Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 712 posts

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

#261

Post by arresin »

alanmoraes wrote: post #61
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…

I never understood why those tools need to fork Visual Studio Code. Wouldn't an extension suffice?

It was so they could close source it.

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

#262

Post by absurddoctor »

shados wrote: post #103
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…

CC would explode even further if they had official Team/Enterprise plan (likely in the work, Claude Code Waffle flag), and worked on Windows without WSL (supposedly pretty easy to fix, they just didn't bother). Cursor learnt the % of Windows user was really high when they started looking, even before they really supported it. They're likely artificially holding it back either because its a loss leader they want to us…

They quietly released an update to CC earlier today so it can now be run natively on Windows.

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

#263

Post by resonious »

ReaLNero wrote: post #248
resonious wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re productivity gains, CC allows me to code during my commute time. Even on a crowded bus/train I can get real work done just with my phone.

What's your workflow if I may ask? I've been interested in the idea as well.

The project is just a web backend. I give Claude Code grunt work tasks. Things like "make X operation also return Y data" or "create Z new model + CRUD operations". Also asking it to implement well-known patterns like denouncing or caching for an existing operation works well.

My app builds and runs fine on Termux, so my CLAUDE.md says to always run unit tests after making changes. So I punch in a request, close my phone for a bit, then check back later and review the diff. Usually takes one or two follow-up asks to get right, but since it always builds and passes tests, I never get complete garbage back.

There are some tasks that I never give it. Most of that is just intuition. Anything I need to understand deeply or care about the implementation of I do myself. And the app was originally hand-built by me, which I think is important - I would not trust CC to design the entire thing from scratch. It's much easier to review changes when you understand the overall architecture deeply.

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

#264

Post by ec109685 »

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…

Good analysis. And Claude code itself will be mercilessly copied, so even if another model jumps ahead, small switching cost.

That said, the creator of Claude Code jumped to Cursor so they must see a there there.

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

#265

Post by sothatsit »

harikb wrote: post #173
resonious wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

You can tell Claude Code to use opus using /model and then it doesn't fall back to Sonnet btw. I am on the $100 plan and I hit rate-limits every now and then, but not enough to warrant using Sonnet instead of Opus.

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

#266

Post by osigurdson »

This certainly aligns with my own usage. I'm currently using OpenAI's own Codex 50:1 compared to Windsurf. For me, I'd rather take some time to create a good quality prompt and have it work away for a few minutes and create a material delta. It isn't always perfect, and I often have to make a few tweaks myself, but it is much nicer and waiting around and watching Windsurf bang around on a tiny part of the solution. Windsurf is still nice to use for quick UI iteration however.

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

#267

Post by ec109685 »

Aeolun wrote: post #163
nikcub wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor see it coming - it's why they're moving to the web and mobile[0] The bigger issue is the advantage Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have in developing and deploying their own models. It wasn't that long ago that Cursor was reading 50 lines of code at a time to save on token costs. Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to, and it blew everything else away. Cursor could rele…

> Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to I don’t think this is true at all. The reason CC is so good is that they’re very deliberate about what goes in the context. CC often spends ages reading 5 LOC snippets, but afterwards it only has relevant stuff in context.

Background of how it works: https://kirshatrov.com/posts/claude-code-internals

Prompt: https://gist.github.com/transitive-bullshit/487c9cb52c75a970...

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

#268

Post by shivenigma »

submeta wrote: post #105

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!…

> But I don’t review files that much anymore.

Say no more.

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

#269

Post by ec109685 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #186
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…

just curious because I'm inexperienced with all the latest tools here > - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) What is that? I have Gemini Code Assist installed in VSCode and I'm getting tab completion. (yes, LLM based tab completion) Which, as an aside I find useful when it works but also often extremely confusing to read. Like say in C++ I type int myVar = 123 The editor might show int myVar = 123; And it…

Tab completion in cursor lets you keep hitting tab and it will jump to next logical spot in file to keep editing or completing from.

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

#270

Post by sashank_1509 »

agd wrote: post #194
sashank_1509 wrote: post #168

So the result of aggressively scrutinizing big tech acquisitions is acquihires, not a more competitive tech ecosystem with say more IPO’s. The libertarian spin on this would be government should have never scrutinized acquisitions and the result is just worse for everyone. The progressive spin would be to now ban acquihires somehow, and then whatever new legal invention will be created next. I can imagine the next st…

This wasn't a result of regulator scrutiny. The issue was that MS (owner of Copilot) was demanding access to the IP (due to their existing agreement with OpenAI), and OpenAI was resisting. In addition, Claude blocked access to Windsurf, which also damaged them as an acquisition target. Nothing to do with regulators.

I find this hard to believe considering all the recent acquihires that happened recently like Character AI, Inflection, Covariant AI, Scale AI, context AI and so on. Maybe you’re right about the specifics of this situation, but my prior for this being an acquihire is very high and I would need to see very compelling evidence that that is not the case.
Post reply on HN