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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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor ($9 bil) has a higher valuation than JetBrains ($7 bil). Think about that.

Tells me that the markets ability to sensibly valuate companies is pretty messed up.

These aren't public companies, so the values are mostly made up.

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

#142
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the fact that OpenAI, at the bleeding edge of it all, has decided to buy an IDE is a rather strong hint that the future of agents handling entire engineering tickets might be further out than many believe. If autonomous agents were just around the corner, then why wouldn't OpenAI bet on their own Codex product obviating (most) need for an IDE and save themselves the $3 billion?

It sounds like the openAI team is overburdened (I guess they aren’t AI super users yet) so this may be their only option. Easy entry into a key segment, at least for now, and locks out competitors.

so much for ai turning everyone at openai into 1000x coders

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

#143
post #89

- A $3B signal that OpenAI is unable to do product - AI assisted coding is mostly about managing the context and knowing what to put in the context to avoid confusion and dumb mistakes, it's not about the UI. - This signals that OpenAI believes that highly effective coding assistant LLMs will become a commodity / open source and so UI / tooling lock-in is a good investment.

chatgpt is massively popular, I'm not sure that's the signal I'd get

they're acquiring one of the biggest the front doors to developers, with Windsurf - whether it'll _remain_ in fashion or not, that's a different debate. This can be like facebook acquiring instagram (if developers turn out to be the actual profit-driver niche for LLMs, which currently seems to be the case)

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

#144

OpenAI knows that everyday someone uses Gemini their ChatGPT brand dies a bit faster. Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May, would be a death sentence to just steamroll with Gemini-3.

> Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May

"Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906018

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

#145

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.

> If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion

It's funny money / made-up value. This is not $3B cash.

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

#147

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,…

Agreed. Especially with tools like Claude Code, which can get better over time and remove the need to use Windsurf and Cursor.

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

#148
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone that never used windsurf, what features does it have that GitHub copilot does not? Reading their webpages I didn't spot any "killer feature" that would convince me to switch. I always felt that cursor and windsurf should be just extension to vscode instead of a fork. Was there some missing functionality is vscode that was missing? Is it still missing? There are some extensions that work in this way and al…

It can write a lot of code, that works, better than vscode can (right now). It's in a lot of ways the OpenAI story itself: Can they keep an edge? Or is there at least something that will keep people from just switching product? Who knows. People have opinions, of course. OpenAIs opinion (which should reasonably count for something, them being the current AI-as-a-product leader) is worth $3B as of today.

Windsurf works well with Claude and Gemini models, so if OpenAI forces Windsurf users to only use OpenAI models, then it wouldn't be as useful.

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

#149
post #90
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone that never used windsurf, what features does it have that GitHub copilot does not? Reading their webpages I didn't spot any "killer feature" that would convince me to switch. I always felt that cursor and windsurf should be just extension to vscode instead of a fork. Was there some missing functionality is vscode that was missing? Is it still missing? There are some extensions that work in this way and al…

The differentiator of Cursor is it’s way smarter at basic code completion than GitHub Copilot. I pay for Cursor instead of GitHub Copilot even though I get the latter for free from open source contributions, and I made that decision after five minutes of usage after using Copilot for what, more than a year? I won’t even talk about how Cursor guesses where I’m going to edit next and makes the correct edit most of the…

My experience is the same. And the agent mode in copilot is terrible, it simply will stop halfway through files.

Or you chat and suddenly it wants to use the azure copilot instead because reasons.

Horrible experience.

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

#150

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.

30% of their code is now written with AI.

Their “programmers” are more busy with making blogs and videos than functioning tests or technical documentation, and they start using JavaScript and Python for everything.

I’m not surprised their quality went to shit. There are some pearls left, C# in general is pretty good, and Aspire is becoming quite neat.

The latter I think mainly because David Fowler is just a great developer

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