OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by standyro » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:23 PM UTC

blibble wrote: post #296

elevatortrim wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is owing its bad reputation to Windows, Office, Sharepoint!!!, Teams (and more?). The quality of developer tools and languages (C#, Visual Studio, Code and .NET Ecosystem, Azure UI is also great) from Microsoft has been flawless (with some exceptions like webforms, or ui code generation tools of the past).

have we used different Visual Studio's? it was crap compared to Borland's products 20 years ago and today it's crap compared to JetBrains' and christ knows how anyone could consider the Azure UI to be "great" other than Teams I don't think I've used a worse piece of software

I wouldn’t say that. JetBrains is incredibly bloated and has significantly less community support.

I’ll agree on Teams being crap though, mostly for how dumb it is that they’ve rewritten it multiple times and created a confusing slate of weird versions like “Teams (work or school)”

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

#312

Post by matheusmoreira » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:29 PM UTC

gexos wrote: post #300

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,…

[flagged]

> If they start walling off features like TypeScript 7.0 from forks, the open source pushback will be fierce—and that could backfire hard.

Do they have the man power to compete with Microsoft?

Linux managed to do it but Linux is the biggest, most successful free software project there is. Firefox and its forks are a better example. If Mozilla stopped working on Firefox, the forks would be pretty much dead in the water: they simply do not have the man power necessary to maintain a modern browser.

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

#313

Post by no_wizard » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:30 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #247

no_wizard wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s hard to compete with free when free is backed by lot of money.

Free doesn't matter here. JetBrains is an established toolset that people pay for. They've already been competing with free, and free didn't put them out of business. In some ways, free likely made business better than ever (I know alot of devs that started with VS Code and moved to JetBrains for various reasons)

They can have all the money in the world and it doesn't mean much in this context.

For while Microsoft is going to invest heavily in a Cursor / Windsurf like product and likely do alot to ship it in their editors - likely with exclusions or lag times between updates on other platforms - there's zero reason for Google to do this for example, when they could sell through Gemini for Code as an extension across all editors.

I don't see JetBrains having issues because of AI tooling, for most of these companies, its a boon to be on the JetBrains platform. Especially because JetBrains has lots of enterprise customers who would naturally be very interested in buying AI tooling for their developers. Its a natural market

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

#314

Post by yoyohello13 » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:33 PM UTC

michelb wrote: post #127

incorrecthorse wrote: post #80

It blows my mind OpenAI wouldn't be able to build a Windsurf alternative for orders of magnitude less than $3B.

They can, of course, but why would they waste time on it? They are buying a tool, talent, and a heap of paying enterprise customers. This is a steal.

According to the various CEO's saying AI give 100x speedup they could just have one dev whip it up in a weekend no?

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

#315

Post by yapyap » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:37 PM UTC

damn.

openai just seems to have a hole in their hand they keep temporarily patching up with new investor money

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

#316

Post by Illniyar » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:39 PM UTC

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…

Cursor purports 200m in projected yearly revenue. With some months having 40% month over month growth. The trajectory is vastly different.

Whether or not it's justified is a different matter, but for startups valuations are more about potential then current performance.

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

#317

Post by jonplackett » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:39 PM UTC

hnlurker22 wrote: post #309

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 just abandoned Windsurf because I found copy/pasting code with ChatGPT's web interface significantly better in terms of results.

I’m still just copying and pasting. Was considering trying it. Is it really not any better?

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

#318

Post by kasey_junk » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:50 PM UTC

cheema33 wrote: post #262

tough wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github Copilot is pretty much the same UI as cursor on vscode already

UI may be close. Functionality is very very different. Copilot is $10/month. Cursor is $20/month. I canceled my Copilot subscription after 2 months of using both. Compares to competition, Copilot has been garbage for quite some time.

I’d love to know what specifically is better about cursor in your opinion? I’ve used both and have a hard time even listing a different feature.

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

#319

Post by owebmaster » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:52 PM UTC

blueboo wrote: post #269

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…

OpenAI needs a product team hiring is hard it's a high-functioning team swimming in contemporary design and eng practices code is emerging as an important battleground OpenAI has the $$$

It is ironic that the company said to be cooking AGI is acquihiring software engineers because they can't develop it in-house.

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

#320

Post by libraryofbabel » Tue, May 06, 2025, 10:54 PM UTC

But is there a secret sauce in any of the coding agents (Copilot Agent, Windsurf, Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Aider, etc)? Sure, some have better user experience than others, but what if anything makes one "better at coding" than another?

As this great blog post lays bare ("The Emperor Has No Clothes", https://ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent), the core tech of a coding agent isn't anything magic - it's a set of LLM prompts plus a main loop running the calls to the LLM and executing the tool calls that the LLM wants to do. The tools are pretty standard like, search, read file, edit file, execute a bash command, etc. etc. Really all the power and complexity and "coding ability is in the LLM itself. Sure, it's a lot of work to make something polished that devs want to use - but is there any more to it than that?

So what is the differentiator here, other than user experience (for which I prefer the CLI tools, but to each their own)? $3B is a lot for something that sure doesn't seem to have any secret sauce tech or moat that I can see.