Top all-time · #5882
F
Fern
Company blog · buildwithfern.com/post · on HN as dandevsprogrammingweb
Fern is the company blog at buildwithfern.com, writing about programming and web. Since 2023, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Fern: Beautiful SDKs and Docs for Your API”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
27mentions?
14HN people?
2023–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Fern, a tool that generates SDKs and API docs from OpenAPI, when comparing API tooling such as Stainless, Speakeasy and liblab. The site also hosts a post on rebuilding its marketing site without Figma.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Fern: Beautiful SDKs and Docs for Your API4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-10-30
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-12
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-31
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-10-23
What Hacker News says?
Lots of these have been popping up lately, they all seem really good. This is the first one I've seen with an answer for "I want to customize the output by hand", which is neat. https://buildwithfern.com/ https://liblab.com/ https://www.speakeasyapi.dev/ Between this and fancy API doc generators (Mintlify, etc.), I feel like we're finally getting close to being able to just go from OpenAPI to Stripe-level "polish".
Comment linking /
on “The Stainless SDK Generator”Submitted How 2 Designers ditched Figma (sort of) to rebuild a marketing site as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHow do you guys differ against https://www.speakeasyapi.dev and https://www.buildwithfern.com and https://liblab.com ?
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on “The Stainless SDK Generator”Submitted I'm making our documentation agent-friendly (and how I'm not) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm one of the builders of an open source project (buildwithfern.com) to improve client codegen. One of the learnings I've had is that the quality of OpenAPI specs varies widely (like really widely). We wrote a linter that suggests improvements to your OpenAPI before you run the code generators and that's been really helpful for generating idiomatic clients. You can try Fern for free: https://buildwithfern.com
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on “OpenAPI v4 (aka Moonwalk) Proposal”Submitted Show HN: Generate SDKs with gRPC and REST as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFern | https://buildwithfern.com | Founding Backend Engineer | $160k + equity | On-site NYC | Full-time At Fern, we're creating the modern developer experience platform. We work with developer-focused companies to generate SDKs & API documentation. We're looking for a Founding Backend Engineer with 4+ years of experience to help us scale with our users. You'll join a small team (3 of us) and will be a product owner…
Comment linking /careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2023)”Submitted The AI-assisted solo technical writer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFern (YC W23) | Founding Engineer | New York City | $130k-$160k + 0.5-1.0% equity | Full Time | Open Source | https://buildwithfern.com REST APIs underpin the internet but are still painful to work with. They are often untyped, unstandardized, and out-of-sync across multiple sources of truth. With Fern, we aim to bring great developer experiences to REST APIs. Our stack is Next.js + Vercel, Express (Node.js) + FastA…
Comment linking /careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2023)”Submitted How to generate a TypeScript SDK for your API spec as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI think part of why tRPC shines is because it's tightly coupled to TypeScript (and especially Zod, its schema validation library of choice - many of its features map 1:1 onto TypeScript concepts that don't exist in many other languages), which means it can avoid many of the issues that OpenAPI generators have. I'd also like to see a good TS-first OpenAPI client - Fern [0] is probably the closest I've seen. In genera…
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on “tRPC – Move Fast and Break Nothing. End-to-end typesafe APIs made easy”Submitted The first autogenerated SDK with gRPC and REST as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFor cross-language, I can recommend Fern, which works with OpenAPI http://buildwithfern.com
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on “tRPC – Move Fast and Break Nothing. End-to-end typesafe APIs made easy”Submitted Fern: Beautiful SDKs and Docs for Your API as a story · 1 points
HN discussionGarph is like tRPC but for GraphQL: https://garph.dev For REST APIs there's ts-rest ( https://ts-rest.com ), zodios ( https://www.zodios.org ) and Hono ( https://hono.dev ) If your team uses multiple languages, there's Fern: https://www.buildwithfern.com
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on “tRPC – Move Fast and Break Nothing. End-to-end typesafe APIs made easy”We're two product designers at Fern and we recently rebuilt the buildwithfern.com site in five weeks with no developer help. The three things worth mentioning here from the blog: - Figma has become a very expensive virtual whiteboard. It’s still in our loop, but only as a starting point for ideation and moodboarding. Then we quickly move to claude.ai/design for iteration and Claude Code to build. The code is the sou…
Comment linking /post/building-fern-site
on “How 2 Designers ditched Figma (sort of) to rebuild a marketing site”Fern (YC W23) | Founding Engineer | New York City | $125k-$175k + equity | Full Time | Open Source | https://buildwithfern.com REST APIs underpin the internet but are still painful to work with. They are often untyped, unstandardized, and out-of-sync across multiple sources of truth. With Fern, we aim to bring great developer experiences to REST APIs. Our stack is Next.js + Vercel, Express (Node.js) + FastAPI (Pytho…
Comment linking /careers
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)”Hey, co-founder of Fern https://www.buildwithfern.com here. You're right that four companies are going after SDK and Docs generation. After seeing enterprises like AWS, Stripe, Twilio, Palantir, Dropbox, and many more build codegen for REST APIs in-house, it seems like a no-brainer that they'll be a solution that serves the millions of developers out there working with REST APIs. We're seeing a new category getting…
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on “Show HN: Hacker News API SDKs → Code Generation in Rust”Thank you for your encouraging words and insights! There are indeed popular DSLs and code to openapi solutions out there. Many of which are easy to plug in to the openapi-stack libraries btw! I guess I personally always found it frustrating to try to control the generated OpenAPI output using additional tooling and ended up preferring yaml + a visualisation tool as the api design workflow. (e.g. swagger editor) But…
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on “Show HN: REST Alternative to GraphQL and tRPC”(disclosure: I'm about to build my own version of this kind of thing) Reading the https://www.buildwithfern.com/docs/why-fern page, I wonder why not Smithy? They also have 1:1 IDL:AST. Is it too complex for just HTTP-JSON api? I'm quite inclined to just follow Smithy spec (or subset), they seem to encounter many edge cases e.g. client codegen backward compatibility ( https://smithy.io/2.0/spec/type-refinement-traits…
Comment linking /docs/why-fern
on “Show HN: Fern, a language for defining REST APIs that compiles into OpenAPI”Stainless is way more than just the codegen. If you’re curious I did write some details when responding to another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48191376 But Fern is a (great) Stainless competitor that went the open source way, so that could have been an option, at least for parts of it: https://buildwithfern.com/ . There is more context but I don’t think it’s my story to tell
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on “Anthropic Acquires Stainless”We evaluated Stainless, Fern [1], and a few others for Docs & SDKs (soon, CLI) and ended up choosing Fern. Definitely glad we did after today's news. Hadn't seen WorkOS's work here though - thanks for sharing. [1] https://buildwithfern.com/
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on “Anthropic Acquires Stainless”Hey, co-founder of Fern ( https://www.buildwithfern.com/ ) here. I too am inspired by Stripe's API documentation. Specifically, I like that it: 1. shows the API reference alongside the requests and responses 2. gives code examples of how to use the client libraries (e.g. python, node.js, go, java) 3. is one, continuously scrolling page --- We built Fern Docs so that for $150/month you can get Stripe-like documentati…
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on “Ask HN: Stripe like API documentation tool?”I use https://www.buildwithfern.com/ . Really easy to setup and the founders are great.
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on “Ask HN: Stripe like API documentation tool?”
