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

OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 712 posts

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#501

Post by sbarre »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #293
wadefletch wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

flip-flopping on pricing has led users to feel nickel-and-dimed i like cursor fine, but check out the forum/subreddit to see people talking like addicts, pissed their fix is getting more expensive i think this aggressive reaction is more pronounced for non-programmers who are making things for the first time. they tasted a new power and they don't want it taken away.

I agree with your take, but I still don't excuse anti consumer practices like that. It annoys me because this is a repeat problem in this space, where these companies don't take into account the market dynamics, or costs of their service. From the start I've been looking at these $20.00 subscriptions, and then my own personal api per token costs and been wondering how they aren't all bankrupt. Look no further than fo…

I think any "value add" business that has a primary product built on top of another larger business' non-commodity service(s) runs the risk of having to re-do their pricing in ways that are outside their control.

This is nothing new. I'm not sure if it's "anti-consumer" as much as it's just a risky play from a brand and customer happiness viewpoint. Because your prices can be forced up by your supplier, and your customers will be mad at you, not at your supplier.

I do also think it is on consumers - in some part - to go into it with eyes open and do their research.

Thankfully a product like Cursor is a monthly sub and not a big up-front investment so if you don't like - or can't afford - the new pricing, you can just stop paying.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#502

Post by mesmertech »

imiric wrote: post #467
mesmertech wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP but this is smth I've vibecoded using cursor: https://bestphoto.ai/ MRR ~$150. It basically started as a clone of my other site: https://aieasypic.com (MRR 2.5k, 5-8k/mo rev) since I was having trouble keeping code context in mind and claude was pretty bad at doing full features with the tech stack I used for that site(Django BE, NextJS FE) making adding new features a pain, so I completely switched to a s…

Those are exactly the kind of AI slop products I would expect to be vibe coded. You've created yet another wrapper around LLM APIs where the business model is charging a premium over existing services. Your revenue depends on the ignorance of customers to not realize they can get the same or better service for cheaper from companies that actually do the hard work. I bet SEO hacking is really important to you. It's ir…

Sure man, any product you don't like is just "another wrapper". I guess every website is just a wrapper over postgres or wordpress too. I run my own serverless GPU containers on runpod with a combination of comfy and my own fastapi servers using diffusers, not that it'd even matter if I just used some third party APIs. It originally even started as smth that was hacked together using 4x 4070ti supers in my basement that I then moved to runpod. Indiehacking is mostly marketing, nobody cares if you built some technically beautiful thing.

Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do you have products that you made by yourself that are used by hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites, 2 of which I named above

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#503

Post by mark_l_watson »

e1g wrote: post #243
jhickok wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give me an idea of how much interaction would be $50-$100 per day? Like are you pretty constantly in a back and forth with CC? And if you wouldn’t mind, any chance you can give me an idea of productivity gains pre/post LLM?

Yes, a lot of usage, I’d guess top 10% among my peers. I do 6-10hrs of constant iterating across mid-size codebases of 750k tokens. CC is set to use Opus by default, which further drives up costs. Estimating productivity gains is a flame war I don’t want to start, but as a signal: if the CC Max plan goes up 10x in price, I’m still keeping my subscription. I maintain top-tier subscription to every frontier service (~$…

Mostly to save money (I am retired) I mostly use Gemini APIs. I used to also use good open weight models on groq.com, but life is simpler just using Gemini.

Ultimately, my not using the best tools for my personal research projects has zero effect on the world but I am still very curious what elite developers with the best tools can accomplish, and what capability I am ‘leaving on the table.’

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#504

Post by lvl155 »

adamoshadjivas wrote: post #76
extr wrote: post #56

IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of…

Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans. I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the ne…

Which is interesting because Sonnet is cheap and Opus is not on par with o3 for tasks where you want to deploy it.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#505

Post by mark_l_watson »

bilsbie wrote: post #295
e1g wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, my CC usage is regularly $50-$100 per day , so their Max plan is absolutely great value that I don’t expect to last.

Is there a cheap version for hobbyists? Or what’s the best thing for hobbyists to use, just cut and paste?

If you are a hobbyist, just use Google’s gemini-cli (currently free!) on a half dozen projects to get experience.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#506

Post by neilv »

taspeotis wrote: post #318
neilv wrote: post #316

> Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, [...] Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology. [...] Google didn’t share how much it was paying to bring on the team. OpenAI was previously reported to be buying W…

If they acquire a company they might need approval due to anti-trust. If the people instead just quit their jobs and start working at Google … nothing to see here.

And everyone who didn't get a Google employee badge agreed because "x%" was big enough?

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#507

Post by metadat »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #367
metadat wrote: post #21

It's another Character.ai situation [0]. Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company. What a harsh time to work for an AI startup as a rank and file employee! I wonder how the founders justify going along with it inside their mind. [0] Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer…

> I wonder how the founders justify going along with it $2.4 billion.

This reads like a Dr. Evil plot.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#508

Post by [deleted] »

BrtByte wrote: post #463
dalemhurley wrote: post #59

Cursor (and Garry Tan’s X post) has shown us that the VC money is propping up these companies astounding growth, the only way for them to become profitable is to increase the cost per a request, which means they need to innovate like crazy. The moat is paper thin. GitHub has open sourced copilot. The open source community is working hard on their own projects. No doubt Cursor is moving fast to create amazing innovati…

It feels like we're watching a hype cycle in real time

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#509

Post by mark_l_watson »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #314
extr wrote: post #56

IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of…

> - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) My local ollama + continue + Qwen 2.5 coder gives good tab completion with minimal latency; how much better is Cursor’s tab completion model? I’m still weary of letting LLM edit my code so my local setup gives me sufficient assistance with tab completion and occasional chat.

I often use the same setup. Qwen 2.5 coder is very good on its own, but my Emacs setup doesn’t also use web search when that would be appropriate. I have separately been experimenting with the Perplexity Sonar APIs that combine models and search, but I don’t have that integrated with my Emacs and Qwen setup - and that automatic integration would be very difficult to do well! If I could ‘automatically’ use a local Qwen, or other model, and fall back to using a paid service like Perplexity or Gemini grounding APIs just when needed that would be fine indeed.

I am thinking about a new setup as I write this: in Emacs, I explicitly choose a local Ollama model or a paid API like Gemini or OpenAI, so I should just make calling Perplexity Sonar APIs another manual choice. (Currently I only use Perplexity from Python scripts.)

If I owned a company, I would frequently evaluate privacy and security aspects of using commercial APIs. Using Ollama solves that.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#510

Post by submeta »

i_love_retros wrote: post #496
submeta wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company with over 700 employees. And there are tons of use cases where a simple CRUD app is sufficient. Or where glue code needs to be written / changed for legacy systems. Or where an OS system like Camunda is deployed and needs to be configured, workflows developed, etc The reality of companies out there is much simpler than the challenges of a startup that needs to build systems that are state of the a…

Who's reviewing all the code you are churning out with ai? If everyone is used to maintaining not developing software it doesn't sound like they'd be best suited to have to review lots of complex pull requests. It sounds like you are moving very fast and probably have people just clicking "approve". Good luck for the future to who ever owns your company!

When I setup systems, I thoroughly document them, test them, develop them according to architectural best practices. My AI assisted code generation is lightyears ahead of what I see in companies I have worked for. The best they —the companies—-do is hire expensive consultants. Who sell them preconfigured system. And when you look into those systems you won’t believe your eyes either. Because you instantly realise that those devs do not know much about architectural patterns, aout systems design, about software development best practices. Yet they sell their systems as well, because they offer a niche product where they have only a handful competitors.

In that setting someone with solid software engineering background using AI to solve problems is like a wizard from the team‘s perspective.

When I worked for startups I was constantly panicking to miss the latest tech trends, and I feared that I would be not marketable in case I didn’t catch up. But in mature companies things work much slower. They work with decades old technology. In that setting not the latest tech counts but being able to solve problems, with whatever means you can.

Post reply on HN