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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

#231
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…

The forked IDE thing I don't understand either, but...

During the evaluation at a previous job, we found that windsurf is waaaay better than anything else. They were expensive (to train on our source code directly) but the solution the offered was outperforming others.

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

#232
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…

You can view and navigate the diffs made by the terminal agent in your IDE in realtime, just like Cursor, as well as commit, revert, etc. That’s really all the “integration” you need.

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

#233
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 use Windsurf so I remain in the driver's seat. Using AI coding tools too much feels like brain rot where I can't think sharply anymore. Having auto complete guess my next edit as I'm typing is great because I still retain all the control over the code base. There's never any blocks of code that I can't be bothered to look at, because I wrote everything still.

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

#234
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1. Cost to hire is now prohibitive. You're competing against companies like Meta paying tens of millions for top talent.

2. Cost to train is also prohibitive. Grok data centre has 200,000 H100 Graphics cards. Impossible for a startup to compete with this.

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

#235

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.

If you believe AGI is around the corner, doesn’t it mean it’ll replace ALL products?

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

#236
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm assuming it's this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44538243

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

#237
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the case for using Claude Code much weaker now that Gemini CLI is out?

no. CC is not just a cli. Its cli + their pro/max plan. gemini cli is very expensive.

Isn't Gemini CLI 1000 requests/day free?

https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini...

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

#238
post #183
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP is talking about Claude Code Max 100 & 200 plans. They are very reasonable compared to anything else that has per-use token usage. I am on Max and I can work 5 hrs+ a day easily. It does fall back to Sonnet pretty fast, but I don't seem to notice any big differece.

Yes, my CC usage is regularly $50-$100 per day , so their Max plan is absolutely great value that I don’t expect to last.

Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour using Opus on API credits. The model providers are heavily subsidized, the datacenters appear to be too. If you look at the Coreweave stuff and the private datacenters it starts looking like the telecom bubble. Even Meta is looking to finance datacenter expansion - https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-seeks-29-billion-priva...

The reason they are talking about building new nuclear power plants in the US isn't just for a few training runs, its for inference. At scale the AI tools are going to be extremely expensive.

Also note China produces twice as much electricity as the United States. Software development and agent demand is going to be competitive across industries. You may think, oh I can just use a few hours of this a day and I got a week of work done (happens to me some days), but you are going to end up needing to match what your competitors are doing - not what you got comfortable with. This is the recurring trap of new technology (no capitalism required.)

There is a danger to independent developers becoming reliant on models. $100-$200 is a customer acquisition cost giveaway. The state of the art models probably will end up costing hourly what a human developer costs. There is also the speed and batching part. How willing is the developer to, for example, get 50% off but maybe wait twice as long for the output. Hopefully the good dev models end up only costing $1000-$2000 a month in a year. At least that will be more accessible.

Somewhere in the future these good models will run on device and just cost the price of your hardware. Will it be the AGI models? We will find out.

I wonder how this comment will age, will look back at it in 5 or 10 years.

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

#239
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://techcru…

The cost of the fork isn't creating it, it's maintaining it. But maybe AI could help :/

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

#240
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The basic concept plus a lot of money spent on compute and training data gets you pretraining. After that to get a really good model there’s a lot more fine-tuning / RL steps that companies are pretty secretive about. That is where the “smart decisions” and knowledge gained by training previous generations of sota models comes in.

We’d probably see more companies training their own models if it was cheaper, for sure. Maybe some of them would do very well. But even having a lot of money to throw at this doesn’t guarantee success, e.g. Meta’s Llama 4 was a big disappointment.

That said, it’s not impossible to catch up to close to state-of-the-art, as Deepseek showed.

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