OpenAI to acquire Pierre, maker of Code Storage and the Diffs and Trees libraries in the Codex app

OpenAI announced on November 4 that it will acquire Pierre Computer Company, the startup behind the Git hosting service Code Storage and the open-source Trees and Diffs libraries. Financial terms weren't disclosed, and the deal still needs regulatory approval. Until it closes, the two companies stay independent.

Codex users have already seen Pierre's work. According to OpenAI, Trees and Diffs are what the Codex app uses to browse a project's files and to show what changed in a review. Pierre also recently released Highlights, a syntax highlighter that updates as a developer types or an agent streams code. Pierre announced the deal on X:

What Code Storage is

Code Storage is the less visible and probably more important part of the deal. It is Git hosting meant for machines rather than people: an API that lets an app create repositories on demand, stream files and grep code, plus standard clone, push and fetch endpoints that a customer can expose under its own domain. Pierre's own page lists no limits on the number of repositories or on request rates, says it has seen more than 500 Git requests per second on a single repository, and allows repositories up to 32TB. Pricing is usage-based, with "hot" storage at $0.005 per GB-hour and code untouched for more than seven days moved to cheaper cold storage.

That is the same problem OpenAI described earlier this week when it revealed Pando, its in-house source-control backend built because agents were pushing more code than its Git setup could handle. OpenAI's announcement ties the two together and says it wants to cover everything "from the first branch an agent creates to that magic moment when code is deployed to the world."

What happens to existing users

OpenAI makes two commitments. Pierre's open-source projects will stay open source, and OpenAI says it will keep contributing to them. Code Storage customers "can continue using Code Storage after the acquisition closes while we work to bring its features and functionality into Codex."

The second sentence leaves a lot open. It doesn't say how long Code Storage will remain a standalone service, or whether it will stay available to companies that build their own coding agents and compete with Codex. For those customers, the code behind their products would now be stored on infrastructure owned by a competitor.

Axios, which broke the news, frames the deal as a move against GitHub, owned by Microsoft, which in turn owns nearly a quarter of OpenAI. In the same piece it lists Cursor's Origin and a new product from former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke as other recent challengers. For OpenAI it is a step from writing code toward owning where that code is stored, reviewed and shipped.

Thibault Sottiaux, who leads Codex at OpenAI, welcomed the team on X: