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

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

#631

Post by ivape »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #240
lukan wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are there actually only a few people in the world able to do this? The basic concept is out there. Lots of smart people studying hard to catch up to also be poached. No shortage of those I assume. Good trainingsdata still seems the most important to me. (and lots of hardware) Or does the specific training still involves lots of smart decisions all the time? And those small or big decisions make all the difference…

The basic concept plus a lot of money spent on compute and training data gets you pretraining. After that to get a really good model there’s a lot more fine-tuning / RL steps that companies are pretty secretive about. That is where the “smart decisions” and knowledge gained by training previous generations of sota models comes in. We’d probably see more companies training their own models if it was cheaper, for sure.…

I’d also add that no one predicted the emergent properties of LLMs as they followed the scaling laws hypothesis. GPT showed all kinds of emergent stuff like reasoning/sentiment analysis when we went up an order of magnitude on the number of parameters. We don’t don’t actually know what would emerge if we trained a quadrillion param model. SOTA will always be mysterious until we reach those limits, so, no, companies like Cursor will never be on the frontier. It takes too much money and requires seeking out things we haven’t ever seen before.

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

#632

Post by oooyay »

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…

I'll fill in some context. I think the value of Cursor as an IDE is probably somewhat ephemeral. It's mostly combating Microsoft's ambitions to keep other players busy and box them out of the market. Agents gain a lot of value from model context protocol and there's an amazingly short list of clients that fully support the protocol, but the VSCode Chat window is one of them: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients

I actually do prefer the view that having the agent built into an IDE brings me but I'll be damned if I'm forced to use CoPilot/OpenAI. Second to that, the agent does have access to a lot more contextual tools by being built into the editor like focused linting errors and test failures. Of course that demands your development environment is setup correctly and could be replicatable with Claude Code to some extent.

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

#634

Post by e1g »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #475
e1g wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a founder/CTO of an enterprise SaaS, and I code everything from data modeling, to algos, backend integrations, frontend architecture, UI widgets, etc. All in TypeScript, which is perfectly suited to LLMs because we can fit the types and repo map into context without loading all code. As to “why”: I’ve been coding for 25 years, and LLMs is the first technology that has a non-linear impact on my output. It’s simult…

> I’ve written millions of lines of revenue generating code This is a wild claim. Approx 250 working days in a year. 25 years coding. Just one million lines would be phenom output, at 160 lines per day forever . Now you are claiming multiple millions? Come on.

It's impossible as an IC on a team, or working where a concept of "tickets" exists. It's unavoidable as a solo founder, whether you're building enterprise systems or expanding your vision. Some details -

1. Before wife&kids, every weekend I would learn a library or a concept by recreating it from scratch. Re-implementing jQuery, fetch API via XHR, Promises, barebones React, a basic web router, express + common middlewares, etc. Usually, at least 1,000 lines of code every weekend. That's 1M+ over 25 years.

2. My last product is currently 400k LOCs, 95% built by me over three years. I didn't one-shot it, so assuming 2-3x ongoing refactors, that's more than 1M LOCs written.

3. In my current product repo, GitHub says for the last 6 months I'm +120k,-80k. I code less than I used to, but even at this rate, it's safely 100k-250k per year (times 20 years).

4. Even in open source, there are examples like esbuild, which is a side project from one person (cofounder and architect of Figma). esbuild is currently at ~150k LOCs, and GitHub says his contributions were +600k,-400k.

5. LOCs are not the same. 10k lines of algorithms can take a month, but 10K of React widgets is like a week of work (on a greenfield project where you know exactly what you're building). These days, when a frontend developer says their most extensive UI codebase was 100k LOCs in an interview, I assume they haven't built a big UI thing.

So yes, if the reference point is "how many sprint tickets is that", it seems impossible. If the reference point is "a creative outlet that aligns with startup-level rewards", I think my statement of "millions of lines" is conservative.

Granted, not all of it was revenue-generating - much was experimental, exploratory, or just for fun. My overarching point was that I build software products for (great) living, as opposed to a marketer who stumbled into Claude Code and now evangelizes it as some huge unlock.

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

#635

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

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…

One competitor to Claude Code that I don't hear much about is Jetbrains Junie. From my experience, the code it generates is as good as CC, and if you've purchased a Jetbrains license you probably have some amount of free Junie every month.

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

#636

Post by satvikpendem »

robryan wrote: post #156
satvikpendem wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC? Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for documentation fetching even comes close. That is the only reason why I still use Cursor, sometimes I have esoteric packages that must be used in my code and other IDEs will simply hallucinate due to not having such a robust docs feature, if any, which is useless to me, and I believe Claude Code also falls i…

Claude code can get pretty far simply calling `go doc` on packages.

That's great for Go, but unfortunately not all languages have such an option.

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

#637

Post by bluefirebrand »

ec109685 wrote: post #269
socalgal2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just curious because I'm inexperienced with all the latest tools here > - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) What is that? I have Gemini Code Assist installed in VSCode and I'm getting tab completion. (yes, LLM based tab completion) Which, as an aside I find useful when it works but also often extremely confusing to read. Like say in C++ I type int myVar = 123 The editor might show int myVar = 123; And it…

Tab completion in cursor lets you keep hitting tab and it will jump to next logical spot in file to keep editing or completing from.

Do people actually use this?

My experience with this has been hair-pullingly frustrating

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

#638

Post by bluefirebrand »

lelanthran wrote: post #518
LunaSea wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where the real test lies for Cursor and programming LLMs. Will users feel that a $200 subscription is worth it or not?

I think what everyone, including those programmers advocating coding agents, are forgetting is that if you can have a full time programmer for $200/m, then that becomes the new value of programming labour in the open market. IOW, the market will slowly but surely drive the labour rate for programming down to the cost of the cheapest coding agent. So, sure, boasting about a 10x speedo on boilerplate has good metrics,…

Hooray!

So how do I fight this as a programmer?

Because I have no interest in devaluing my skills with this crap, but unfortunately many others are all in!

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

#639

Post by bluefirebrand »

screye wrote: post #200

Works out for Google and the C-suite. Horrible for the employees. These fake-acquisitions are effectively arbitrage against employees, who get left holding nothing. Should be illegal and regulated. Not sure how the VCs get their cut. I'm guessing that Google can balance it out by participating in rounds for other startups in that VC's porfolio.

It is always the case that the employees get screwed

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

#640

Post by bluefirebrand »

anon7000 wrote: post #304
arresin wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tab completion is fast and the best available right now but is still so garbage that I turn it off 99% of the time because the suggestions are mostly noise.

I have the opposite experience, it’s at least 90% correct. For example, if I start writing the name of a function that I just added in a different file, tab will suggest the function, then jump to the top of the file to import it. If I’m changing the way something is called in 5 places, if I change it in the first place, tab will jump to make the same change in the other places. It’s honestly pretty spot on. Zed tab…

> I have the opposite experience, it’s at least 90% correct. For example, if I start writing the name of a function that I just added in a different file, tab will suggest the function, then jump to the top of the file to import it

Intellisense has done this for ages. A decade at least.

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