Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

111–120 of 604 posts

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

#112

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,…

> 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.

Microsoft software quality has gone downhill recently, and I'm not going to bet on them delivering something more polished than WS and Cursor here.

Side: all images on Microsoft websites are low resolution! it's like they don't even check their own website.

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

#113

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,…

[deleted]

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

#116

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,…

The thing is: we should not need standalone editors just to use AI coding agents. They could be just plugins, but Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that. Windsurf has a "plugin edition" for JetBrains IDEs that works really, really well[0] (they also have a VSCode plugin[1] but it's lacking in comparison). However, given that JetBrains also have their own AI offering[2], I'm not sure how long t…

There are already a bunch of open source, free, and popular "AI coding agent" extensions for VS Code:

1) Cline (1.4mil downloads)

2) Roo Code (a fork of Cline, 450k downloads)

Still a drop in the bucket compared to Cursor in terms of # of users, but they're growing pretty fast.

Disclaimer: I maintain Kilo Code, which competes with 1) and 2) so I'm pretty familiar with this space/the growth patterns.

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

#117
post #54

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,…

> 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. I agree with the first part, I'm much less optimistic about the second part. I suspect they will create something that is worse, but cheaper if you already pay for Github/Office 365/whatever. Then many large enterprises will switch to save money whilst the engineers…

That seems pretty bold. I still find myself switching to basically anything but the VS code copilot agent any chance I get.

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

#120
If I recall correctly from the recent YC interview, the Windsurf founder noted their team leans more toward GTM than engineering. That makes this less likely to be a classic acquihire (as with Rockset) and more plausibly a data play rather than a product integration.

My current read is that this is a frontier lab acquiring large-scale training data—cheaply—from a community of “vibe coders”, instead of paying professional annotators. In that light, it feels more like a “you are the product” scenario, which likely won’t sit well with Windsurf’s paying customers.

Interesting times.

Post reply on HN