[rattray]

> ... 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".

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!)

[riddlemethat]

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

[JJOKOCHAA]

Not all boring businesses build wealth

[fnord77]

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

[dgellow]

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 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?

[thunspa]

This is very cool, congratulations!

[dgellow]

Thank you!

[firemelt]

so its like if I have something like twillio, i make openapi specs give it to u guys, and u guys generate the sdk for me for my clients to use?

[JJOKOCHAA]

Do you work at stainless?

[john_strinlai]

clicking on their profile will answer your question.

[trueno]

do they have one of those websites that looks like all of those websites

edit: they sure do

[dgellow]

https://www.stainless.com/products/sdks/

I don’t understand your point, things look fairly clear to me, assuming you’re familiar with that part of the industry. We didn’t hide behind buzzwords and show you the end product right away

[troupo]

Yes, you do hide behind buzzwords. Because your actual front page is this: https://www.stainless.com/ not the sdk subpage

--- start quote ---

Best-in-class interfaces for developers and agents

Great agent experience is built on great developer experience. Stainless helps you deliver both, with robust and idiomatic SDKs, documentation that keeps up with your API, and state-of-the-art MCP servers, all derived from your OpenAPI spec.

--- end quote ---

There would be no questions asked if you had the SDK's copy on your front page. Or whatever you wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48191376

[dgellow]

I see, that’s fair. FWIW the SDK page was the homepage until the acquisition announcement

[samrus]

It turned API specs into ssoftware devolopment kits and model context servers. Basically connecting existing tools to AI agents so they can actually use them.

They might be a big part of the reason why claude code can edit notion docs for you pretty easily

[galsapir]

I think the question he tried to raise was "is this needed? Aren't today's / tomorrow's models well-enough equipped to deal with just OPEN API?" (idk, just if I understand the question)

[TylerH]

Nothing (AI slop to create an unnecessary product, funded by A16Z).

[dgellow]

To be clear, because that has incorrectly been reported since at least 2024, none of the codegen at stainless has ever been AI based.

Alex vision has always been to generate code other engineers would love reading. It’s something I know the team is very proud of and what attracted most of us. We all joined because we wanted to raise the quality of developer experience across the board and I believe that we did it successfully

[123malware321]

well you might say that, but they got bought, so in making nothing which no one needed they did find their perfect match, anthropic, who also builds nothing and sells hot air :D.

We might have our opinions on AI and slop, but in the end of the day this was a business play and it worked out for the players. Separate that from the actual product and u can respect they did really well for themselves.

[dgellow]

In this case we actually were selling something specific. Customers got SDKs/MCP servers/docs websites + the whole release pipeline automation out of the deal. I don’t see where the claims of hot air come from. The SDKs we produce are used by millions of developers every single day. I mean, we worked really closely with the teams at Cloudflare, Mux, Lithic, Finch, Modern Treasury, Scale, and a lots of others. It’s not like we had just a pitch and only had Anthropic as a close customer.

See https://www.stainless.com/customers/ for an overview

[firef1ie]

This is awesome! I listened to your interview with Dan Shipper a few months back and I was thinking then about how well positioned your company was to be the center point between AI and so many platforms. Congrats!

[garad]

It sucks you succumbed to business practices that hurt your customers. If this were an aquihire, let us enjoy the product open-sourced. But it seems like the goal was to undercut Anthropic competitors, and you sold your soul :(

[dnadler]

He sold his business. That tends to happen quite a bit.

[ryanmcgarvey]

Good for you guys. I'm happy for you.