Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 604 posts

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#23

Post by charcircuit »

_fat_santa wrote: post #17
infecto wrote: post #16

Windsurf probably sees this as a win. I still think they're behind in some areas, Cursor's Agent feels faster and more responsive but Windsurf nails the rest. The documentation is far better, and the overall developer experience is more solid. Cursor still feels like a hacked-on plug-in in a broken VS Code fork. Even small touches, like built-in Linux install instructions, show Windsurf's polish.

> Its the little things like having baked in instructions to install Windsurf on linux. When I went to download Cursor the other day I noticed that they do not offer any .deb/.rpm packages and just offer the FlatPak (could be a Snap I'm not sure). This just tells me they really dont understand the community and just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.

>just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.

This what all developers want for a platform. They can release their software and not have to worry about some "maintainer" switching out dependencies out from under them introducing bugs and crashes in what they shipped.

Cursor ships as an AppImage.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#24

Post by zero-g »

_fat_santa wrote: post #17
infecto wrote: post #16

Windsurf probably sees this as a win. I still think they're behind in some areas, Cursor's Agent feels faster and more responsive but Windsurf nails the rest. The documentation is far better, and the overall developer experience is more solid. Cursor still feels like a hacked-on plug-in in a broken VS Code fork. Even small touches, like built-in Linux install instructions, show Windsurf's polish.

> Its the little things like having baked in instructions to install Windsurf on linux. When I went to download Cursor the other day I noticed that they do not offer any .deb/.rpm packages and just offer the FlatPak (could be a Snap I'm not sure). This just tells me they really dont understand the community and just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.

Windsurf has plugins for Jetbrains products, for vim, for emacs, for Visual Studio (not code), XCode, and even eclipse. They try to get as much of the market as possible, while Cursor focuses on the core functionality.

Whenever I tried Windsurf Editor, or their plugin for vim, and Intellij, it didn't feel polished at all. The basic function of autocomplete felt much much snappier on Cursor, and even on GitHub Copilot for vim/intellij.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#27

Post by sidcool »

crimsonnoodle58 wrote: post #19

$3B for a fork of an IDE which Microsoft keeps crippling by the day by making it's best extensions not work with forks (eg. C++, Python, C#, Remote SSH, etc)..

That's a oversimplified view. It doesn't matter if it's a fork. It has customers and paying ones. And it has a brand. That's more than enough. $3 billion would be peanuts for OpenAI

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#28

Post by Androider »

Windsurf and Cursor feel like temporary stopgaps, products of a narrow window in time before the landscape shifts again.

Microsoft has clearly taken notice. They're already starting to lock down the upstream VSCode codebase, as seen with recent changes to the C/C++ extension [0]. It's not hard to imagine that future features like TypeScript 7.0 might be limited or even withheld from forks entirely. At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.

Both Windsurf and Cursor are riddled with bugs that don't exist upstream, _especially_ in their AI assistant features beyond the VSCode core. Context management which is supposed to be the core featured added is itself incredibly poorly implemented [1].

Ultimately, the future isn't about a smarter editor, it's about a smarter teammate. Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets: generating PRs with tests, taking feedback, and iterating like a real collaborator.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/microsoft_vs_code_sub...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1kbt790/rules_in_49...

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#29

Post by bko »

Incredible timeline to a $3B exit

> Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf.

> Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation.

> Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a $1.3 billion valuation.

> May 2025: $3 billion acquisition from OpenAI

I wonder how much of the value is really from the model or the tooling around it. They all use the same models (mostly Claude, others have been horrible and buggy in my experience). Even co-pilot agent mode now uses Claude. The editor has their own LLM (?) that does the apply since LLMs often return snippets. They work well enough on Cursor. And then you have the auto-complete, which I think is their own model as well.

But the main value from me is from the agent mode and 95% of the value is the underlying model. The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin. The other benefit is the fixed pricing. I have no idea how much 500 calls cost if I were to use the API, but I expect they're probably losing money.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#30

Post by threeseed »

_fat_santa wrote: post #17
infecto wrote: post #16

Windsurf probably sees this as a win. I still think they're behind in some areas, Cursor's Agent feels faster and more responsive but Windsurf nails the rest. The documentation is far better, and the overall developer experience is more solid. Cursor still feels like a hacked-on plug-in in a broken VS Code fork. Even small touches, like built-in Linux install instructions, show Windsurf's polish.

> Its the little things like having baked in instructions to install Windsurf on linux. When I went to download Cursor the other day I noticed that they do not offer any .deb/.rpm packages and just offer the FlatPak (could be a Snap I'm not sure). This just tells me they really dont understand the community and just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.

> https://www.cursor.com/downloads

Linux builds are in the AppImage format.

Which makes a lot more sense to me than deb/rpm when it's just a single executable.

Post reply on HN