As a Vimmer, I'm not into VS Code forks. I really like the goose CLI[1] though. Some untapped market potential right there. 1: https://GitHub.com/block/goose
all IDEs have vim plugins
Vim has IDE plugins. Terminal life forever
OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
551–560 of 604 posts
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. That's the problem. You think the answer is no, but the answer is actually yes.
Could you elaborate? Power saw operators replaced traditional carpenter?
Of course any tool that makes a job easier means that less people are needed to do the same job. If demand doesn’t change the supply will naturally shrink.
So hypothetically 1 man can cut wood but it takes him 2 days to do a big job. With a power saw it takes him half a day so his output on this section of the job is amplified by 4x. Any tool that makes his life more trivial increases his output and therefore increases the supply of the product without touching demand. With an over supply the system will naturally lower in supply by replacing carpenters.
This happens for anything and any tool that makes someone’s occupation easier. You have to think in aggregate. It may be the increase is imperceptible as it only increases the efficiency of a worker by 1 percent which is nothing but in aggregate that translates to a 1 percent reduction in the work force. Of course reality is more complicated than that but I hope the example shows you what I’m saying.
And it gets even more complicated than this too because increasing supply can also increase demand because the product becomes cheaper. Or demand may have already been astronomically high so the increase in supply only meets the demand.
In general if the product is in equilibrium of supply and demand and you increase the efficiency of the worker producing the supply then you will reduce worker population because the job doesn’t pay well enough anymore and people leave or less people join. The system slowly comes back to equilibrium or it can oscillate back and forth between over supply and undersupply as it’s basically a control system. This is what’s been happening with software for the past 3 decades.
The idea that the power saw didn’t replace a carpenter is flat out wrong. The story is much more complicated than that but the reality is that in general it did replace some carpenters just like how vibe coding for sure is replacing some software engineers.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#553i fail to understand what makes this $3B valuation justified.
i built my personal code assistant after using cursor/windsurf/aider/cline because i was frustrated with how crappy they worked for my use case. i only program in python/js/html/css and i needed something better. only took me an hour of prompting and after that tinycoder basically built itself from there on out. i still use vscode to inspect the code sometimes, but i might replace vscode ultimately too.
source code at https://github.com/koenvaneijk/tinycoder and contributions welcome obviously.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If your assertion was true, we would see a hiring boom across the board, instead of mass layoffs and hiring freezes throughout our industry
That's fair, but enterprises are often naive and prone to groupthink.
It was just a few years ago when automakers and rental car companies unanimously decided (has they had been told to decide) that COVID-19 would reduce demand for cars. They cut production, sold off fleets, and almost immediately found themselves unable to keep up with demand.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#555i fail to understand what makes this $3B valuation justified. i built my personal code assistant after using cursor/windsurf/aider/cline because i was frustrated with how crappy they worked for my use case. i only program in python/js/html/css and i needed something better. only took me an hour of prompting and after that tinycoder basically built itself from there on out. i still use vscode to inspect the code somet…
If you think about it, facebook is just a ui over a database. Google is just a html form for a list of pages and hacker news can be replicated with a Microsoft Access.
If that seems stupid, is because it is. There are network effects and small UI benefits.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. That's the problem. You think the answer is no, but the answer is actually yes.
Could you elaborate? Power saw operators replaced traditional carpenter?
You can't really make a living anymore being a furniture maker. Even semi-famous people in the industry have a hard time doing it. Only a few make enough to feed their family.
Making cabinets, etc.. sure. But woodworking has drastically changed, and maybe programming is changing that way, too.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I was involved in an M&A once; my role was to evaluate the technology and determine how long it would take us to build a competitive product. If it was less than some X then we’d build it, greater than X and we’d buy. The function for X was not clear to me from my perspective; it had legal fees involved, etc. The person leading M&A said an intangible aspect of the price is what it does to the adjacent market. If the…
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Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#558i fail to understand what makes this $3B valuation justified. i built my personal code assistant after using cursor/windsurf/aider/cline because i was frustrated with how crappy they worked for my use case. i only program in python/js/html/css and i needed something better. only took me an hour of prompting and after that tinycoder basically built itself from there on out. i still use vscode to inspect the code somet…
If you think about it, facebook is just a ui over a database. Google is just a html form for a list of pages and hacker news can be replicated with a Microsoft Access. If that seems stupid, is because it is. There are network effects and small UI benefits.
yes but at least google provides excellent search results, facebook has all my friends and hacker news has well.. the latest news :-)
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. Probably. > And deliver them with far greater stability and polish That seems ... overly optimistic given MS's history.
Their devtools team is surprisingly competent when they choose to be. Pre-2015, people used Sublime Text, Atom, Textmate, Notepad++, Light Table, Brackets, Emacs/Vim, Intellij. VS code single handedly crushed all of them with code completion and language servers that require zero configuration. Emacs/Vim lost share, Jetbrains (and also Eclipse) were forced to release their own "lightweight" code editors, and everybod…
VS Code is pretty much the only exception to their overall quality level.
One exception in 50 years does not inspire confidence.
Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B
#560I've never heard of Windsurf before. I use Cursor daily however.