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OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

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

#151

Post by knes »

h8hawk wrote: post #20
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.

In my experience, Windsurf was significantly more effective when working with a big codebase.

Have you checked Augmentcode.com? On reddit/youtube people are praising it for how well it handle large codebase compared to Cursor and Windsurf

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

#152

Post by knes »

does that mean that Windsurf will only support OpenAI models going forward? I doubt OpenAI will pay to have users use Gemini/Claude? Especially as all of these Ai coding tools (Windsurf, Augment, Cursor) are heavily subsidizing the users.

I wonder what Anthropic makes of this. Windsurf was like a top 3 customers of them, might be a big revenue blow too?

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

#154

Post by beardedwizard »

stevage wrote: post #79
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.

They're not the champion of code hosting?

It's a close call - I make this based on the fact that GitHub is viewed as an anti-choice by some in the community, a huge change from the "you don't use GitHub?!?!" energy they had pre-acquisition.

The MS acquisition traded the developer community to briefly appeal to enterprises, then quickly let both down.

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

#155

Post by beardedwizard »

mdaniel wrote: post #134
sofixa wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why gitlab hasn't been able to capitalize on GitHub's many failures is almost as interesting as GitHub's fall.

I think the GitHub brand is still stronger and people just don't "care" about gitlab.

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

#156

Post by boleary-gl »

htrp wrote: post #137
owendarko wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Our plan is to be a superset of Cline and Roo's features (we already have all the major features from both) [0]

We also have our own provider, which means no need to bring your own API keys (you can if you like, but it is batteries included by default) and we're not charging anything on top of the API pricing. Instead of monetizing on individual developers, we want it to be free for them and make money eventually off enterprise contracts [1]

[0]: https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/roo-or-cline-were-building-a-supe... [1]: https://kilocode.ai

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

#157

Post by lolinder »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #62
lolinder wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it acquired those customers in an environment where Microsoft was not enforcing their marketplace terms it very much does matter if they have a plan for supporting plugins in the future. Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's? Will they rally jointly behind a single open store? They need to have an answer to Microsoft here, and for the good of t…

> Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's? They should and probably will soon, and if I were them I'd even consider giving plugin devs a cut of their paying customer subs if MS gets competitive about it. > but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem. Agentic AI coding is more import…

VS Code is shipping agentic coding in the form of updates to GitHub Copilot. I haven't used it extensively yet since they added agent mode, but it's obvious that they're gunning for this market hard, and if I were into VS Code I would not personally choose to lose the ecosystem for marginally better agent mode.

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

#158

Post by Frotag »

leonidasv wrote: post #91
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,…

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…

> Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that.

What doesn't the current API allow plugins to do? I'm guessing custom UI stuff that lives outside a panel?

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

#159

Post by tough »

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,…

Github Copilot is pretty much the same UI as cursor on vscode already

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

#160

Post by qoez »

fcanesin wrote: post #119

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.

Google IO in may? Guess we'll be getting a huge OpenAI release May 19th then.

Edit: Oh of course, it's the open weights model they've been teasing.

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