.
For better or worse, it's an acquihire.
not anymore lol
I can't even imagine the money wasted on turn-and-burns in the F1000 alone. The US needs a wake up call with respect to consumer / buyer protections. The life of the snake oil salesman is plentiful these days, and you have a lot of AI-psychotic executives who can't seem to get enough.
They mostly have. By mostly refraining from dealing with startups and companies they deem either “too young” or "too small" to be reliable partners. And, when they do, imposing long sales cycles.
And thus the enterprise well is poisoned for most startups.
But buyers try to insert this language into partner/ biz dev contracts all the time.
Much less common for sales.
Hadn't heard of Stainless before today. Did it have enterprise customers?
They can also keep the product running behind the scenes for a select few and just shut down the public facing part
> 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.
By self-service, do you mean that the SDK generators are now source-available so they can be run by end users locally?
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.
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.
This is the same startup culture. The only innovation here is finding new way to swindle customers and businesses out of money.
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?
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.
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.
Because that's what the API is for.
This isn't hard to understand. The cost you pay for subsidized tokens is lock-in. If you don't want lock-in, there's the API.
This isn't egregious or wrong or anything. It's exactly what you'd expect out of a heavily subsidized product option.
Really walled garden is the only direction that makes sense--models will slowly become commodities
If you want to know more details regarding stlc you can reach out to transition@stainless.com
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.
Though I understand the frustration, sorry for this. If you end up looking for a competitor I would recommend fern over speakeasy, their offering is way better in my opinion (I’ve personally always seen fern as Stainless only real competition, I have lots of respect for what they’ve built)
*load-bearing* just started popping up like crazy with opus 4.7.
Although Claude will never hold a candle to Codex’s jargon, at least in my experience.
https://typespec.io/
(disclaimer: founder of Stainless and also friends with creator of TypeSpec)
Congrats to them both, and I'm not at all surprised! Great acquihires.
A: Writing docs at an SF AI company for $500k TC.
B: Designing, maintaining, and implementing all features for a platform in the IoT sector in Spain — alone — for €40,000.
A: Spain? I just bought a villa near the beach, close to Alicante. Do you know it?
B: Yes..
While the EU does a good job optimizing life for the median person, it is a nightmare for the exceptional. It should find a way to fix this or the brain drain will continue.
And to be frank, that's not only Europe.
The challenge with Europe is not talent, but funding - and that is related to those things you wrote, namely how companies are taxed in some European countries.
- 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!
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.
well that ones obviously patently false
It sure does, readers should be informed of who says what. The speaker and their history is part of full communication, not just the words.
Naive credentialism is obviously bad, but reputation does matter.
This happens for every single company that has twitter/HN/reddit users from the same company on the same platforms, I think it's also short of impossible to stop. I don't think I haven't worked in a single company in the last decade where that hasn't happened, in a range of scales.
If you weren't already, which you should have been really, you should be suspicious about anything you come across on the internet :)
So at least anecdotally I really don’t think it’s fair to portray this as OAI doing some sort of social media psyop as if others aren’t engaged in similar behavior.
It’s also very possible that this user just has opinions and tends to think OAI is more developer friendly / that Anthropic is hostile to developers (which is common sentiment I’ve seen from many real people who are definitely not paid OAI shills or something)
HN did a massive 180 in the last month or two, and nearly every post or comment related to Anthropic is just a hate post.
The amount of anger against Anthropic on HN doesn't reflect anything I see in reality (and I work at a pretty big FAANG with Codex and Claude Code, both are great) so I do suspect that OAI is doing some guerrilla marketing here, while Anthropic isn't really marketing or doing PR at all.
After seeing the whole internet being enshittified I'm still shocked people don't see through these very transparent tactics that every tech company has employed since 2012 or so.
[0]: https://github.com/openai/openai-python
[1]: https://github.com/openai/openai-node
[0]: https://github.com/openai/openai-python
[1]: https://github.com/openai/openai-node
Starting a race to the bottom where every AI company agrees to "all lawful use" such as mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, probably increasing p(doom) by some amount.
All to stick it to Anthropic. That's not petty to you?
To me it is an order of magnitude bigger than all of the stuff you've described. I suspect some people here just work for OAI.
I was wondering what the Dow jones stock index thing was...
It took me a minute, but I am guessing this means department of war? It feels strange to see terminology evolve like this over my lifetime.
At first I thought this might've been a 'freedom fries' thing, but I guess it's pretty official now.
Expect grok to improve dramatically as Musk reverse-engineers the Anthropic services running on his hardware.
If you or anyone had any evidence to support GP’s claim I’d love a reference to it.
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.
2. non profit then for profit
3. least open ai lab there. when is the last time you read something interesting from them
4. collaboration with the military after anthropic backed out
5. scam altman
Assuming they bet on Claude getting much better at coding over time, couldn't they themselves cover their own needs with technology that they built themselves?
Is some sort of autonomy over technology they use somehow the goal here?
“We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.”
We are offering a 50% off for the first year subscription price at www.apimatic.io for companies impacted by this.
If you're looking for a solid long term SDK and docs partner, APIMatic is the OG CodeGen serving companies like PayPal, Maxio and PayQuicker for the past 10 years.
Reach out to mehdi@apimatic.io and I'll help you migrate.
PS: sorry for the shameless plug but sdks and APIs are my life and blood :-)
I hope they make it open source!
> 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.
Anthropic have bought out a tool their competitor used too, they even have an OpenAI case study still on the Stainless website.
GP:
> OpenAI
??
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 almost sounds like you want Lina Khan back :-D
Fun fact: Jarred has been promising a blog post about the Rust rewrite, but has missed his target dates for publishing it. In other words, that blog post has now taken longer to write than generating and merging 1m loc. Go figure :)
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?
Was stainless doing great? Was stainless doing not great? Did they just want to hire some extra skilled engineers? Did they hire them so OpenAI's SDKs are gonna have a setback?
Mmmh
This. Probably to work on Anthropic's SDKs and tooling.
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.
[1] https://buildwithfern.com/
Hmm.
Seems like developer tools/tooling are a hot commodity to the current big AI companies?
(I worked on the Stainless Docs product at Stainless and implemented support for Anthropic’s embedding use case)
But Fern is a (great) Stainless competitor that went the open source way, so that could have been an option, at least for parts of it: https://buildwithfern.com/.
There is more context but I don’t think it’s my story to tell
But the truth is that this is actually not entirely impossible. The AI world is going crazier than this.
It had never occurred to me to go like, "I'm going to make an open source product for LLM". How is something like built from scratch from an idea? And what is the idea?
For example, it is fairly straight foreword to build a dash board of something with React as front end + backend API. This will be a typical web app.
But stainless is something different, from my limited knowledge in this space, its appears to be SDK, something like OpenAI SDK that reduces boilerplate code to interact with LLM providers by providing list of tools (MCP), temperature, context memory and bunch of other parameters...
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?
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.”
aside from that, this is literally just an openapi to sdk generator, not like openai can't just generate one
Convince your boss to buy my product. I sell it for 10 million dollars only. Your boss will be very happy. Make no mistakes please.
It's funny that Anthropic needs to spend millions acquiring a dev doc platform, can't they just vibe code something up with Mythos a few junior devs at Anthropic?
We have Dario claiming SWE development is obsolete and both OpenAI and Anthropic and big tech bros like Musk are still spending millions like this..
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.
Yet another reason to use open source.