171–180 of 604 posts
$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
Didn't they change names months ago? I know them as Codeium.
I think the long-term play here is something to do with Agents and they are simply cornering the market because coding tools are part to it.
That being said, quick search around what people are building with these VIDEs reveals mostly landing pages that are actually not even that good. For the amount of money spent one could have easily bought a good template or pay someone to customise an existing one.
I don't know. Maybe I am dumb.
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…
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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
- 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)
AI is definitely huge for anyone writing code, though one can imagine a model like o3 completely replacing 90% of white collar jobs that involve reading, writing and analysis.
Interestingly, o3 is particularly bad at legalese, likely not fully by accident. Of all professions whose professional organizations and regulatory capture create huge rents, the legal profession is the most ripe for disruption.
It's not uncommon for lawyers to bill $250 to $500 per hour for producing boilerplate language. Contracts reviewed or drawn up by lawyers never come with any guarantees either, so one does not learn until too late that the lawyer overlooked something important. Most lawyers have above average IQs and understand arcane things, but most of it is pretty basic at its core.
Lawyers, Pharmacists, many doctors, nearly all accountants, and most middle managers will be replaceable by AI agents.
Software engineers are still expected to produce novel outputs unlike those other fields, so there is still room for humans to pilot the machine for a while. And since most software is meant to be used by humans, soon software will need to be usable by AI agents, which will reduce a lot of UI to an MCP.
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If the VS Code team are delivering the product, I have some amount of trust. If it’s the VS team, good luck to everyone involved
VSCode is still miles behind for .NET and C++ tooling, have a bit of fate on VS team.
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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).
That’s why you won’t see a ton of work go into e.g. issues/projects on GitHub. Those features all already exist and are very robust in ADO, so if you need those kinds of things (and the reporting an enterprise would want to be able to run on that data), then you belong on ADO.
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> 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…
If the VS Code team are delivering the product, I have some amount of trust. If it’s the VS team, good luck to everyone involved
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,…
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?
this is the question i am still asking...