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OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

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

#571

Post by rglover »

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,…

If Microsoft were smart, they'd just acquire Cline (or fork it), make it an official VSCode feature and be done with it. It smokes Cursor and Windsurf and it's a free plugin you can just install in un-forked VSCode.

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

#572

Post by indymike »

justanything wrote: post #484
jillesvangurp wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the case here. Windsurf wasn't leading the agentic coding market. They were doing a decent job but others are bigger. Cursor has the brand recognition and Claude is getting a lot of recognition too. MS has github copilot which is still a good brand and Google has been catching up with Gemini. OpenAI has a new thing called codex but it isn't very good yet. I tried it and it's super flaky. Lot's of…

I wanna pick your brain a lil. Are you saying agentic AI has helped you replace devs that you would otherwise need for your startup? In your opinion, what should one do/learn to get a SDE/related gig now? What do you/other companies look for?

> I wanna pick your brain a lil. Are you saying agentic AI has helped you replace devs that you would otherwise need for your startup?

I need fewer devs to get more work done... but interestingly it has put a premium on experience because a lot of the "human work" is debugging and fixing where the LLM missed the mark. So less headcount, higher skill required.

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

#574

Post by rhubarbtree »

hello_newman wrote: post #378
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-te…

I suspect it’s also around handling large code bases, building out a prompt that is maximally useful via more conventional processing before passing to the LLM

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

#575

Post by __loam »

resters wrote: post #539
__loam wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI is so good at prose, why haven't I heard about any breakout best sellers?

openAI models are good at solid, fluent academic style prose. DeepSeek R1 can sound fresh and can use more "voices" that feel authentic to the reader. Grok-3 is close behind. Writing good prose is a far different skill than coming up with a compelling and innovative plot and style. As a data point, OpenAI now blocks o3 from doing the "continue where the story left off" test on works of fiction. It says "Sorry, I can'…

Wow that's great.

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

#577

Post by twodave »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #245
twodave wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you’re right (especially wrt things like security scanning), but you sort of have to include Azure DevOps in the conversation nowadays. I think the end goal for Microsoft is to get the larger organizations into ADO, either cross-pollinate pipelines and actions or just replace actions with pipelines at some point, and leave GitHub for simpler project structures and public codebases. That’s why you won’t see a ton…

I can say with a high level of confidence that the goal is definitely not to push larger orgs to ADO over GitHub. ADO is and will continue to be supported and you’re right that its project management features are much more advanced than GitHub, but the mission is not to push people off of ADO and into GitHub.

Your opening and closing statements aren’t mutually exclusive, but I can’t tell if one is a typo (or if so, which one it is).

I didn’t mean to imply that MS wanted to migrate anyone, just that the different offerings serve different kinds of customers, so you can’t really just compare GitLab to GitHub and say MS is lacking in serving some group of them.

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

#578

Post by tracerbulletx »

alexchantavy wrote: post #388
ignoramous wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bubble or not, given the exit, Windsurf's (Codeium) focus on enterprise sales motion has been rewarded rather handsomely: https://research.contrary.com/company/windsurf / mirror: https://archive.vn/ThWNz

Yeah, in the recent Lightcone Podcast episode, Varun was talking about how they have a lean eng team but large sales org. I thought that was super interesting for a dev tool since I was expecting a dev tool to involve bottom-up sales to the dev instead of top-down sales to a leader like a CTO or VP of Eng

thats how you spend a lot of time making something great that no one pays for and everyone demonizes you if you even try

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

#580

Post by milkshakes »

walthamstow wrote: post #531
sdwr wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot has every incumbent advantage, so if Cursor is doing halfway decent in the market (which it is), it's winning by default

Incumbent advantage of being in VS Code already? Thing is, Cursor is basically just VS Code, there's hardly any barrier to switching, so it's quite a weak advantage.

the incumbent advantage is the default distribution.

defaults matter

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