421–430 of 604 posts
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> I wonder how much of the value is really from the model > The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin The other stuff would take a team 6 months to implement. This is where the valuation comes from. Time to market, they are there TODAY.
6 months of anyone's time is not worth 3 billion dollars.
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…
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The value is in the prompts being sent to OpenAI. Massive training depository. Only thing better would be a social network, which supposedly they're working on.
But OpenAI already knows every single prompt sent to its models. They don't need to buy Windsurf for that.
And that's just on their models. They'd also get (at the very least) signals on their direct competition, if not straight up prompts+completions as well.
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But OpenAI already knows every single prompt sent to its models. They don't need to buy Windsurf for that.
Now they also get to see what is sent to Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, etc., and what is returned. At scale, for a prime area of concern.
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I’ve been a WindSurf customer since day one. It was my first true AI agentic experience. [Dev mode] While working on Alembic migrations I broke one of my migration files. After an hour of manual debugging I handed the task to WindSurf. It methodically checked every config file, applied the migrations one by one, and narrowed the issue to a single file. It rewrote the migration, verified the fix, wrote tests, ensured…
They're paying $3 billion because money is hyper plentiful for OpenAI at present. Basically because they can. Money isn't their problem right now, it's not a scarce resource (maybe it will be in the future of course). They're trying to capture and lock-in, so as the hurdles and regulations go up they're one of the huge winners left standing. Try replacing Uber today, it's impossible. Nobody is going to give you billi…
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But OpenAI already knows every single prompt sent to its models. They don't need to buy Windsurf for that.
Now they also get to see what is sent to Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, etc., and what is returned. At scale, for a prime area of concern.
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The value is in the prompts being sent to OpenAI. Massive training depository. Only thing better would be a social network, which supposedly they're working on.
But OpenAI already knows every single prompt sent to its models. They don't need to buy Windsurf for that.
All they really see as a model provider is little fragments of the picture, like trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa by knowing which paint swatches Leonardo used.
In other words, they only saw whatever Windsurf sent as context with a "fix the bugs" prompt stapled to it.
By owning Windsurf, they see the entire source code of what's being built, all the time, plus how the model is interacting with it.
There's a massive amount of value in what happens client-side, and behind the scenes. The "director's cut" of context.
Huge difference.
Incredible timeline to a $3B exit > Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf. > Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation. > Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a…
I’ve been a WindSurf customer since day one. It was my first true AI agentic experience. [Dev mode] While working on Alembic migrations I broke one of my migration files. After an hour of manual debugging I handed the task to WindSurf. It methodically checked every config file, applied the migrations one by one, and narrowed the issue to a single file. It rewrote the migration, verified the fix, wrote tests, ensured…
Incredible timeline to a $3B exit > Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf. > Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation. > Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a…
It's a bubble about to pop. That's where the value is coming from.
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JetBrains makes $400M in revenue and is 10+ years old. Cursor is 1 year old and makes $300M in revenue. One is going to be valued at a much higher multiple than the other.
I feel jetbrains is squandering an opportunity here. Cursor is significantly easier to build then any IDE in the jetbrains ecosystem. The technology jetbrains is very hard to replicate. While the technology cursor uses should be trivial to replicate. If jetbrains can combine there IDE technology with cursor technology, that would be ideal. I think the problem is jetbrains tech is sort of already very biased in a cert…