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OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

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Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#251

Post by pbowyer »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #66
h8hawk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Windsurf was significantly more effective when working with a big codebase.

Windsurf goes looking into the codebase and learning context before attacking the problem in my experience. Often Cursor tries it's best to just guess the solution without context and only really resorts to going deeper when you tell it they fails. I find if I tell Windsurf to look at something it will, Cursor I sometimes lay everything out for it and it just doesn't even read it. Ultimately though once you run out o…

I trialled Cursor for a month and then Windsurf. Cursor read entire code files in while Windsurf would read the first 100 lines (or was it 50?), then the next 100, and often stop before it got to the part of the file with the method in which was needed.

So I went back to Cursor.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#252

Post by TiredOfLife »

retornam wrote: post #240

I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…

One example is that VS Code Copilot autocomplete is still behind what Codeium (now Windsurf) was 1.5 years ago.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#255

Post by throwup238 »

mliker wrote: post #148
jstummbillig wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can write a lot of code, that works, better than vscode can (right now). It's in a lot of ways the OpenAI story itself: Can they keep an edge? Or is there at least something that will keep people from just switching product? Who knows. People have opinions, of course. OpenAIs opinion (which should reasonably count for something, them being the current AI-as-a-product leader) is worth $3B as of today.

Windsurf works well with Claude and Gemini models, so if OpenAI forces Windsurf users to only use OpenAI models, then it wouldn't be as useful.

I doubt they'll restrict it to their own models. The amount of business intel they'd get on the coding performance of competing models would be invaluable.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#257

Post by cheema33 »

no_wizard wrote: post #182
Onavo wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their devtools team is surprisingly competent when they choose to be. Pre-2015, people used Sublime Text, Atom, Textmate, Notepad++, Light Table, Brackets, Emacs/Vim, Intellij. VS code single handedly crushed all of them with code completion and language servers that require zero configuration. Emacs/Vim lost share, Jetbrains (and also Eclipse) were forced to release their own "lightweight" code editors, and everybod…

I would contend that JetBrains has only grown even with VS Code around. They're still more than viable, support things on a near similar cadence (and even in some cases, faster and/or better) than VS Code gets support for it. I agree with the rest, they've all mostly lost market share or completely no longer exist due to VS Code, but not IntelliJ, that platform is going really strong. Though no doubt, VS Code has pus…

Jetbrains products are used primarily by Java devs. Everybody else is slowly moving away. I did.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#258

Post by supportengineer »

retornam wrote: post #240

I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…

High valuations for companies you've never heard of with no moat - it comes down to cronyism/nepotism/fraud.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#259

Post by DanHulton »

FuckButtons wrote: post #234
Androider wrote: post #28

Windsurf and Cursor feel like temporary stopgaps, products of a narrow window in time before the landscape shifts again. Microsoft has clearly taken notice. They're already starting to lock down the upstream VSCode codebase, as seen with recent changes to the C/C++ extension [0]. It's not hard to imagine that future features like TypeScript 7.0 might be limited or even withheld from forks entirely. At the same time,…

I think you’re being overoptimistic about the skill ceiling that this generation of Ai is likely to have.

Yeah. Every time I see entirely unfounded claims like that, I remember that I've been seeing them for literal years now. While there have definitely been improvements in AI capability, they have largely been very marginal, while the claimed "will handle entire engineering tickets" capability requires huge leaps in capability and reliability that _we just have not seen evidence for._

Mentally, I'm replacing claims like this with "it will do magic!" and I think I'm just about as likely to be correct.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#260

Post by arthur-st »

retornam wrote: post #240

I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…

They have a healthy enterprise customer base, and an engineering team that clearly knows how to work with power users (which OpenAI is bad at).
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