Keith Horwood, founder of Autocode:

Autocode is shutting down and I am joining OpenAI. As part of my transition the product and services will be shut down at 12:00AM on Friday, April 26th, 2024. Billing cycles will be reset at 12:00AM PT on April 4th, set to expire at 12:00AM on April 26th and prorated accordingly. No new subscriptions can be created after midnight tonight.

[...]

Autocode has been a passion project of mine since I founded the company in 2016. It started with the vision of building a missing piece of internet infrastructure — a “standard library” (stdlib) of APIs for the World Wide Web. My dream – one I pitched to our earliest investors, and well before ChatGPT – was that one day this could act as a machine-readable repository of actions for a future Siri or Google Assistant, a straightforward way to extend future intelligent agents. We started simple; just make it easy to build APIs and connect them together. Over the years market forces shaped this vision into Autocode; a collaborative-coding API development and integration platform. It’s probably best to think of us like Zapier where the code editor and developer-focused APIs are first-class citizens of the product.

Autocode saw incredible growth, especially around chatbots — hundreds of thousands of users, mostly teenagers and young adults, some learning to code for the first time — but we found it difficult to monetize in this category in a way that could continue to grow the business efficiently. The product in its current state has more complexity than I’d like and I’d have a hard time running it as-is while working with OpenAI, which is why I’ve made the difficult decision to shut it down.

That said, I’m personally very excited to bring everything I’ve learned over the last 8 years to OpenAI, where I’ll be joining the API and Platform team. Working with OpenAI represents the opportunity to work more closely towards my initial vision of extending intelligent agents and allows me to collaborate with some of the most talented people in the world.

I've been a fan of Autocode since the early stdlib days, they were one of the early adopters of serverless technologies and making it easier to get into serverless, but this announcement isn't a surprise. I wish Keith and the team the best of luck.