OpenAI Group PBC today announced plans to acquire Pierre Computer Company Inc., a low-profile developer tooling startup.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Observers pegged it as a shot at Microsoft Corp.’s open-source software repository GitHub for the age of artificial intelligence agents.

Pierre operates a cloud service that AI agents can use to store the code they generate. It can also store related files such as software licenses and interface design elements. According to Pierre, the service provides significantly better performance than competing technologies. It helped one customer, AI startup Lovable Inc., cut code retrieval latency by about 70%.

Pierre also develops a collection of popular open-source libraries. Two of those libraries, Trees and Diffs, underpin the interface of OpenAI’s Codex programming tool.

Large software projects contain upwards of hundreds of code files that are organized in dozens of folders. Many programming tools include a sidebar specifically designed to help developers navigate those folders. Trees, the first Pierre-developed library used by Codex, marks it easier to implement such sidebars.

Trees can equip a folder navigation sidebar with a search feature and drag-and-drop controls for moving subfolders. Additionally, it flags code files that have been recently added or updated. Developers review those files first when performing tasks such as troubleshooting an outage.

Diffs, the other Pierre library that OpenAI has integrated into Codex, is also designed to power programming tool interfaces. In particular, it can be used to implement the main interface that shows the code the user is currently editing.

When a code file is updated, Diffs points out the specific lines of code that changed to spare developers the hassle of manually finding them. It can show changes in a separate interface section or in-line.

OpenAI will continue to offer Trees and Diffs under an open-source license after the acquisition closes. Additionally, it plans to integrate the features of Pierre’s paid code hosting service into Codex. In the longer term, the Pierre team will help OpenAI “ship new products and platforms.”

The effort will place an emphasis on building software that can optimize coding agents. In particular, OpenAI hopes to streamline agent workflows that involve Git. That’s an open-source tool developers use to manage code files. Trees, Diffs and Pierre’s paid storage service all provide built-in support for Git.

OpenAI makes extensive use of the tool internally. On Monday, the company revealed that it has built a software engine called Pando to boost the performance of its internal Git environment. The engine reduces the amount of time it takes OpenAI engineers’ coding agents to create and read code files. 

Image: OpenAI