OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-06/openai-reaches-agreement-to-buy-startup-windsurf-for-3-billion

by swyx • 1 year ago

667 553 1 year ago

bloomberg.com

dtagames• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/ocXFo

jeanlucas• 1 year ago

oh wow, meaning I won't need to pay for Windsurf? What do you think will be the monetization path for this?

nialse• 1 year ago

Probably the other way around. Windsurf and co (Aider, Cursor) drives a heap of traffic to their API from which OpenAI actually profit. They just need to have their own tool to lock customers in their ecosystem.

bionhoward• 1 year ago

Dumb, fail for user freedom, nothing owned by OpenAI can be used to … create AI or anything that competes with them: scheduled AI, AI agents, AI tools, AI coding, chat, audio, image gen, video gen, shopping, and oh, anything the AI can do, soon social networking and hardware, what’s left that doesn’t compete with these assholes?

ChatGPT is a great breakthrough but it’s wasted if everyone has to worry about a noncompete with it. Seriously, how is it not insane to think we should outsource our thoughts and agree never to use the thoughts to compete with the thinker? Who wants to live in a world where nobody thinks and nobody can make anything competitive with their “Saviour Machine?”

Anybody who would join an org like that for a few billion dollars is a sell out. It’s an AI safety nightmare, too. I’m just flabbergasted millions of noobs accept not to compete with intelligence, wtf is this world, if you can’t use your thoughts to compete with your thinker, what is left for you? lol this is worse than black mirror

frabcus2• 1 year ago

Where's this non-compete clause? In ChatGPT T&Cs?

bartimus2• 1 year ago

They didn't even buy an IDE since windsurf is more like a VS code plugin.

So what was it exactly that was worth the 3B that they couldn't replicate themselves? Their prompts? Their training sets? Their users or user data?

thomasfromcdnjs• 1 year ago

I'd guess the prompts and employees.

I've found Windsurf more reliable/efficient than any other editors by leagues. How ever they have named the tools, crafted their prompts and generally how their internals reason is just on the money. I don't think that is easy to replicate, iterating on prompts over product releases whilst not pissing off your user base constantly is a feat in of itself.

bartimus2• 1 year ago

Then perhaps it's about bringing in the human talent that wrote those prompts.

XCSme2• 1 year ago

To be honest, Windsurf doesn't work like half of the time, so it's more likely their users, the data, and their branding/marketing potential.

TiredOfLife5• 1 year ago

Windsurf/Codeium plugin is at least 3 years old.

patapong• 1 year ago

Maybe time? OpenAI has access to basically infinite capital right now, if they believe this will be an importnat market and they could save a few months on launching this acquisition may be worth it for them.

KhazAkar• 1 year ago

Pure speculation without official voice.

infecto2• 1 year ago

Windsurf probably sees this as a win. I still think they're behind in some areas, Cursor's Agent feels faster and more responsive but Windsurf nails the rest. The documentation is far better, and the overall developer experience is more solid. Cursor still feels like a hacked-on plug-in in a broken VS Code fork. Even small touches, like built-in Linux install instructions, show Windsurf's polish.

_fat_santa• 1 year ago

Its the little things like having baked in instructions to install Windsurf on linux.

When I went to download Cursor the other day I noticed that they do not offer any .deb/.rpm packages and just offer the FlatPak (could be a Snap I'm not sure). This just tells me they really dont understand the community and just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 1 year ago

There's a difference between understanding the community and prioritizing investments.

I'm sure Cursor has more than few devs that primarily use Linux...

charcircuit• 1 year ago

just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.

This what all developers want for a platform. They can release their software and not have to worry about some "maintainer" switching out dependencies out from under them introducing bugs and crashes in what they shipped.

Cursor ships as an AppImage.

zero-g• 1 year ago

Windsurf has plugins for Jetbrains products, for vim, for emacs, for Visual Studio (not code), XCode, and even eclipse. They try to get as much of the market as possible, while Cursor focuses on the core functionality.

Whenever I tried Windsurf Editor, or their plugin for vim, and Intellij, it didn't feel polished at all. The basic function of autocomplete felt much much snappier on Cursor, and even on GitHub Copilot for vim/intellij.

threeseed• 1 year ago

https://www.cursor.com/downloads

Linux builds are in the AppImage format.

Which makes a lot more sense to me than deb/rpm when it's just a single executable.

TiredOfLife5• 1 year ago

appimage is more Linux than .deb/.rpm.

h8hawk• 1 year ago

In my experience, Windsurf was significantly more effective when working with a big codebase.

whywhywhywhy5• 1 year ago

Windsurf goes looking into the codebase and learning context before attacking the problem in my experience. Often Cursor tries it's best to just guess the solution without context and only really resorts to going deeper when you tell it they fails.

I find if I tell Windsurf to look at something it will, Cursor I sometimes lay everything out for it and it just doesn't even read it.

Ultimately though once you run out of requests on Windsurf it's very weak without Claude though, and the top up requests are burnt through too quickly.

knes2• 1 year ago

Have you checked Augmentcode.com? On reddit/youtube people are praising it for how well it handle large codebase compared to Cursor and Windsurf

dbbk2• 1 year ago

Of course it's a win, dude that cloned a GitHub repo is now personally a billionaire

ramoz2• 1 year ago

Right wtf are we talking about. People are walking away with generational wealth.

__jl__• 1 year ago

Here are my two cents on cursors versus windsurf approach:

CURSOR shifted to a more agentic approach even for chat requests to reduce input tokens.

Previously, they used the good old RAG pattern with code dumps: Request with user added files -> Retrieval (when Codebase enabled) -> LLM requests with combined context from user and retrieval.

Now they seem to be doing something like this: Request -> LLM with tools to search code base and/or user-added files

I get constant search tool calls even for user-added files. Big reduction in input token but I think performance suffers as well.

WINDSURF is still willing to dump code into the context, which gives them an edge in some cases (presumably at a cost of input tokens).

Windsurf is willing to spent to acquire customers (lower subscription cost, higher expenses for llm calls). Cursor has a huge customer base and is working on making it sustainable by a) reducing costs (see above) and b) increasing revenue (e.g. "Pro" requests for 0.05 with more input and output token).

crimsonnoodle58• 1 year ago

$3B for a fork of an IDE which Microsoft keeps crippling by the day by making it's best extensions not work with forks (eg. C++, Python, C#, Remote SSH, etc)..

sidcool2• 1 year ago

That's a oversimplified view. It doesn't matter if it's a fork. It has customers and paying ones. And it has a brand. That's more than enough. $3 billion would be peanuts for OpenAI

codyvoda2• 1 year ago

given that they lose >$4B/year I guess everything is peanuts

lolinder8• 1 year ago

If it acquired those customers in an environment where Microsoft was not enforcing their marketplace terms it very much does matter if they have a plan for supporting plugins in the future.

Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's? Will they rally jointly behind a single open store? They need to have an answer to Microsoft here, and for the good of the ecosystem I hope they do have an answer, but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.

Androider3• 1 year ago

VSCode must have over 100 times the user base of Windsurf and Cursor combined. All Microsoft needs to do is implement a halfway decent version of the context management features these forks added. That alone would be enough to halt user migration.

For users who've already switched to the forks, the cost of switching back is essentially zero, especially if Microsoft begins introducing changes that break fork compatibility. In that case, the migration direction would reverse almost overnight.

avisser• 1 year ago

And it has a brand

Didn't they change names months ago? I know them as Codeium.

whywhywhywhy5• 1 year ago

It's easy to downplay as a fork because it's such a young product but ultimately if people use Cursor or Windsurf instead of VSCode then it is VSCode that needs to worry about being upstream from them and Cursor or Windsurf making their extensions no longer work with VSCode.

moralestapia3• 1 year ago

Microsoft "owns" OpenAI, which now owns Windsurf, which cloned VSCode.

I think it's going to be fine.

This is xAI buying Twitter, with extra steps.

bix67• 1 year ago

~$40M ARR makes this a 75x

Cursor yesterday was a 45X for comparison (9B, 200M)

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/openai-is-reportedly-in-ta...

chipgap982• 1 year ago

Growth rate matters a lot though. If they are growing quickly that multiple reduces quickly

lispisok2• 1 year ago

Easy to grow when you're selling one dollar bills for 75 cents

bix67• 1 year ago

You think they can double every year for the next 5 years?

airjason• 1 year ago

keep in mind a lot of $3B is ClosedAI paper money, so 75x ain't that ridiculous.

bix67• 1 year ago

Do you know the cash / equity split?

ergocoder3• 1 year ago

Investment vs. acquisition is going to have different price points.

At $40M ARR, I assume the founders don't really need to make more money and are not in a rush to sell. Therefore, the price would go even higher. This can't be compared with investment where the founders still retain the control.

Cursor is probably the fastest growing company in the history of our modern civilization. Achieving a really high multiple doesn't seem out of line.

I'm skeptical of Cursor but I can see why they achieve that high valuation.

sidcool2• 1 year ago

Now their models may have limits on how VS code and Cursor use it. Competition heating up!

Androider3• 1 year ago

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, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.

Both Windsurf and Cursor are riddled with bugs that don't exist upstream, _especially_ in their AI assistant features beyond the VSCode core. Context management which is supposed to be the core featured added is itself incredibly poorly implemented [1].

Ultimately, the future isn't about a smarter editor, it's about a smarter teammate. Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets: generating PRs with tests, taking feedback, and iterating like a real collaborator.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/microsoft_vs_code_sub...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1kbt790/rules_in_49...

onlyrealcuzzo2• 1 year ago

At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.

We've seen this before with Office.

We'll see it again.

rvz4• 1 year ago

...as done with Teams.

Microsoft Build is this month [0] and it will tell where they are going next (other than price cuts).

I'm expecting disappointment for now, but also expecting GitHub Copilot to be upgraded. Then we'll see if they are ahead or so far behind.

[0] https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/home

blitzar2• 1 year ago

They don't even need to be good - just in the bundle you (your company) are already paying for and the competition can't compete.

CptanPanic• 1 year ago

At the speed that AI programming is going, there will be something else that they are falling behind of that will exist in a year. Just like Agents now, they are adding them, but will always be a step behind progress.

timabdulla• 1 year ago

I mean, the fact that OpenAI, at the bleeding edge of it all, has decided to buy an IDE is a rather strong hint that the future of agents handling entire engineering tickets might be further out than many believe.

If autonomous agents were just around the corner, then why wouldn't OpenAI bet on their own Codex product obviating (most) need for an IDE and save themselves the $3 billion?

bix67• 1 year ago

It sounds like the openAI team is overburdened (I guess they aren’t AI super users yet) so this may be their only option. Easy entry into a key segment, at least for now, and locks out competitors.

osigurdson• 1 year ago

This is a good point. It is already the case that unless you deeply review every Windsurf change you will have zero understanding of your codebase. If it gets 1000X better in the next 3 years why would anyone look at code at all?

Of course, back to reality. Today, at least in my workflow, I use / like Windsurf but it is a small part of what I am doing. For any code I want to keep I mostly write it by hand (using vim for a very bare-bones / cognitive mode experience). For me, the real flow state occurs in vim while ChatGPT and Windsurf are great for exploration.

slt20213• 1 year ago

why OpenAI purchased windsurf instead of prompting openai to create something like windsurf?

this is the question i am still asking...

macrolime2• 1 year ago

They might just want a way to quickly collect data needed for fine-tuning the next generation of programming agents.

robinhood• 1 year ago

"riddled with bugs". "incredibly poorly implemented". Man, what are you talking about? Your comment seems based on nothing but what you read online.

Have you used Cursor on a daily basis? I have. Every day for six months now. I haven't encountered a single bug that prevent me to work.

Moreover, while Microsoft tries to catch up lately, it's still very far behind, especially on the "tab autocompletion" front.

arjunaaqa• 1 year ago

Plus, cursor & windsurf excel in user experience which is an alien concept to Microsoft.

Androider3• 1 year ago

I use Cursor in anger every day. The core idea behind Cursor is genuinely smart. But the execution is like the classic "unfinished horse" meme [0].

Microsoft provides the editor base, foundation models provide the smarts, and Cursor provides some, in my experience, extremely buggy context management features. There is no moat.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/unfinished-horse-drawing-flam...

hobo_mark2• 1 year ago

I have tried (stopped a couple months ago). The Python extensions broke all the time while they manually patched around the latest MS release a few days later. Syntax highlighting glitched every other day requiring a full reload. Remote dev via SSH or tunnels also randomly stopped working. Liveshare... Essentially they do not own the platform their core product is built on.

Maybe it's fine if you only do local development in other languages (Javascript?), but I completely swore it off.

kasey_junk3• 1 year ago

I have. It’s ~fine. The only feature difference it has currently to vs code that makes a difference to me is allowing multiple files for rules.

Meanwhile GitHub web integration is approaching seamless in vs code. To the point I often forget I’m in a browser instead of the app, until an extension I use doesn’t work.

serjester• 1 year ago

As a counterpoint, I also use cursor as my daily driver and I have been tempted to switch many times because of the endless bugs. Just take a look at their forum.

prawn• 1 year ago

I've tried both Cursor and VS Code with AI in the agent/edit mode. They both seem similar enough. Is there another mode I haven't found where Cursor has a distinct advantage? If so, I'd like to try it.

I gave up on Cursor because my trial ran out, while VS Code with Copilot doesn't seem to charge me anything.

karn97• 1 year ago

I dont care about a vibe coders experience

doix• 1 year ago

At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.

I agree with the first part, I'm much less optimistic about the second part. I suspect they will create something that is worse, but cheaper if you already pay for Github/Office 365/whatever. Then many large enterprises will switch to save money whilst the engineers complain, just like with Teams.

preciousoo2• 1 year ago

If the VS Code team are delivering the product, I have some amount of trust. If it’s the VS team, good luck to everyone involved

pjmlp6• 1 year ago

They already succeedd well enough that VSCode is the only Electron app I tolerate on my private systems, naturally on device assigned ones I have less control.

Aeolun• 1 year ago

That seems pretty bold. I still find myself switching to basically anything but the VS code copilot agent any chance I get.

madeofpalk• 1 year ago

I mean they already have. GitHub Copilot was the first LLM coding tool before "LLM" was in the lexicon. MS/Github kind of squandered their lead with it, but they released Agent Mode a few months back https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...

Szpadel• 1 year ago

For someone that never used windsurf, what features does it have that GitHub copilot does not? Reading their webpages I didn't spot any "killer feature" that would convince me to switch.

I always felt that cursor and windsurf should be just extension to vscode instead of a fork. Was there some missing functionality is vscode that was missing? Is it still missing?

There are some extensions that work in this way and allow to use multiple implementations depending on task at hand without any long term commitment.

I feel like such fragmentation is by artificial just to lock users in single ecosystem.

jstummbillig• 1 year ago

It can write a lot of code, that works, better than vscode can (right now).

It's in a lot of ways the OpenAI story itself: Can they keep an edge? Or is there at least something that will keep people from just switching product?

Who knows. People have opinions, of course. OpenAIs opinion (which should reasonably count for something, them being the current AI-as-a-product leader) is worth $3B as of today.

ZeroTalent2• 1 year ago

It's better at coding, but they are essentially paying for users.

I would also argue that the product could be built over two weekends with a small team. They offer some groundbreaking solutions, but since we know that they work and how, it's easy to replicate them. That also means they have significant talent there.

Hence, they are also buying the employees.

The code base itself is basically worth nothing, in my opinion.

oefrha• 1 year ago

The differentiator of Cursor is it’s way smarter at basic code completion than GitHub Copilot. I pay for Cursor instead of GitHub Copilot even though I get the latter for free from open source contributions, and I made that decision after five minutes of usage after using Copilot for what, more than a year? I won’t even talk about how Cursor guesses where I’m going to edit next and makes the correct edit most of the time, just the fact that Copliot makes completions that result in unbalanced parentheses/braces all the time and Cursor doesn’t makes the switch a no-brainer; that’s not even a fucking AI problem, you just need to look around and see that function you just completed already has a closing curly brace, all it takes is some traditional AST analysis if your model is dumb. (Copilot made zero progress on that issue during my time using it, but I can’t say if that was fixed after I ditched it.)

horns4lyfe• 1 year ago

The feature they have over copilot is “not sucking”

johntarter5• 1 year ago

I'm going back and forth between Windsurf and Github Copilot right now. Windsurf's development iteration speed is much fast and features are added faster.

For example, Github only autocompletes based on what file you have opened in the current editor's tab. Windsurf indexes your entire code base and seems able to autocomplete based on what other files you have in your project. Autocomplete also spans across multiple lines and open tabs.

Windsurf's agentic tool (Cascade) can run terminal commands and read the output without opening a terminal like copilot. It can undo the agent's actions easier than Copilot. Though I think Cursor is superior in that regard, it can undo multiple checkpoints.

Still evaluating Windsurf but it, Cursor, and Claude Code are all more sophisticated than Github copilot at the moment. I'm sure copilot will catchup but by that time the other tools may have already iterated ahead.

arresin• 1 year ago

Copilot owns the platform, had an amazing head start and yet still is the worst option available. I don’t mean to be harsh but this was a titanic fumble.

beardedwizard5• 1 year ago

GitHub has been failing upward for more than 5 years. They could have totally dominated software development and security - failed. Could have been the undisputed champion of code hosting - failed. Should have dominated development co-pilots - failed.

I actually find it a little reassuring that they can't seem to get out of their own way.

aravindputrevu2• 1 year ago

I still can't believe how they let Cursor (which is amazing until somepoint) take away all the shine.

This reminds me of "big companies moves slow.." line.

jayd16• 1 year ago

I'm curious what the cost per user is on Copilot. It doesn't make sense for them to be a loss leader so they're probably running the model at cost or a profit compared to the startups that have more of an incentive to scramble for market share.

bigbinary• 1 year ago

These are investment plays a company makes when holding too much money, and not a smart move this early in the technology imo

Buying competition while everyone’s still fighting might straddle you with a lame horse

dist-epoch2• 1 year ago

Cursor ($9 bil) has a higher valuation than JetBrains ($7 bil). Think about that.

mrweasel5• 1 year ago

Tells me that the markets ability to sensibly valuate companies is pretty messed up.

cellis• 1 year ago

I never did like JetBrains primary product, IntelliJ. It felt clunky even compared to Eclipse for Java, let alone VSCode for … everything. DataGrip is the lone standout imo, but as of the last update I paid for, it didn’t have even basic copilot

rchaud3• 1 year ago

Non-public numbers may as well be pulled out of thin air. WeWork was a $50bn company according to its VC bagholders, and that was marked down by 80% once they released their books to the general public.

aledalgrande• 1 year ago

What did OpenAI buy for $3B? That's what I'm wondering.

marricks2• 1 year ago

Wow, folks almost had me convinced MS turned a new leaf 5 years ago.

Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: embrace, extend, extinguish.

pjmlp6• 1 year ago

Nah, folks keep giving human behaviours to big corporations instead of understanding everyone is in the game for the shareholders.

tomnipotent• 1 year ago

Do you consider the Microsoft-managed plug-in marketplace and infrastructure to be a private or public resource? From my understanding Microsoft has never been vague on the position that the plugin marketplace is exclusive to the official VS Code distribution, and the TOS specifically forbids forks from doing so.

Cursor and other forks have decided to circumvent this, some even going so far as to use proxies to bypass restrictions.

I'm not convinced Microsoft owes other billion dollar companies free access to a product they've built, curated, and supported for over a decade. Plug-in authors are not restricted from publishing their products on competing marketplaces.

johntarter5• 1 year ago

Satya's talked about how some acquired companies such as LinkedIn and Github are allowed to operate independently for the most part and keep their culture. Or else we'd all be using Teams instead of the LinkedIn messaging feature!

m3kw92• 1 year ago

Microsoft is slow af for a company that size. Maybe yeah, they are slow because of that size. Don’t bet on them out accelerating a startup, the evidence so far in the past year is that they will stay a year behind every year

leonidasv2• 1 year ago

The thing is: we should not need standalone editors just to use AI coding agents. They could be just plugins, but Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that. Windsurf has a "plugin edition" for JetBrains IDEs that works really, really well[0] (they also have a VSCode plugin[1] but it's lacking in comparison).

However, given that JetBrains also have their own AI offering[2], I'm not sure how long that will last too...

[0] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-windsurf-plugin-f...

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Codeium....

[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/

owendarko2• 1 year ago

There are already a bunch of open source, free, and popular "AI coding agent" extensions for VS Code:

1) Cline (1.4mil downloads)

2) Roo Code (a fork of Cline, 450k downloads)

Still a drop in the bucket compared to Cursor in terms of # of users, but they're growing pretty fast.

Disclaimer: I maintain Kilo Code, which competes with 1) and 2) so I'm pretty familiar with this space/the growth patterns.

Frotag• 1 year ago

Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that.

What doesn't the current API allow plugins to do? I'm guessing custom UI stuff that lives outside a panel?

no_wizard4• 1 year ago

I suspect JetBrains will never limit this. I've yet to recall anything in the past where they have done this even when they have a similar offering.

In fact, their own AI extension appears to be pluggable in and of itself. I think they see the value in being easy to adapt different AI solutions to rather than trying to only provide their own.

silverwind• 1 year ago

They could be just plugins

No, they should be LSPs so that they can be integrated into any editor, not just VSCode.

iambateman• 1 year ago

Is windsurf essentially the same as cursor? I didn’t realize there was something similar for JetBrains but if it’s a cursor-equivalent for JB that would be wonderful.

sanderjd3• 1 year ago

I haven't found any of the jetbrains options (including Windsurf) nearly as satisfying to use as Cursor. But YMMV I guess!

aravindputrevu2• 1 year ago

I completely disagree and feel MS would never do it. Not a MS Employee, but they have moved on from such battles.

They should have restricted the Marketplace several years ago, however, they are doing it now.

With C++, they are part of MFC's, they are the legal owners, not like Google vs Oracle in case of Java.

Lastly, with AI Code IDEs I think yes, there is a case, the need for IDE might be very less. Like a steering on a self driving car.

pjmlp6• 1 year ago

ISO C++ has nothing to do with MFC.

wkat42423• 1 year ago

Why should they have restricted the marketplace? It's really annoying imo that they lock vs codium out of the more useful plugins like the SSH remote one. However luckily most only take a setting or two to enable anyway.

behnamoh• 1 year ago

At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.

Microsoft software quality has gone downhill recently, and I'm not going to bet on them delivering something more polished than WS and Cursor here.

Side: all images on Microsoft websites are low resolution! it's like they don't even check their own website.

moi23882• 1 year ago

30% of their code is now written with AI.

Their “programmers” are more busy with making blogs and videos than functioning tests or technical documentation, and they start using JavaScript and Python for everything.

I’m not surprised their quality went to shit. There are some pearls left, C# in general is pretty good, and Aspire is becoming quite neat.

The latter I think mainly because David Fowler is just a great developer

mliker2• 1 year ago

Agreed. Especially with tools like Claude Code, which can get better over time and remove the need to use Windsurf and Cursor.

tough• 1 year ago

Github Copilot is pretty much the same UI as cursor on vscode already

cheema333• 1 year ago

UI may be close. Functionality is very very different. Copilot is $10/month. Cursor is $20/month. I canceled my Copilot subscription after 2 months of using both. Compares to competition, Copilot has been garbage for quite some time.

dontlikeyoueith2• 1 year ago

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.

Onavo• 1 year ago

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 everybody else became mostly irrelevant (except perhaps Sublime Text since it has the best native performance out of all editors).

elevatortrim• 1 year ago

Microsoft is owing its bad reputation to Windows, Office, Sharepoint!!!, Teams (and more?). The quality of developer tools and languages (C#, Visual Studio, Code and .NET Ecosystem, Azure UI is also great) from Microsoft has been flawless (with some exceptions like webforms, or ui code generation tools of the past).

dmitrygr• 1 year ago

Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets

Care to place a bet?

sanderjd3• 1 year ago

I'm frankly very skeptical of your last paragraph. That's not at all what seems useful to me. But we'll see!

But I agree with you about the first part, and I think it's awesome for me as a user that all this competition to build a matter mousetrap is happening right now! I'm not as certain as you are that Microsoft will end up building a better version. It's definitely one of the likely outcomes. But it's also totally plausible that Cursor or Windsurf can win the race, even if they need to replace every single one of the MS extensions and entirely diverge the core IDE from upstream. These products are well capitalized and it's just not that hard to build the core pieces of an IDE.

999900000999• 1 year ago

Ultimately, the future isn't about a smarter editor, it's about a smarter teammate. Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets: generating PRs with tests, taking feedback, and iterating like a real collaborator.

I think a few options for this already exist, but honestly they don't go far enough. I want something like an AI scrum master, for hyper agile teams, that can task out smaller tickets to AI sub agents.

I would integrate this thing in with something like an AI powered Jira.

Two arguments exists.

1. I need to take about 6 months off and start building this now, even if I don't know exactly how I'll get it done. Between a combination of vibe coding and maybe a bit of outsourced work ( looking at Eastern Europe), I could get this done with my personal funds.

2. To do this properly would probably require tens of millions of dollars. I'll probably burn myself out trying to do it solo without ultimately getting to a sellable product.

The biggest issue here is to actually scale I would need to either have users bring their own LLM keys or have tens of thousands to spend on LLM tokens.

AlwaysRock4• 1 year ago

I was a little late to jump on the cursor bandwagon but finally downloaded it because i liked the LLM chat interface in the sidebar. By the time my free trial ran out, VSCode had added a LLM chat interface in the sidebar. Yes Cursor had a bit better auto complete and maybe a few other things but it wasnt good enough that it was worth paying for.

But I'm glad OpenAI is getting into the tooling space in this way. I cant wait to use all the cool features they build after VSCode rips them off.

cheema333• 1 year ago

By the time my free trial ran out, VSCode had added a LLM chat interface in the sidebar.

I am guessing you are talking about GitHub Copilot when you say VSCode. GitHub Copilot is far far inferior product when compared to Cursor, Windsurf or Augment Code. Most people who try almost any Copilot alternative for a reasonable amount of time end up canceling their Copilot subscription. I did, after two months of using both.

FuckButtons• 1 year ago

I think you’re being overoptimistic about the skill ceiling that this generation of Ai is likely to have.

DanHulton• 1 year ago

Yeah. Every time I see entirely unfounded claims like that, I remember that I've been seeing them for literal years now. While there have definitely been improvements in AI capability, they have largely been very marginal, while the claimed "will handle entire engineering tickets" capability requires huge leaps in capability and reliability that _we just have not seen evidence for._

Mentally, I'm replacing claims like this with "it will do magic!" and I think I'm just about as likely to be correct.

joshwcomeau• 1 year ago

++. Was surprised I had to scroll so far to find someone saying this!

3abiton• 1 year ago

This is the right take, but long term. Short term, it's just about investor hype. Cursor is becoming more mainstream and if OpenAI falls behind on this, they'll be losing momentum. But yes, the fields moves so fast, it'll be totally different in a year or 2. Does anyone recall langchain?

re5i5tor• 1 year ago

I have to admit skepticism re: “far greater stability and polish” from MS

cft• 1 year ago

I am slightly more optimistic, because the API may not be fully centralized- there may be more than one foundational AI company in the end. Like WhatsApp exists because there's the iOS/Android duopoly, an agent-neutral IDE from a non-foundational company without its own API aspirations may continue to exist

maccard• 1 year ago

Ultimately, the future isn't about a smarter editor, it's about a smarter teammate. Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets: generating PRs with tests, taking feedback, and iterating like a real collaborator.

I disagree, but would love to be wrong. These tools exploded onto the scene and were massive productivity helpers, but since their initial integrations they’ve churned rather than improved in the last 2 years. They are even worse when you try to iterate rather than just get them to one shot the problem space.

prpl• 1 year ago

I view this as an another step in the push/pull between local things, remote things, local things remotely, thin clients, network partitioning, cloud, zero trust, etc...

The last cycle I remember of this IMO is iPython -> Jupyterhub/Jupyterlab. Of course, iPython has existed for a long time, though that change was made because data was too big to analyze locally and it turns out it was more convenient to centrally manage kernels/images/libraries for convenience.

MCP servers and Cursor/Windsurf changed that a bit, but it will end up centralized again at some point (or at least aggregated, if it's not already?). People are passing around lists of interesting MCP servers now, and that will be out of fashion in less than 12 months.

hnlurker222• 1 year ago

I just abandoned Windsurf because I found copy/pasting code with ChatGPT's web interface significantly better in terms of results.

jonplackett• 1 year ago

I’m still just copying and pasting. Was considering trying it. Is it really not any better?

dughnut• 1 year ago

“And will deliver them with far greater stability and polish”

Stable and polished are not words that ever came to my mind while using any Microsoft product.

rglover• 1 year ago

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.

bko• 1 year ago

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 $1.3 billion valuation.
May 2025: $3 billion acquisition from OpenAI

I wonder how much of the value is really from the model or the tooling around it. They all use the same models (mostly Claude, others have been horrible and buggy in my experience). Even co-pilot agent mode now uses Claude. The editor has their own LLM (?) that does the apply since LLMs often return snippets. They work well enough on Cursor. And then you have the auto-complete, which I think is their own model as well.

But the main value from me is from the agent mode and 95% of the value is the underlying model. The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin. The other benefit is the fixed pricing. I have no idea how much 500 calls cost if I were to use the API, but I expect they're probably losing money.

bfeynman• 1 year ago

talented and smart folks for sure but can't not notice how much luck it is especially because its like 100% just better models. Windsurf raised a ton of money and then said they pivoted which they had millions raised to just do something completely different that likely wouldn't have been easier to raise for. Even in an interview with the cursor founder he kind of dumbly rambles that they launched and then basically lost a ton of traction until GPT4 came out. They have some core features like autocomplete but I'm struggling to see vision other than getting training data for iterative dev is a partial moat compared to just seeing commits and final code bases.

sigmoid102• 1 year ago

Training data is almost certainly their main reason for this acquisition. Users themselves and the models they use don't really matter. What matters is their interactions with the models. Especially if you're trying to build coding agents that will be marketed to companies for $10k a month. OpenAI is going for the industry B2B opportunity here, not consumers or end users.

dist-epoch2• 1 year ago

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.

supportengineer2• 1 year ago

6 months of anyone's time is not worth 3 billion dollars.

pclmulqdq• 1 year ago

As usual, HN misses the point. The customer list was probably worth about $2.99 billion, and the engineering work about $10 million.

moralestapia3• 1 year ago

The right time and the right place, plus they did the work, ofc; but I'm sure 80% of this site has worked as hard as, or even more, than what it takes to clone VSCode.

I'm jelly. Very rarely you see in history someone lucky enough to be riding the absolute top of the wave. Even OpenAI took about decade to cook their breakthrough product.

rpgbr• 1 year ago

It's a bubble about to pop. That's where the value is coming from.

ignoramous• 1 year ago

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

throw234234234• 1 year ago

5 years ago if you said coding tools would be worth in the billions in value it would of been surprising to most people. Dev Tools were the thing you could never get a company to buy for you or were just free for most people. Interesting times.

madduci• 1 year ago

It's all about stocks

mvkel2• 1 year ago

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.

bufferoverflow3• 1 year ago

But OpenAI already knows every single prompt sent to its models. They don't need to buy Windsurf for that.

sagarpatil• 1 year ago

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 everything passed, and opened a PR. I reviewed it and it worked flawlessly.

Regarding the acquisition I don’t understand why OAI would pay $3 B. The team is strong, they have lots of data, and the agentic flow is great, but all of that feels commoditized.

Claude Code launched two months ago and I prefer it to WindSurf, Cursor, and Aider. Augment Code also ranks above WindSurf for me.

If I were in Sam’s place I would have doubled or tripled down on Codex CLI. Just my 2 cents.

adventured• 1 year ago

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 billions of dollars to try to do it. It'd be an absolute nightmare to attempt it.

moeadham• 1 year ago

sometimes companies are acquired for things the public has not yet seen.

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

WindSurf, Cursor, and Aider. Augment Code also ranks above WindSurf for me.

Bring on (a lot) more competition! I am waiting for the point where "Simple Pricing" (Augment Code has that on the pricing page) means fixed pricing; Simple is NOT '600 messages included' because it's impossible to know what the ROI from those 600 messages is, so it's very far from 'Simple' (many of those prompts will deliver nothing or, worse, having to rollback because the agent produced garbage). I know it's not sustainable, but the only thing that will keep me not jumping from one to the other, signing up with different emails, trials, coupons etc is if they will lose the restrictions on usage. They will, as they have to compete and it's worth it seeing this acquisition; losing 10s of millions a month to get/keep people and getting nice growth is what they do to get the billions. So bring it on!

bingemaker• 1 year ago

Is there a writeup or a recording. Would be nice to follow through

jjallen• 1 year ago

Because they have users and OpenAI has seen the massive drop off in coding usage since Claude Code came out. My personal Chatgpt decline is at least 99%. It’s also 1% of their current market value. So not really a big deal.

dayjah3• 1 year ago

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 leading product A is valued during a raise at $Y, and you buy the next best product B at 1/10 that, you cause future issues with raises for A.

Might this be an attempt to clip Cursors wings?

boringg• 1 year ago

If he's (Sam) trading equity on a grossly inflated OpenAI for the acquisition then he's likely not paying real money for the company and thus he is expanding his roadmap for cheap.

neets• 1 year ago

It’s probably those big Fortune 500 corporate customers and getting a look inside their code bases or at least get to know their use cases

shift8• 1 year ago

I think it was foolish to buy it for so much money to be honest. I'm not sure how large its user base is, but that's more than likely something to do with it.

Remember that none of these tools can survive forever. Exiting was EXTREMELY smart of the founders here. Incredibly smart. I'd F off into the sunset now myself.

The reason is because they are built on top of VS Code and use Claude. So OpenAI can switch the LLM, cool, but at the end of the day there's no moat for the Cursors and Windsurfs of the world. OpenAI has the keys here because they have the proprietary LLM. This doesn't mean OpenAI will survive btw. I think Google will awkwardly win this race. They're so so so awkward though it'll take some time. It's painful to watch, but because they have the user base, they'll win. Hold that thought for a moment.

So new tools like Cursor and Windsurf will pop up all the time and do you think Microsoft will just sit by and watch? Nope. They'll update VS Code and Copilot and voila, the pendulum shift. As quickly as Cursor and Windsurf gained users, they'll lose them all again back to VS Code and Copilot. Copilot does indeed index your entire codebase - a rumor or misunderstanding by people. So as the dust settles, we'll see this change in usage. As LLMs trade places, we'll have a revolving door of fanbois and people arguing about what's better. What a rollercoaster.

What's really interesting here is that I think we're going to see a LOT of litigation. Back to Google. Look at what's happening with Google Chrome. Some genius thought they were in violation of anti-trust laws (well maybe they are). The reality is they are about to make it WAY WAY WORSE because Google Chrome was open source and should someone buy Chrome and decide they don't want to share...Well bye bye funding to virtual every other web browser. Congratulations brilliant legal system, you created a monopoly. It just wasn't Google's monopoly so I suppose that's alright.

So what I would bet is going to happen here is we're going to see OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, etc. all start to mess with one another here in a similar fashion. It's all going to be lobbying and legal battles. All over the place. It's going to make for an incredibly turbulent landscape. This is a very very expensive game.

THIS is why we're talking $3B. Someone is looking to protect something. It's not because of value. To think about it as a business value somewhere is wrong. Windsurf and Cursor aren't worth billions. Are you out of your mind? There's no justifiable way any rational human being would think that. When they're built on top of other tech and have absolutely no defensible position?? Heck no. It's not about their value individually, it's about their added value to these other companies. It's about bet placing. It's about protecting a larger business.

Take a moment to think what the world would look like if OpenAI must remain an open source business and or had to divest ChatGPT. They get Screwgoogled. Now ask why they're going to gobble up other businesses and why they keep raising all this money. I still think it's foolish, but it definitely seems like an existential threat that's lurking in there to me.

SwtCyber5• 1 year ago

Totally agree - a lot of the "magic" still feels like it boils down to whoever has the best underlying model

froh• 1 year ago

The value is the team and their thinking and the customer base.

pqtyw3• 1 year ago

How is it different to a bunch of other apps which and tools which offer more or less exactly the same?

Iolaum• 1 year ago

I think part of the value is customer acquisition rather than product.

ulfw• 1 year ago

It's a beautiful world where you'll only put a little over 220 MM in and get 3000MM out mere months later.

qwytw• 1 year ago

Incredible timeline to a $3B exit

dot-com vibes. Maybe not quite the same as Pets.com but still...

meerita• 1 year ago

Visual Studio Code Agent Mode uses whatever model you tell it to use.

bcx• 1 year ago

Incredible timeline - also helpful to understand the OpenAI side.

1) OpenAI is valued at 300B (as of March 31st) https://openai.com/index/march-funding-updates/

2) OpenAI recently raised 40B from SoftBank and others.

3) Windsurf is getting roughly 1% of OpenAI's valuation.

OpenAI needs to keep moving fast to outpace MS, Google, and others -- and I think we can all agree that agentic coding is a major trend -- that is likely to keep growing really fast -- and super high leverage in that the folks doing the coding are well paid -- and more likely to be early adopters than any other field. (e.g. if openAI wants a fast way to grow beyond $20-$200/month, owning a tool like windsurf is a good move)

Some folks have been speculating the cash/equity split. I'd be confident whatever number they arrived at de-risks things for windsurf, and preserves the right amount of cash on hand for openAI.

Even if OpenAI is burning 10-20B a year, with the recent raise would buy them between 1-2 years, and given the pace of AI development that's a pretty long time.

seydor• 1 year ago

This may end up saving openAI. their models have no moat

blitzar2• 1 year ago

The companies they are buying have even less moat than openAi

whazor• 1 year ago

From a customer point of view it makes sense to pay a fixed monthly price for both chat and coding, instead of having two separate subscriptions.

mark_l_watson• 1 year ago

Question: has there been any announcements of bundling Windsurf with the ChatGPT $20/month package? (I could not access the linked article)

mrweasel5• 1 year ago

That makes a lot of sense, for the customers, but OpenAI is not profitable on even their $200 subscription. I doubt Windsurf is turning a profit either.

Buying a "bundle" should result in a lower price, as compared to buying both tools separately, making the loses worse. Unless they can reuse some of the same infrastructure and save a lot of money that way.

rvz4• 1 year ago

Very surprising outcome, since OpenAI went after Cursor (twice) [0] And I originally thought that Cursor would be bought instead a day before the rumour [1].

It was smart for Windsurf to take the offer and to get greedy in this hype cycle. Unless Cursor is thinking that Anthropic or someone else will buy them for a lot more, its going to get extremely competitive as the switching cost for Cursor is zero and that ARR can disappear very quickly.

Copilot will attempt to destroy Cursor on price and functionality for however long they want to.

Very risky for Cursor at $9B valuation (which I think is overvalued and based on VC FOMO).

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/17/openai-pursued-cursor-make...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698819

returnInfinity• 1 year ago

sometimes products stick, like slack, dropbox, box cursor may survive

rvz4• 1 year ago

*not get greedy.

neonate• 1 year ago

https://archive.md/l6n9H

brap• 1 year ago

Recent announcements from OpenAI seem to indicate they know they're losing the race

dr_dshiv• 1 year ago

You are referring to the nonprofit continuation?

They have certainly lost the monopoly.

lolinder8• 1 year ago

The next step for Cursor and Windsurf both is that they need to work together to provide an answer for what it means to be a VS Code fork in the new era where Microsoft is trying to strangle the forks. If they're not already they should be teaming up with each other and with the VSCodium team and with the Open VSX marketplace.

Microsoft is an existential threat to their model here, but with the money they each have coming in they together have the opportunity to make the whole ecosystem better by building out viable infrastructure for all VS Code forks, if they can cooperate.

SwtCyber5• 1 year ago

There's a real opportunity here to build a sustainable, open ecosystem for AI-powered dev tools - but it's going to require actual coordination, not just parallel efforts

xnx4• 1 year ago

"$3B" should be in heavy quotes if this is paid in OpenAI shares.

singularity20014• 1 year ago

probably paid in pro accounts

tom_y• 1 year ago

Fortunately it is not the cursor. I am using the cursor and I don't want it to be sold.

Oras• 1 year ago

Good for them, always rooting for startups who win.

That said, I have tried Windsurf multiple times, and it wasn't a pleasant experience compared to Cursor, which I've been using for more than 6 months as a paid customer.

incorrecthorse• 1 year ago

It blows my mind OpenAI wouldn't be able to build a Windsurf alternative for orders of magnitude less than $3B.

mrweasel5• 1 year ago

Why didn't they just use ChatGPT to build it? Weird.

singularity20014• 1 year ago

it would be only a few millions if they used cursor and Claude but their ego prevented it

bayarearefugee• 1 year ago

Sometimes it almost seems like the idea that LLMs are capable of instantly creating real, maintainable software is vastly overblown to inflate valuations...

michelb• 1 year ago

They can, of course, but why would they waste time on it? They are buying a tool, talent, and a heap of paying enterprise customers. This is a steal.

echelon2• 1 year ago

And they're probably buying it with equity, not cash.

yoyohello13• 1 year ago

According to the various CEO's saying AI give 100x speedup they could just have one dev whip it up in a weekend no?

malthaus• 1 year ago

they have an infinite war chest and building windsurf/cursor isn't the hard part, building a brand and sales environment around it is. why risk failing the execution and losing focus when you can just buy one with momentum?

it's also a bit of multiple arbitrage in terms of what seriously addressing the developer market means for their valuation, they likely recoup the 3b instantly.

xyst• 1 year ago

An _ide_ sold for $3B? VCs and other early investors got their 1000% ROI on this one.

ujkhsjkdhf234• 1 year ago

I need someone to convince me this isn't one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition. If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion then what are they even doing? Windsurf can't have that high of a userbase that you feel the need to pay for it.

ashish01• 1 year ago

one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition.

I think that was when intel acquired McAfee for 8B in 2010.

insane_dreamer• 1 year ago

MSFT buying Nokia for $7B is runner up. But at least it could have worked if MSFT hadn't burned it down. Intel and McAfee makes no sense at all.

fazeirony• 1 year ago

you mean the company that spent $9B to make $4B in 2024? that openai?

i agree with you on this - it seems that openai hallucinates reality as much as their products do :-/

singularity20014• 1 year ago

instinctively I agree but it's all about timing: if they try to build their own IDE and hired people it would probably still take a couple of years to get a decent product. I don't know about patents.

mdaniel3• 1 year ago

if they try to build their own IDE and hired people

Oh, haven't you heard? Hiring people to write software is so last decade. Maybe they just didn't want to vibe code a Windsurf implementation and decided to buy a press cycle for $3B

JumpCrisscross3• 1 year ago

We don’t know how OpenAI is paying. A lot of comments seem to be assuming this is an all-cash deal. We have no evidence for that.

rchaud3• 1 year ago

These deals are mostly in stock, not cash. $3b cash is not something most companies can afford to part with, and additionally, making deals that are stock-heavy creates an incentive for the leadership of the acquired company to keep working towards the general interest of OAI, and not instantly retire.

xnx4• 1 year ago

If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion

It's funny money / made-up value. This is not $3B cash.

resters6• 1 year ago

- A $3B signal that OpenAI is unable to do product

- AI assisted coding is mostly about managing the context and knowing what to put in the context to avoid confusion and dumb mistakes, it's not about the UI.

- This signals that OpenAI believes that highly effective coding assistant LLMs will become a commodity / open source and so UI / tooling lock-in is a good investment.

herval2• 1 year ago

chatgpt is massively popular, I'm not sure that's the signal I'd get

they're acquiring one of the biggest the front doors to developers, with Windsurf - whether it'll _remain_ in fashion or not, that's a different debate. This can be like facebook acquiring instagram (if developers turn out to be the actual profit-driver niche for LLMs, which currently seems to be the case)

resters6• 1 year ago

developers turn out to be the actual profit-driver niche for LLMs

AI is definitely huge for anyone writing code, though one can imagine a model like o3 completely replacing 90% of white collar jobs that involve reading, writing and analysis.

Interestingly, o3 is particularly bad at legalese, likely not fully by accident. Of all professions whose professional organizations and regulatory capture create huge rents, the legal profession is the most ripe for disruption.

It's not uncommon for lawyers to bill $250 to $500 per hour for producing boilerplate language. Contracts reviewed or drawn up by lawyers never come with any guarantees either, so one does not learn until too late that the lawyer overlooked something important. Most lawyers have above average IQs and understand arcane things, but most of it is pretty basic at its core.

Lawyers, Pharmacists, many doctors, nearly all accountants, and most middle managers will be replaceable by AI agents.

Software engineers are still expected to produce novel outputs unlike those other fields, so there is still room for humans to pilot the machine for a while. And since most software is meant to be used by humans, soon software will need to be usable by AI agents, which will reduce a lot of UI to an MCP.

SwtCyber5• 1 year ago

ChatGPT's popularity doesn't automatically translate into dev adoption

SwtCyber5• 1 year ago

Yeah, this feels less like a "we can't build it" move and more like a "we can't afford to wait" one

resters6• 1 year ago

"we can't afford to wait"

True, but how long does it take to build something similar? I see it as a defensive move, probably good for the industry to let some people with innovative ideas in AI cash out now so they can do the next thing.

JSR_FDED• 1 year ago

What’s the equivalent in the Vim world?

TiredOfLife5• 1 year ago

https://windsurf.com/vim_tutorial?extensionName=vim

owendarko2• 1 year ago

We're reaching a point where we don't need to switch to another IDE (from VS Code/IntelliJ/insert-your-IDE-here) for "AI/vibe coding"

IDEs can support "AI coding agents" on their own.

The entire workflow for "AI coding agents" boils down to:

1. You write a prompt

2. The "agent" wraps it in a system prompt and sends it to the LLM

3. The LLM sends back a response

4. The agent performs specific actions based on that response (editing files, creating new ones, etc.)

Microsoft already started doing that with Copilot. And they have a vibrant ecosystem of VS Code extensions (I maintain one of them [1])

"AI agents" should be a feature, not a separate piece of software (IDE) that's integral to software devs.

[1] https://github.com/Kilo-Org/kilocode

remoroid• 1 year ago

Windsurf is terrible, I always use AI just in a normal website and I tried this product a few days ago and it asks me if it can run a command to make a file, which I find extremely strange, then it fails to write valid commands even to do mkdir.

visarga• 1 year ago

It worked allright for me when I was using it, a month ago. I cancelled because they somhow lost my paid credits and refused to refund me. No matter how great an AI tool, if the company is mismanaging user payments or usage tracking, it is useless.

andai2• 1 year ago

That was my experience with OpenAI's Codex auto-coder thing (running o4-mini). It took 5 minutes and like 200 commands to do what Gemini 2.5 Flash (not even Pro!) did in about 30 seconds.

I see LLMs trying to do stuff that doesn't work in every AI coding thing I've tried, despite 20 pages of system prompts! (Or perhaps because of it.)

robertclaus• 1 year ago

A lot of this valuation must be aqui-hire and existing users, right? 6 months of development lead time can't be worth this much... can it?

istjohn• 1 year ago

I wonder how much of this is a data play for OpenAI as they work to improve language model performance on longer time horizons.

fcanesin2• 1 year ago

OpenAI knows that everyday someone uses Gemini their ChatGPT brand dies a bit faster. Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May, would be a death sentence to just steamroll with Gemini-3.

ukuina2• 1 year ago

So soon after Gemini 2.5?

xnx4• 1 year ago

Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May

"Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906018

fcanesin2• 1 year ago

LMAO, like one hour after. And guess what, it is a coding upgrade .

qoez• 1 year ago

Google IO in may? Guess we'll be getting a huge OpenAI release May 19th then.

Edit: Oh of course, it's the open weights model they've been teasing.

andai2• 1 year ago

They launched a new version of Gemini 2.5 Pro today.

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/gemini-2-5-pro-io-impro...

casey22• 1 year ago

Open AI needed to spend $3B pivoting away from bigdata based AI. But instead they went for the most shorted sighted move possible of snapping up the "trendiest" company nobody has ever heard outside the Ycombinator echo chamber.

Typical VI-fallacy BS. If LLMs were actually good they would replace IDEs completely not be integrated.

frabcus2• 1 year ago

There's an in between case, where LLMs are useful and give coders a (say) 20% speedup, and everyone has to use them. They don't have to be perfect to be a big industry!

ashvardanian• 1 year ago

If I recall correctly from the recent YC interview, the Windsurf founder noted their team leans more toward GTM than engineering. That makes this less likely to be a classic acquihire (as with Rockset) and more plausibly a data play rather than a product integration.

My current read is that this is a frontier lab acquiring large-scale training data—cheaply—from a community of “vibe coders”, instead of paying professional annotators. In that light, it feels more like a “you are the product” scenario, which likely won’t sit well with Windsurf’s paying customers.

Interesting times.

simple10• 1 year ago

Agreed. It seems like a data play and a hedge to beef up vibe code competition against upcoming Google and MS models so OpenAI doesn't lose API revenue. I would assume vibe coding consumes more tokens than most other text based API usage.

bradley13• 1 year ago

M&A activity needs much more strongly regulated. Buying up potential competitors is how we get monstrosities like Microsoft and Alphabet.

chipgap982• 1 year ago

In what world is Windsurf an OpenAI competitor?

throwaway77832• 1 year ago

This is probably a response to Claude Code, which is still experimental and terminal-only.

In my experience Claude Code is fantastic, both for answering questions about the codebase and coding.

ccheney• 1 year ago

OpenAI has Codex CLI https://github.com/openai/codex

knes2• 1 year ago

does that mean that Windsurf will only support OpenAI models going forward? I doubt OpenAI will pay to have users use Gemini/Claude? Especially as all of these Ai coding tools (Windsurf, Augment, Cursor) are heavily subsidizing the users.

I wonder what Anthropic makes of this. Windsurf was like a top 3 customers of them, might be a big revenue blow too?

ukuina2• 1 year ago

Maybe Anthropic will buy Cursor to level the field.

owebmaster5• 1 year ago

The queries made to other models is the juice of the data they will have access.

_pdp_• 1 year ago

I cannot pretend that I know what is going on - I don't.

I think the long-term play here is something to do with Agents and they are simply cornering the market because coding tools are part to it.

That being said, quick search around what people are building with these VIDEs reveals mostly landing pages that are actually not even that good. For the amount of money spent one could have easily bought a good template or pay someone to customise an existing one.

I don't know. Maybe I am dumb.

redbell• 1 year ago

Ok, now I have a question: Will OpenAI keep Windsurf open to third-party models, or will they limit it to their own models only?

sidgarimella• 1 year ago

probably a rare area I fully agree with HN on– the IP here seems weak and it's not hard to swap out code editors, nothing like tearing out Salesforce or other sales-driven tooling. and idk if first mover advantage actually means much in the next 10 years given how dynamic the underlying models are.

but undeniably these cos are all a great lesson in just how much cash lies in executing first/near first

dbreunig• 1 year ago

What is Windsurf's (or for that matter: Cursor, Cline, or CoPilot) moat? This seems like a great deal and timing for them.

D4ckard• 1 year ago

I don't get why people want the AI right in their editor. In another windows inside the editor, fine, but not inline with code I'm writing. It's super distracting to have AI auto complete pop up at random all the time. As always, typing speed, or speed at generating raw code, is not the bottleneck in programming. The crux remains design, in which case having the LLM on the side is just fine (if you use it for that).

There are some niceties about inline completion (like spelling out a log message that's obvious from the surrounding code) but I don't get the hype much beyond that.

Maybe I'm missing some feature though ...

echelon2• 1 year ago

Have you tried it recently?

AI autocomplete is the best thing I've experienced in developer experience in my career since git won over subversion.

I don't use LLM code prompting, but autocomplete is my jam. It's getting things right 90% of the time when I'm plumbing fields or refactoring. It makes life so much more pleasurable, and I say that as someone who is already using a statically typed language with robust IDE refactoring capabilities.

It's absolutely made me more productive.

pknerd2• 1 year ago

I am happy with Copilot with VSCode..I do not think so, I would need to let AI generate the entire code. Even if I need, I copy/paste from Claude/GPT

tomjen3• 1 year ago

If you have tried the completions in copilot, you are right. They are complete garbage.

Windsurfs on the other hand are much better. The only issue is that windsurf is super aggressive about them, but it is able to do do things like "the user made a change on this line, he most likely also want to make the change here".

sensanaty• 1 year ago

You'd think with all these super hyper advanced AI tools they're shitting out they would be able to make a mediocre VSCode extension of their own instead of flushing 3B down the drain. Guess that's slightly out of reach of their "AGI"s though.

crsv• 1 year ago

Man why did these guys do that OpenAI couldn’t replicate for less than 3Bn on reasonable timeline? This seems insane.

lnenad• 1 year ago

They've got users (which I don't doubt that OpenAI's fork of VSC would have as well but I assume that's their thought process)

AlwaysRock4• 1 year ago

Yup. Even a small market share is market share. Plus they are paying to acquire a team of folks who are already in this space and who will, until golden handcuffs come off, keep working in this space. Still an insane number though.

apwell23• 1 year ago

I would switch in heartbeat if openAI built something equivalent.

arthur-st2• 1 year ago

They have an old-school enterprise sales operation that is doing superb work. Apart from that, ChatGPT's projects are useless crap (can't read other convos in a project; can't generate project documents from a convo), and so clearly they would get value out of just getting some developers who have built anything of use to a poweruser.

conradfr• 1 year ago

I guess $3B of vibe coding credits with ChatGPT can't create Cursor.

pknerd2• 1 year ago

hmm..

Tell me what AI wrapper do I make that you would acquire my product?

soorya3• 1 year ago

IMO, there are few solid reasons to purchasing this tool 1. windsurf has lot of insights into how developer writes code, style, problem etc 2. for the prompt engineering that went into generating the code 3. only microsoft and cursor has the moat so they need to compete at the applications level not model level.

My prediction is anthropic, google or amazon will buy cursor. The next logical step to coding is building apps.

retornam5• 1 year ago

I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here?

For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades.

If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers like some of its fierce advocates say it would, wouldn't their potential customer base shrink?

Professionals typically drive enterprise revenue, while hobbyists—who might become the primary users—generally don't support the same business model or spending levels.

What am I missing here?

lolinder8• 1 year ago

Part of what you're missing is that OpenAI needs to justify its own overinflated valuation. They raise money on the premise that an AI-native company can and will outcompete giant established players, so lowballing Windsurf would run counter to the narrative they're selling to their own investors.

mdasen• 1 year ago

The article also doesn't say that it's $3B in cash that OpenAI is spending. They might be giving Windsurf $3B worth of OpenAI shares - paying an inflated value for Windsurf with their own inflated value.

OpenAI just had a fundraising round that put them at $300B. Maybe they're just giving Windsurf 1% of OpenAI. Maybe they're even giving less than 1% - if OpenAI was worth $300B at the end of March and $150B last October, maybe they're worth $400B now. Maybe Windsurf is getting 0.75% of OpenAI that's "valued" at $3B.

worldsayshi• 1 year ago

So they are effectively blowing their own bubble?

goodluckchuck2• 1 year ago

If OpenAI just provides AI, then the various IDEs development wrappers / IDEs / low-code etc. can collectively bargain against OpenAI for low rates. If OpenAI has an alternative, then they can charge higher rates for all plugins/ etc. and give the market an alternative.

retornam5• 1 year ago

If enterprises require fewer software engineers, where will the market for IDE development wrappers come from?

TiredOfLife5• 1 year ago

One example is that VS Code Copilot autocomplete is still behind what Codeium (now Windsurf) was 1.5 years ago.

__loam6• 1 year ago

Is there an actual measure for this besides contrived benchmarks and vibes?

supportengineer2• 1 year ago

High valuations for companies you've never heard of with no moat - it comes down to cronyism/nepotism/fraud.

quantadev3• 1 year ago

Yeah it seems like there's really no "adult supervision" at all in OpenAI. This purchase was a panic move. Windsurf would be worthless without the AI. Probably OpenAI knows that AI is now a commodity technology and no longer a space they can monopolize so they're just trying to get off a ship that's sinking, and find some viable path to having a tech that doesn't ultimately depend on OpenAI even having a monopoly any longer.

arthur-st2• 1 year ago

They have a healthy enterprise customer base, and an engineering team that clearly knows how to work with power users (which OpenAI is bad at).

blueboo• 1 year ago

OpenAI needs a product team

hiring is hard

it's a high-functioning team swimming in contemporary design and eng practices

code is emerging as an important battleground

OpenAI has the $$$

owebmaster5• 1 year ago

It is ironic that the company said to be cooking AGI is acquihiring software engineers because they can't develop it in-house.

bufferoverflow3• 1 year ago

I bet they can hire best minds in the world for a fraction of $3 billion.

samdjstephens2• 1 year ago

Just consider what it fundamentally is: a company at the leading edge of a product category that has found absurdly strong technology/use-case fit, and is growing insanely fast.

Looking for a moat in the technology is always a bit of a trap - it’s in the traction, the brand awareness, the user data etc.

lolinder8• 1 year ago

Looking for a moat in the technology is always a bit of a trap - it’s in the traction, the brand awareness, the user data etc.

Traction, brand awareness, and user data do not favor Windsurf over GitHub Copilot. The few of us who follow all the new developments are aware that Windsurf has been roughly leading the pack in terms of capabilities, but do not underestimate the power of being bundled into both VS Code and GitHub by default. Everyone else is an upstart by comparison and needs some form of edge to make up for it, and without a moat it will be very hard for them to maintain their edge long enough to beat GitHub's dominance.

Illniyar• 1 year ago

Cursor purports 200m in projected yearly revenue. With some months having 40% month over month growth. The trajectory is vastly different.

Whether or not it's justified is a different matter, but for startups valuations are more about potential then current performance.

retornam5• 1 year ago

Cursor purports $300M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) but stays silent on churn.

They made $25M from subscriptions one month, took that number, multiplied it by 12, arrived at $300M and everyone has been running with that line without ever asking what their churn looks like.

They could have churned $24M the next month, ask yourself why they are silent on churn if they are doing so well.

djha-skin4• 1 year ago

Did powered table saws replace carpenters?

ninetyninenine3• 1 year ago

Yes. That's the problem. You think the answer is no, but the answer is actually yes.

ergocoder3• 1 year ago

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.

retornam5• 1 year ago

$400M in real revenue versus $300M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) are totally different things. Real revenue is money actually earned, while ARR just multiplies one month's subscription revenue ($25M) by 12, ignoring customer churn.

Startups love flashing ARR figures because "$300M ARR" sounds impressive, but without knowing churn rates, they might never actually collect that full amount.

JetBrains however collected real $400M in a year.

ninetyninenine3• 1 year ago

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 certain direction and it's hard for them to pivot as fast into this new AI direction.

__loam6• 1 year ago

Well you see Jetbrains is a European company unlike the super special boys running an inherently more valuable American company.

quantadev3• 1 year ago

It's about popularity. OpenAI lost their monopoly now that there are many competitors so they're just trying to make a move to purchase "relevance". They're just trying to buy their way into the cool kids club, to remain relevant to at least a large number of kids.

nailer2• 1 year ago

Steel man: Windsurf own the customer relationship. The models are just generic interchangeable services they use for processing.

Realistically: I don’t know how many users windsurf actually has and I never actually met anyone that uses them. Whereas Cursor AI took a huge percentage of the VS code users I know in real life.

seunosewa2• 1 year ago

I use Windsurf. It had the smoothest agentic experience when I subscribed. I think still does.

shortrounddev2• 1 year ago

What am I missing here?

That AI is in a bubble akin to the crypto craze from a few years ago, and the valuation of these companies is divorced from their underlying business fundamentals

globnomulous• 1 year ago

If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers like some of its fierce advocates say it would, wouldn't their potential customer base shrink?

This is such a good point. The best reply available to the AI hype-men would probably be that LLMs "democratize" coding and therefore that even more people will use IDEs in the future, but that sounds like BS to me -- not unlike AI/hype itself.

bwfan1232• 1 year ago

indeed, and that is why you see adobe declining, because, their customer base is shrinking even as they add AI into their tools.

empath75• 1 year ago

when it depends on API services it doesn't own

It now owns the API services.

XCSme2• 1 year ago

OpenAI buying a company that is dependent on their competitor.

animitronix3• 1 year ago

They have no moat, Cursor does the same stuff. Microsoft's moving to kill all of these anyway and has added agent mode to copilot.

OpenAI would have gotten more value by setting that 3 billion on fire, at least it would have powered the data center for a little while.

hodder• 1 year ago

"I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation".. Nothing to be skeptical about. The market has spoken. It was worth 3b to OpenAI. Companies arent worth a vague notion of what "value" someone in an armchair thinks they might be worth, they are worth what people are willing to pay, and OpenAI paid.

mirekrusin3• 1 year ago

I don't get it.

With $3bn budget you can replicate it in few months, promote for free using your own stronger brand and you're left with roughly $3bn in the bank to do whatever you want.

n_ary• 1 year ago

Your sentiment is very common, which reminds me of those days where everyone claimed to be able to clone twitter/airbnb/dropbox/gmail/whatever over the weekend.

The real value lies in a successful execution, Windsurf is live and already has brand popularity with revenue stream. When it gets acquired by a titan, the die hard fans(vibe coders) will gain new trust that the product is not going anywhere and instead has solid future(we don’t yet know if oAI plans to do Msft style acquire, extend, kill yet). Cumulatively, this actually increases the value. Also Windsurf already has established enterprise revenue, hence brand trust and experience is already there.

In summary, an existing live and proven product is worth more any day over 100% uncertainty of building a sufficiently capable team to perfectly execute the same idea in specific deadline and also have the added burden of marketing, market penetration, user acquisition etc.

mirekrusin3• 1 year ago

Windsurf is not present in enterprise.

Github copilot, vscode and apis through azure - basically everything through Microsoft - is.

Alternative to Microsoft's monopoly in enterprise that exists is open source.

Comparing this situation to twitter is more like if there was some chat api service, known more than twitter itself, that twitter is using/wrapping where other alternative clients exist, some with stronger popularity, some being open source.

unmole• 1 year ago

Windsurf is live and already has brand popularity with revenue stream

OpenAI has a much bigger brand.

DrNosferatu• 1 year ago

They seem almost exactly the same as Cursor, but even using the exact same rules, Cursor gives much better results than Windsurf (which performs below viable for me) - my test case was a complex Python project.

dubeye• 1 year ago

the answer is always users and growth rate.

swyx2• 1 year ago

my summary here https://news.smol.ai/issues/25-05-05-cursor-openai-windsurf

serverlessmania• 1 year ago

GitHub acquired for 7b, Windsurf a VScode fork + Agentic LLM… 3b$. I should be missing something.

jsheard2• 1 year ago

Windsurf a VScode fork + Agentic LLM… 3b$.

They don't have their own LLMs either, they've glued a 3rd party editor to 3rd party models. That's some expensive glue.

TiredOfLife5• 1 year ago

They have their own autocomplete model.

casey22• 1 year ago

Who are these people that give OpenAI all this money? Aren't Microsoft, SoftBank, Nvidia publicly traded? Don't they owe a fiduciary duty to their investors? I'm surprised it's legal to just hand over a blank check to random private companies to make nonsense purchases. This isn't going to end well.

If I were any of these companies I would be suing OpenAI to try to get my money back. Thrive, ARK, Tiger and the others can pound sand

anticensor• 1 year ago

Long term investments exist.

ramoz2• 1 year ago

Bearish on IDEs after using Claude Code.

qainsights• 1 year ago

Valuation lost its meaning in recent years :)

victorantos• 1 year ago

This is classic OpenAI - acquiring competitors rather than innovating internally. They're desperately trying to keep up with competition from Anthropic and Microsoft's GitHub, but throwing money at the problem is hardly a creative solution.

What's especially rich is the timing - right after OpenAI backpedaled on their restructuring plans due to "public pushback" (read: Sam Altman making yet another governance blunder). Now they're dumping billions into a tool that's essentially the same thing everyone else is building.

franze• 1 year ago

here is the thing, even those editors are relict of the pasts, the code is still in the center in these editors. thats something we need now, but not in the near (2 years, 5 years, 10 years?) future.

then the prompt is the coding, the reasoning is the execution, the code just an abstract layer that we do not care to much about i.e.: like assembly, machine instructions.

we know it exists, bit even here on hackernews i would guess only a small fraction know how it really works on a detailed level.

there will still be coding, instructions (prompt) -> execution (reasoning and AI code and code execution -> feedback (debugging to AI then and one point to the user)

bur actual looking at the code, well, thats only when this cycle annoyingly fails.

so current IDEs are still built from an code first mindset. this will not be the IDE of the future.

so basically OpenAI bought a Dinosaur

yapyap• 1 year ago

damn.

openai just seems to have a hole in their hand they keep temporarily patching up with new investor money

libraryofbabel2• 1 year ago

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 LLM prompts plus a main loop running the calls to the LLM and executing the tool calls that the LLM wants to do. The tools are pretty standard like, search, read file, edit file, execute a bash command, etc. etc. Really all the power and complexity and "coding ability is in the LLM itself. Sure, it's a lot of work to make something polished that devs want to use - but is there any more to it than that?

So what is the differentiator here, other than user experience (for which I prefer the CLI tools, but to each their own)? $3B is a lot for something that sure doesn't seem to have any secret sauce tech or moat that I can see.

gregschlom• 1 year ago

But one could have said the same thing of Whatsapp when they got acquired by Facebook, no? Just a messaging app, anyone can replicate.

libraryofbabel2• 1 year ago

Yes and no. A messaging app with 450m users has very strong network effects. Users are sticky in a way they aren’t going to be with a VS Code fork which will be increasingly incompatible with the VS Code ecosystem. There are a lot of equally good alternatives to Windsurf and you don’t have to persuade all your friends and relatives to switch too.

hello_newman• 1 year ago

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-term moat

rhubarbtree• 1 year ago

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

asdev• 1 year ago

the apply model for Cursor is really good and fast for multi line edits within files. not sure if others have caught up

MR4D• 1 year ago

Here’s the crazy thing. All MSFT has to do is build in connections to every AI provider for VS Code and they win.

Embrace & Extend will never die.

alganet• 1 year ago

Embrace & Extend will never die

Spread too thin is often the final result of embrace and expand.

waynesonfire• 1 year ago

1,000 prompt credits/user/month

"hey Jim, can I use your credits? I have a deadline and I'm all out."

djha-skin4• 1 year ago

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

jsbg• 1 year ago

all IDEs have vim plugins

djha-skin4• 1 year ago

Vim has IDE plugins. Terminal life forever

thekhatribharat• 1 year ago

Valuation aside, Windsurf has built its own models [1] and boasts enviable enterprise distribution: $100M ARR, per TechCrunch [2]

[1] https://windsurf.com/blog/our-model-strategy [2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/22/why-openai-wanted-to-buy-c...

nsoonhui• 1 year ago

However crazy the 3 billion valuation is, windsurf's valuation is still very sane compared to that of Safe Super intelligence, who exists for less than a year, with no product, no roadmap,and virtually no hype, but is worth at 30 billion.

manicennui• 1 year ago

So which of OpenAI's investors are also Windsurf investors?

dankwizard• 1 year ago

What's funny is the translation layer between your prompt <--> agent <--> LLM, that code was written by ChatGPT.

So OpenAI are paying for software which leverages other LLMs written by their own LLM.

We live in a topsy turvy world.

habosa• 1 year ago

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see many comments here talking about how this is a competitive move by OpenAI against Anthropic?

From what I've heard most people using/liking these agentic IDEs are using Claude models to power them, they seem to be the best at writing code. By buying Windsurf (and trying to buy Cursor) OpenAI can figure out why Claude is better at this task, fix GPT, and then make GPT the default for the coding use case.

Not sure it's worth $3B, but that's also not a lot to them when they can raise unlimited money at any time,

CSMastermind• 1 year ago

People seem to be pretty negative about this but of all the AI dev tools I've evaluated it's the only one that's felt meaningfully better than just using the web interfaces of the various frontier models.

I don't think it's good value for the money but pretending it's just a VSCode fork that wraps LLMs is underselling it. There's something they're doing that makes them better than Cursor, Claude Code, etc.

sagitta_on_hn• 1 year ago

I like Windsurf for RSE, but it sometimes gets a little too excited which can take me out of the flow to undo stuff and get back into the groove of things.

The Claude integration is quite nice - I hope that doesn't take a step backward with the acquisition.

SwtCyber5• 1 year ago

Feels like OpenAI is trying to double down on control and narrative at the same time

robertlagrant• 1 year ago

I'd love it if windsurf were a single private Gist that is the prompt for OpenAI, and a load of people building UIs around it.

spilldahill• 1 year ago

Big move by OpenAI—curious how Windsurf fits into the long game.

neil5paul• 1 year ago

I think it's more of a time saver move by openAI - they can probably build something similar, cheaper – but, windsurf has established itself. Looking forward to see where this goes

lgiordano_notte• 1 year ago

Value isn’t just the editor, it’s the workflow. Letting LLMs plan and act across multi-step flows is a hard problem, and Windsurf figured out a dev-focused version of that. Gains to be made in browser automation once you add structure, retries, and context. Feels like a bet on that pattern becoming default. But yeah as others said, highly doubt that's $3B in hard cash, more likely a roll-up of shares etc.

hakube• 1 year ago

looks like VSCode

Havoc• 1 year ago

Very strange move. They already have the models and their partner MS is providing the base editor.

So they’re paying 3bn for the integration and clients basically?

Seems pricey

lanthissa• 1 year ago

they're paying to aquire places where you can sell tokens at a markup, because the future is multiple base models that are good enough for most user tasks where user gateways play the base model providers off each other and capture a lot of the value

m3kw92• 1 year ago

I use ChatGPT’s “work with” code helper and one of my biggest uses on ChatGPT. It’s a good first line before I pull out the big guns(APIs). Sadly the code canvas is rarely as it’s geared mostly for single page web app functionality useless demo tests. Maybe this is where Windsurf can come in

itsmeadarsh• 1 year ago

Weren't they also in Cursor too?

99nala• 1 year ago

This feels absurd. When money clearly isn't an issue.

koenvaneijk2• 1 year ago

i 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.

motoboi• 1 year ago

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.

koenvaneijk2• 1 year ago

yes but at least google provides excellent search results, facebook has all my friends and hacker news has well.. the latest news :-)

JCharante• 1 year ago

I've never heard of Windsurf before. I use Cursor daily however.

animitronix3• 1 year ago

It used to be called Codeium. Their TOS are insane...

guluarte• 1 year ago

why AI needs a text editor?

animitronix3• 1 year ago

Pretty stupid move with Microsoft moving to put the kibosh on all of these proprietary vscode forks. Could be worth almost nothing in a matter of months...

dotemacs• 1 year ago

Has anybody actually used Windsurf's Emacs mode?

You'd think that with a generative AI coding editor, they'd stay on top of it and make it work. But I guess that wasn't the case up until now.

Maybe with this acquisition that might change...

pabna• 1 year ago

damn i almost worked at this company in 2024.

mtnGoat• 1 year ago

I think this is way over priced, could they not build their own with significantly less resource outlay?

But I guess I’m not really the guy that buys billion dollar things, so I probably don’t know how to evaluate them.

phupt26• 1 year ago

OpenAI is turning to Profit Mode. Reference: https://newscvg.com/coverage/business-economy/openai-maintai...

jamietanna• 1 year ago

Podcast interview with the CEO of Windsurf talking about the tech behind it https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-windsurf...

replwoacause• 1 year ago

Cline is much better IMO

mikestaub• 1 year ago

Seems like a way to justify stock valuations of OpenAI while picking up some good talent to go after vertical stack as the foundation models become commodified. Smart play.

OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

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