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What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

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Re: What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

#31

Post by Jenk »

CalChris wrote: post #2

openai's $3b acquisition of windsurf falls apart. after months of negotiations, they walk away. That isn't accurate. Microsoft was an OpenAI investor and had rights and for MS reasons, exercised them. That's what killed the deal. google announces they're paying $2.4b to hire windsurf's ceo and 41 researchers for deepmind. not to acquire windsurf. just the humans. the same day openai walks. what a coincidence! That is…

Firends who are windsurf employees tell me the in-office opinion is that the founder(s) were paid $.5bn each, and the rest was distributed amongst the researchers they poached.

_Huge_ payday if true.

Re: What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

#33

Post by IshKebab »

smokel wrote: post #4

The premise of this article seems to be that the researchers at Windsurf have been able to learn amazing things thanks to near unlimited VC money, increasing their value to astounding numbers. That may be true (although I doubt the numbers add up). But what is keeping those researchers from walking away, or underperform whenever they feel like it? Giving them a lot of money surely isn't going to motivate them to work…

Retention bonuses maybe?

Re: What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

#34

Post by nateglims »

CalChris wrote: post #23
rohansood15 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.2B went to investors, the remaining 1.2B was actually an incentive/payout for the founders/employees that google took. The company basically has whatever money it had in the bank, plus a bit more from Google - but no investor liabilities.

Ok, Google can pay $1.2B to the CEO and key employees to get them to walk. The other $1.2B is for the Windsurf IP and it cannot go directly to the investors. It has to go through the company where it is first revenue and then an asset. But Windsurf could distribute profit at this point before the Cognition deal. I guess this is where the preference rights got exercised. The tweet from employee #2 said his stock wasn'…

According to TechCrunch it was direct to investors: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how...

Re: What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

#35

Post by jbentley1 »

I honestly think all of these VSCode forks are moving in the wrong direction. They are horseless carriages, old-style tools with AI stapled to the side. I'm trying to figure out what agentic coding should look like, and I built Crystal as an agent management platform first, IDE second.

https://github.com/stravu/crystal/

Re: What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

#36

Post by aprilthird2021 »

ankit219 wrote: post #16

This is a highly speculative post, with conjectures presented as facts. Some things that irked me: - Cursor did not hire Anthropic's "researchers". It hired the guys who built Claude code (PM and dev). Who then promptly went back to Anthropic in 14 days. A researcher for Cursor need not come from Anthropic either. One high profile recruit for them was Jack Gallagher (Midjourney) who is probably one of the best at RL.…

> Google's deal with Windsurf is structured that way because they likely could not directly acquire, or were not confident that it would have gotten past the antitrust. A signal for that is such deal increased in last few years after FTC refused to allow any deal over $100M or so.

Any proof of this? It's quite speculative. Also FTC scrutiny is not escaped if you only acquire a percentage of a company to avoid antitrust scrutiny (as you claim Meta did, speaking of which...)

> Meta would have acquired scale ai in older times

According to reporting, Meta was solely interested in Wang and his inner circle, and did not want to acquire a significant stake in the company. Wang negotiated them UP. It's not as if they wanted to buy the whole thing at its previous valuation, let alone a higher valuation. (source: https://archive.is/ZPoNJ)

Re: What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

#37

Post by apwell23 »

raincole wrote: post #29
ankit219 wrote: post #16

This is a highly speculative post, with conjectures presented as facts. Some things that irked me: - Cursor did not hire Anthropic's "researchers". It hired the guys who built Claude code (PM and dev). Who then promptly went back to Anthropic in 14 days. A researcher for Cursor need not come from Anthropic either. One high profile recruit for them was Jack Gallagher (Midjourney) who is probably one of the best at RL.…

Every single article on this domain is just human hallucination. Little to none research and due diligence done. By the way, The latest article before this one was "tokens are getting more expensive". (One week before $1.25/$10 GPT5 releases. Talking about aging like milk...)

> Little to none research and due diligence done.

There has never been more drama in tech. 007 level drama with chinese and russian spies.

Can we just relax and have fun.

Re: What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

#38

Post by apwell23 »

jbentley1 wrote: post #35

I honestly think all of these VSCode forks are moving in the wrong direction. They are horseless carriages, old-style tools with AI stapled to the side. I'm trying to figure out what agentic coding should look like, and I built Crystal as an agent management platform first, IDE second. https://github.com/stravu/crystal/

ugh.. why are you always plugging this stuff every thread.giving very desperate scammy vibes.

launching multiple claudes in gitworktrees is not that hard. i have like 25 line bash function that does all that stuff in your project without nasty electron stuff.

Re: What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

#39

Post by BenGosub »

If it is true that these wrapper companies can't find positive sum economies for their product offerings, there will be a point in time where we will see them fail and it will cause a domino effect, rolling over to the big LLM providers and ultimately NVDA. This is highly speculative, but currently there are some realistic pointers to such a scenario.

In such a case, I think we will see a move to smaller, domain specific models. I think if the first cycle of the AI age is large, general models, the second will be smaller, domain specific ones that we can run on retail machines.

Re: What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem

#40

Post by dingnuts »

raincole wrote: post #29
ankit219 wrote: post #16

This is a highly speculative post, with conjectures presented as facts. Some things that irked me: - Cursor did not hire Anthropic's "researchers". It hired the guys who built Claude code (PM and dev). Who then promptly went back to Anthropic in 14 days. A researcher for Cursor need not come from Anthropic either. One high profile recruit for them was Jack Gallagher (Midjourney) who is probably one of the best at RL.…

Every single article on this domain is just human hallucination. Little to none research and due diligence done. By the way, The latest article before this one was "tokens are getting more expensive". (One week before $1.25/$10 GPT5 releases. Talking about aging like milk...)

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