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OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

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

#131

Post by ZeroTalent »

throwaway7783 wrote: post #126
ZeroTalent wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better at coding, but they are essentially paying for users. I would also argue that the product could be built over two weekends with a small team. They offer some groundbreaking solutions, but since we know that they work and how, it's easy to replicate them. That also means they have significant talent there. Hence, they are also buying the employees. The code base itself is basically worth nothing, in my opi…

What groundbreaking solutions specifically?

AFAIK their Cascade coding flow implementation was the first done well and then copied than most.

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

#133

Post by karn97 »

robinhood wrote: post #46
Androider wrote: post #28

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,…

"riddled with bugs". "incredibly poorly implemented". Man, what are you talking about? Your comment seems based on nothing but what you read online. Have you used Cursor on a daily basis? I have. Every day for six months now. I haven't encountered a single bug that prevent me to work. Moreover, while Microsoft tries to catch up lately, it's still very far behind, especially on the "tab autocompletion" front.

I dont care about a vibe coders experience

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

#134

Post by mdaniel »

sofixa wrote: post #102
beardedwizard wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub has been failing upward for more than 5 years. They could have totally dominated software development and security - failed. Could have been the undisputed champion of code hosting - failed. Should have dominated development co-pilots - failed. I actually find it a little reassuring that they can't seem to get out of their own way.

To be fair, they have been behind the competition for many years. Gitlab had extremely good CI, security scanning, organisational concepts, etc. for years before GitHub introduced their ones (and Actions still has a worse UX, and GitHub still doesn't have anything below an organisation).

And it being open core (MIT) means spinning up a version to test something is incredibly easy. Not exactly resource cheap, as it's still a rails app with multiple servers "smuggled" in the docker image, but it is easy

And I have long held that they are hungry, shipping like clockwork on or about the 20th of every month, showing up with actual improvements all the time https://about.gitlab.com/releases/ It seems this month brings 18.0 with it, for whatever that version bump happens to include

They also have a pretty good track record of "liberating" some premium features into the MIT side of things; I think it's luck of the draw, but it's not zero and it doesn't seem to be tied to any underhanded reason that I can spot

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

#136

Post by mdaniel »

singularity2001 wrote: post #123
ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote: post #87

I need someone to convince me this isn't one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition. If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion then what are they even doing? Windsurf can't have that high of a userbase that you feel the need to pay for it.

instinctively I agree but it's all about timing: if they try to build their own IDE and hired people it would probably still take a couple of years to get a decent product. I don't know about patents.

> if they try to build their own IDE and hired people

Oh, haven't you heard? Hiring people to write software is so last decade. Maybe they just didn't want to vibe code a Windsurf implementation and decided to buy a press cycle for $3B

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

#137

Post by htrp »

owendarko wrote: post #116
leonidasv wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How are you differentiating from the cline/roo's of the world?

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

#140

Post by simple10 »

ashvardanian wrote: post #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 professi…

Agreed. It seems like a data play and a hedge to beef up vibe code competition against upcoming Google and MS models so OpenAI doesn't lose API revenue. I would assume vibe coding consumes more tokens than most other text based API usage.
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