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OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

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Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#131
post #56

IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of…

Almost all of this was true before they even announced the purchase. I was so shocked and now I’m not surprised it fell through

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#132
post #68
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really true, I believe the "acquiring" (i.e. Google) company buys some equity from the employees (windsurf). Edit: the people downvoting this clearly can't read, I made the exact same point as jonny_eh.

The acquisition of Windsurf was cancelled.

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Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#133
post #58
post #21

It's another Character.ai situation [0]. Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company. What a harsh time to work for an AI startup as a rank and file employee! I wonder how the founders justify going along with it inside their mind. [0] Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer…

This might be the beginning of the end of tech VC startups in general. High interest rates make VC funding more expensive and now bigtech can swoop in, poach all the necessary staff and deprive investors of an exit. What is the point any more?

Isn't there not some contractual agreement between the VCs and the founders? (I understand that a non-compete might not apply [in CA], but taking VC money is a little different that simply getting hired).

Were I a Windsurf investor, I'd be pissed right now and calling my lawyer.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#134
post #21

It's another Character.ai situation [0]. Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company. What a harsh time to work for an AI startup as a rank and file employee! I wonder how the founders justify going along with it inside their mind. [0] Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer…

FYI, It wasn't taken the money and leave, a lot of them got absorbed into GDM.

Source: I was in GDM when character was acquired.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#135
post #50

According to The Information, Microsoft gaining access to Windsurf’s IP if OpenAI acquired them was a factor: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-windsurf-brea... (paywalled)

I don't understand why Windsurf would care after they've exited.

Not Windsurf… OpenAI. And OpenAI cares because they’re competing (in part) against Copilot, so if Msoft gets all the benefits of Windsurf then OpenAI would effectively be paying 3B to feed their competitor.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#136
post #56

IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of…

> with a simple extension for some UX improvements What are the UX improvements? I was using the Pycharm plugin and didn’t notice any actual integration. I had problems with pycharm’s terminal—not least of which was default 5k line scroll back which while easy to change was worst part of CC for me at first. I finally jumped to using iterm and then using pycharm separately to do code review, visual git workflows, some…

#1 improvement for VS Code users is giving the agent MCP tools to get diagnostics from the editor LSPs. Saves a tremendous amount of time having the agent run and rerun linting commands.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#137

I went from Emacs to VS Code, then to Cursor, next to Claude Code, which is so good that I feel like I am having half a dozen junior devs at my fingertips, 24/7. Since Claude Code is cli based, I reviewed my cli toolset: Migrated from iTerm2 to Ghostty and Tmux, from Cursor to NeoVim (my God is it good!). Just had a 14h workday with this tooling. It’s so good that I complete the work of weeks and months within days!…

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Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#139
post #83
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, terminal agents are inferior to hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged environments when it comes to concurrent execution and far inferior to assisted ide in terms of UX so what exactly is the point?. The "UI niceties" is the whole point of using cursor and somehow, everyone else sucks at it.

Not sure what you mean. "Hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged environments"? The entire selling point of CC is that you can do - > curl -fsSL http://claude.ai/install.sh | bash - > claude - > OAuth to your Anthropic account Done. Now you have a SOTA agentic AI with pretty forgiving usage limits up and running immediately. This is why it's capturing developer mindshare. The simplicity of getting up and going with it is a…

Plus it’s straightforward to make Claude Code run agents in parallel/background just like Codex and Cursor, in local sandboxes: https://github.com/dagger/container-use

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#140
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude Code is totally different paradigm. You don't edit your files directly so there is no tab autocomplete. It's a chat session. There are IDE integrations where you can run it in a terminal session while perusing the files through your IDE, but it's not powering any autocomplete there AFAIK.

are people viewing file diffs in the terminal? surely people aren't just vibing code changes in

Yes or running claude code in the cursor/vscode terminal and watching the files change and then reviewing in IDE. I often like to be able to see an entire file when reviewing a diff, rather than just the lines that changed. Plus it's nice to have go-to-definition when reviewing.
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