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

OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 604 posts

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

#371

Post by sally_glance »

op00to wrote: post #365
absqueued wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that, also notice the curly apostrophe (’) vs the usual keyboard straight apostrophe (') mark.

The sheer number of AI written message board posts might just make me stop reading the comments on sites like Reddit and HN. I wanted to stop anyway, this seems like a good push to encourage me to wean myself.

Every one of us leaving (not engaging/commenting) increases the share of AI generated comments (vs real users) the next iteration will train on. I'm not even sure which option is worse. Withdraw and let everyone dilute their own training data, or stay and feed them our mindset and experience...?

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

#372

Post by jayd16 »

arresin wrote: post #60
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,…

Copilot owns the platform, had an amazing head start and yet still is the worst option available. I don’t mean to be harsh but this was a titanic fumble.

I'm curious what the cost per user is on Copilot. It doesn't make sense for them to be a loss leader so they're probably running the model at cost or a profit compared to the startups that have more of an incentive to scramble for market share.

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

#373

Post by aledalgrande »

dist-epoch wrote: post #65
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,…

Cursor ($9 bil) has a higher valuation than JetBrains ($7 bil). Think about that.

What did OpenAI buy for $3B? That's what I'm wondering.

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

#374

Post by DrammBA »

blueblimp wrote: post #358
john-h-k wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this written by an LLM? Not accusative but something about the vibe strongly suggests it

I feel it too: - Plenty of em-dashes - "you're absolutely right" - "They're X, not just Y"

also the

- "some introduction or callback: description or phrase"

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

#375

Post by ewoodrich »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #370
lolinder wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code is shipping agentic coding in the form of updates to GitHub Copilot. I haven't used it extensively yet since they added agent mode, but it's obvious that they're gunning for this market hard, and if I were into VS Code I would not personally choose to lose the ecosystem for marginally better agent mode.

The ecosystem will follow the users. If Cursor or Windsurf has better AI coding that’s where the users will be and the extensions will follow. You’re in the minority if you favor manual coding + extensions over something doing your job for you.

But that's a false dichotomy, Cursor is far from the only capable agentic option. Personally I switched back to using VS Code with Cline + Github Copilot (just for autocomplete and included model access to Gemini Pro 2.5/Claude 3.5/7 that I can use with Cline).

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

#376

Post by resize2996 »

sally_glance wrote: post #371
op00to wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sheer number of AI written message board posts might just make me stop reading the comments on sites like Reddit and HN. I wanted to stop anyway, this seems like a good push to encourage me to wean myself.

Every one of us leaving (not engaging/commenting) increases the share of AI generated comments (vs real users) the next iteration will train on. I'm not even sure which option is worse. Withdraw and let everyone dilute their own training data, or stay and feed them our mindset and experience...?

Build our own spaces.

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

#377

Post by bongodongobob »

jayd16 wrote: post #372
arresin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot owns the platform, had an amazing head start and yet still is the worst option available. I don’t mean to be harsh but this was a titanic fumble.

I'm curious what the cost per user is on Copilot. It doesn't make sense for them to be a loss leader so they're probably running the model at cost or a profit compared to the startups that have more of an incentive to scramble for market share.

I'm too lazy to grab my work laptop, but one of the funniest things about copilot to me is which one? There's M365 copilot, Teams Premium (which gives you copilot in Teams), browser extension, the coding plugin, and others. It's been extremely time consuming to field requests from our users because every time our help desk gets a request for it, they have to have a conversation about which one the user is asking about. They don't even know, and of course I can't blame them.

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

#378

Post by hello_newman »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #320

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 LL…

The moat is Windsurf’s custom LLM and the ops around it (training pipelines, fine-tuning, infra).

Codeium (Windsurf’s parent) started as a GPU optimization company, so they have deep expertise there. Unlike most agents that might just wrap OpenAI/Claude/etc Windsurf’s own model powers its code edits, not external API calls.

That’s where the defensibility is. better in-house models + efficient infra = stronger long-term moat

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

#380

Post by goodluckchuck »

retornam wrote: post #264
goodluckchuck wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If OpenAI just provides AI, then the various IDEs development wrappers / IDEs / low-code etc. can collectively bargain against OpenAI for low rates. If OpenAI has an alternative, then they can charge higher rates for all plugins/ etc. and give the market an alternative.

If enterprises require fewer software engineers, where will the market for IDE development wrappers come from?

If software engineers are more effective, I would expect there to be more software engineers. They’ll put out more and better code. More code means more engineers.

The contrary view is like saying gold miners are finding more gold, and it’s easier than ever, so we expect folks are going to leave town.

Post reply on HN