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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

#211

I did not see this coming. Wow. The game of thrones in SV. I wonder what happened with the OpenAI deal. Anyone have any guesses? My first guess is "Look at Claude Code, we can do this ourselves." But, I am likely thinking too simply. edit: does this mean that Windsurf and its users will stop being iced-out by Anthropic? Or, is this the end of Windsurf?

> I did not see this coming. Wow. The game of thrones in SV.

You must be new around here.

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

#212
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…

I never got the valuation. I (and many others) have built open source agent plugins that are pretty much just as good, in our free time (check out magenta nvim btw, I think it turned out neat!)

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

#213
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor's tab completion model is legitimately fantastic and for many people is worth the entire $20 subscription. Lint fixes or syntax-level refactors are guessed and executed instantly with TAB with close to 100% accuracy. This is their final moat IMO, if Copilot manages to bring their tab completion up to near parity, very little reason to use Cursor.

https://forum.cursor.com/t/i-made-59-699-lines-of-agent-edit... > It's quite interesting how little the Cursor power users use tab. Majority of the posts are some insane number of agent edits and close to (or exactly) 0 tabs.

At my company we have an enterprise subscription and we're also all allowed to see the analytics for the entire company. Last I checked, I was literally the number one user of Tab and middle of the pack for agent.

It's interesting when I see videos or reddit posts about cursor and people getting rate limited and being super angry. In my experience tab is the number one feature, and I feel like most people using agent are probably overusing it tasks that would honestly take less time to do myself or using models way smarter than they need to be for the task at hand.

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

#214
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…

- Forking VSCode is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.

- Anthropic doesn't use the inputs for training.

- Cursor doesn't have $900M ARR. That was the raise. Their ARR is ~$500m [1].

- Claude Code already support the niceties, including "add selection to chat", accessing IDE's realtime warnings and errors (built-in tool 'ideDiagnostics'), and using IDE's native diff viewer for reviewing the edits.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...

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

#215
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

Apparently they are, which is crazy to me. Zed agent mode shows modified hunks and you can accept/reject them individually. I can't imagine doing it all through the CLI, it seems extremely primitive.

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

#216

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!…

Do you do all this switching during the workday?

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

#217
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking an IDE is not expensive if it's the core product of a company with a $900M ARR. I doubt MS has ever made $900M off of VS Code.

"The same editor you already use for free, but with slightly nicer UI for some AI stuff" is not a $900M ARR product.

"Some AI stuff" can well be worth that.

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

#218

What if OpenAI is buying Cursor instead?

Not out of the question after a week of Cursor just absolutely torching goodwill

Could you elaborate or provide more context for those who don't use Cursor?

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the survival strategy for cursor would be to develop their own frontier coding model. Maybe they can leverage the data from their still somewhat significant lead in the space to make a solid effort.

I don’t think that’s a viable strategy. It is very very hard and not many people can do it. Just look at how much Meta is paying to poach the few people in the world capable of training a next gen frontier model.

Why are there actually only a few people in the world able to do this?

The basic concept is out there.

Lots of smart people studying hard to catch up to also be poached. No shortage of those I assume.

Good trainingsdata still seems the most important to me.

(and lots of hardware)

Or does the specific training still involves lots of smart decisions all the time?

And those small or big decisions make all the difference?

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

#220
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…

Claude Code is just proving that coding agents can be successful. The interface isn’t magic, it just fits the model and integrates with a system in all the right ways. The Anthropic team for that product is very small comparatively (their most prolific contributor is Claude), and I think it’s more of a technology proof than a core competency - it’s a great API $ business lever, but there’s no reason for them to try and win the “agentic coding UI” market. Unless Generative AI flops everywhere else, these markets will continue to emerge and need focus. The Windsurf kerfuffle is further proof that OpenAI doesn’t see the market as must-win for a frontier model shop.

And so I’d say this isn’t a harbinger of the death of Cursor, instead proof that there’s a future in the market they were just recently winning.

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