We're Joining OpenAI

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Nature of the deal / “Joining” vs acquihire

  • Several commenters read “we’re joining OpenAI” as PR-speak for an acquihire rather than a partnership.
  • Some speculate OpenAI mainly wants the team’s skills and integrations, not the product as a long-term standalone offering.
  • Others note this is increasingly a viable path into “hot” companies versus traditional interviewing, especially for well-connected founders.

Impact on Alex users and product longevity

  • Existing users are disappointed that new features stop after Oct 1 and worry how long “we plan to continue serving you” will actually last.
  • Many expect the app to go into maintenance mode, then be shut down within 1–3 years, citing a long history of acquired products quietly dying (“our incredible journey” trope).
  • Given rapid changes in tooling and Xcode updates, some think a frozen coding agent will become quickly obsolete anyway.

Alex vs Claude, Xcode AI, and other coding tools

  • Some ask whether Alex is redundant now that Claude Code and Xcode’s native AI features exist.
  • Defenders emphasize Alex’s deep Xcode/iOS optimization and usefulness on very large projects (hundreds to tens of thousands of files).
  • There’s debate over whether such file counts signal “doing it wrong” vs normal scale for serious or enterprise apps.
  • A few users felt Alex’s own model was weaker than Claude and that reselling/proxying other models at $200/year looked financially fragile.

Why Alex matters to OpenAI

  • Commenters suggest OpenAI is buying:
    • A team with hard-won expertise in Xcode/Apple IDE integration and developer UX.
    • Ready-made scaffolding: context handling, retrieval, apply-changes flows, Git workflows, etc.
  • Some see this as part of OpenAI doubling down on coding agents after other moves in the space.

Platform strategy and competition with tooling startups

  • Multiple comments predict model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) will increasingly:
    • Offer first-party tooling (e.g., Codex) that competes with wrappers like Cursor/Alex.
    • Absorb popular use cases, similar to how mobile OSes sherlocked flashlight/QR apps.
  • This is framed as classic vertical integration and vendor lock-in: once a central LLM subscription works “well enough,” many users won’t pay for extra specialized tools.

Ads, monetization, and the future user experience

  • A major subthread anticipates LLMs moving to ad and affiliate models as compute costs and growth expectations rise.
  • Some believe ads will be woven subtly into responses, eroding trust but not usage—comparing to Google’s ad-heavy search.
  • Others insist they’ll switch to non-ad or local models and argue the low switching cost makes ad-based assistants risky.
  • There’s discussion of hybrid models: subscriptions, contextual/affiliate monetization, and the tension between maximizing revenue vs preserving response integrity.