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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

#151

Post by ashraymalhotra »

davidclark wrote: post #145
extr wrote: 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…

Is this $900M ARR a reliable number? Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a sub to Cursor. If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that would be 375K paid users. There’s 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if everyone using Cursor were paying $…

Maybe the OP got confused with Cursor's $900mil raise? https://cursor.com/blog/series-c

Last disclosed revenue from Cursor was $500mil. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-05/anysphere...

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

#152

Post by teruakohatu »

lunarcave wrote: post #146
extr wrote: 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…

Strictly speaking about large, complex, sprawling codebases, I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent. Auto-regressive nature of these things mean that errors accumulate, and IDEs are well placed to give that observability to the human, than a coding agent. I can course correct more easily in an IDE with clear diffs, coding navigation, than followi…

> I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent.

CC has some integration with VSC it is not all or nothing.

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

#153

Post by extr »

ashraymalhotra wrote: post #151
davidclark wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this $900M ARR a reliable number? Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a sub to Cursor. If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that would be 375K paid users. There’s 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if everyone using Cursor were paying $…

Maybe the OP got confused with Cursor's $900mil raise? https://cursor.com/blog/series-c Last disclosed revenue from Cursor was $500mil. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-05/anysphere...

Yeah that’s probably it!

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

#154

Post by woeirua »

dalemhurley wrote: post #59

Cursor (and Garry Tan’s X post) has shown us that the VC money is propping up these companies astounding growth, the only way for them to become profitable is to increase the cost per a request, which means they need to innovate like crazy. The moat is paper thin. GitHub has open sourced copilot. The open source community is working hard on their own projects. No doubt Cursor is moving fast to create amazing innovati…

There is no moat. If you’re a true believer that strong agents are around the corner, then all of these add on companies will be obsolete in a few years. The first company to strong agents can trivially rebuild Cursor or Windsurf.

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

#155

Post by modeless »

gk1 wrote: post #135
modeless wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This would also happen if OpenAI developed the same thing internally, right? I don't see how not acquiring them improves anything.

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

#156

Post by robryan »

satvikpendem wrote: post #121
extr wrote: 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…

> What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC? Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for documentation fetching even comes close. That is the only reason why I still use Cursor, sometimes I have esoteric packages that must be used in my code and other IDEs will simply hallucinate due to not having such a robust docs feature, if any, which is useless to me, and I believe Claude Code also falls i…

Claude code can get pretty far simply calling `go doc` on packages.

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

#158

Post by diegof79 »

I'm not surprised. I started using Windsurf when it came out because I liked its UX better than Cursor's.

However, while Cursor and GH Copilot improved, Windsurf went in the opposite direction. On each update, I started to get more and more issues. The agent often tried to run shell commands, and it hung up, or I found minor UI bugs. One day, I decided to give GH Copilot another chance, and I was surprised by how it evolved, to the point that it worked better than Windsurf for my usage. I don’t know what happened internally at Windsurf, but I notice the degradation as a user. If my case indicates what happened to other users, maybe OpenAI saw declining subscriptions and canceled the deal.

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

#159

Post by resonious »

teruakohatu wrote: post #148
adamoshadjivas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans. I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the ne…

> CC at like a 500% loss Do you have a citation for this? It might be at a loss, but I don’t think it is that extravagant.

I'm also curious about this. Claude Code feels very expensive to me, but at the same time I don't have much perspective (nothing to compare it to, really, other than Codex or other agent editors I guess. And CC is way better so likely worth the extra money anyway)

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

#160

Post by Aeolun »

adamoshadjivas wrote: post #76
extr wrote: 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…

Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans. I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the ne…

It probably doesn’t cost them all that much? Maybe they were offering the API at a 500% markup, and code is just breaking even.
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