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

https://www.theverge.com/openai/705999/google-windsurf-ceo-openai

by rcchen • 1 year ago

1055 685 1 year ago

Ancalagon2• 1 year ago

So Google, Meta, and Microsoft will just hollow out the best AI startups of their talent instead of buying them - out of fear of monopoly lawsuits I'm assuming?

Nice plan I guess. Kind of obvious to spot though.

brianwawok• 1 year ago

Likely cheaper too. Nothing to pay the original shareholders

Kinrany• 1 year ago

It's been working with software developers with no issues.

bix69• 1 year ago

Can shareholders sue? I presume the only avenue is IP since that belongs to the company? Or the non-exclusive license somehow negates that? Brutal.

Ancalagon2• 1 year ago

I actually don't know if there's much that can be done unless there's some non-competes in those employees' contracts which are usually not very enforceable outside of finance iirc.

riwsky2• 1 year ago

“We underpaid you relative to what price you were able to command on the market, and you left, how DARE you!”

khazhoux• 1 year ago

“Buying the startup” just means handing over megabucks to do-nothing investors. If Google isn’t buying any product or technology, why should investors get a talent fee?

bix69• 1 year ago

Do nothing investors who enabled the company to reach this point? Employees who chose lower salaries in expectation of shares being worth something? Come on now.

adastra22• 1 year ago

The investors are getting paid in this deal. Just the employees getting screwed.

DiscourseFan3• 1 year ago

There are many AI startups and we are just in the beginning of learning how to use them. There will be some stupid company like those you’ve listed that figures out a way to use AI that is far better than any other implementation, and Google, Meta, and Microsoft may go the way of Yahoo and AOL, but we’ll see

bix69• 1 year ago

Doesn’t seem like it. Antitrust has no teeth so the mega corps are just buying all the talent with life changing cash.

tlogan4• 1 year ago

I’m honestly just surprised that the CEO and co-founder decided to walk away from the company and leave behind all these employees he was leading. Especially considering many of them probably joined for lower pay, hoping for a big upside.

Maybe there’s more to the story.

quantified2• 1 year ago

When you want to make a big impact for a big payday, why would this surprise you?

Gentle reminder that more startups die by suicide than homicide, and that an early-stage startup is a total crapshoot.

munificent• 1 year ago

You're surprised that a CEO did something that massively financially benefitted them personally at the expense of rank and file employees?

You sweet summer child.

brap• 1 year ago

This is the direct result of regulations. As usual regulations backfire. Expect more regulations to address this, surely they won’t backfire as well.

Sammi• 1 year ago

This is overly reductionist. The are plenty of laws that work well.

Any time I hear someone talk about more or less regulation, instead of talking about better or worse regulation, I suspect they are ideologists and trying to shift the narrative, or else they would be able to criticise based on actual merit.

BrtByte5• 1 year ago

The big players know regulators are watching, so they're doing everything but the formal acquisition

rvnx2• 1 year ago

Windsurf and Cursor are in the business of reselling ChatGPT and Claude at a loss, but the tech itself is not impressive at all

cpursley2• 1 year ago

Those wrappers are gonna go away now that there's Claude Code and Googles CLI thing. They are that much better.

taytus• 1 year ago

I agree. I use claude desktop with MCP and Gemini CLI exclusively. I have 20+ years of writing code, and this is awesome!

warmedcookie• 1 year ago

Are they?

Cursor's Accept / Reject feature for each change it makes in each file is nice whereas I have to use a diff tool to review the changes in Claude Code.

Also, if I go down a prompt alley that's a dead end, Cursor has the Restore Checkpoint feature to get back to the original prompt and try a different path. With Claude Code, you had better have committed the code to git, otherwise you end up with a mess you didn't want.

My company pays for both, but I mostly use Cursor unless I know I am doing a new project or some proof of concept, which Claude Code might have an edge on with a more mature TODO list feature.

m_a_g• 1 year ago

Looks like Sama can’t catch a break.

parpfish• 1 year ago

I only learned this week that “sama” is “Sam Altman” and not the first name of some other ai startup ceo

BobbyJo• 1 year ago

It's his hackernews username.

mi_lk• 1 year ago

sama is nothing without drama

foobiekr• 1 year ago

Good.

3abiton• 1 year ago

It's unclear if OpenAI cancelled the deal, or Google poached them? Either way, this season of "OpenAI Drama" is wild. First Meta, now Google. Your turn Amazon / Microsoft.

jamessinghal• 1 year ago

Apparently OpenAI allowed the deal to expire; likely Google had already been in discussion with Windsurf as I'm sure they knew the deal was likely to die well before today.

sumedh4• 1 year ago

MS probably killed the deal, MS wanted access to Windsurf to make Co Pilot better while OpenAI did not want to give them access.

barbazoo2• 1 year ago

OpenAI’s deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, Google and Windsurf announced Friday.
Mohan and the Windsurf employees will focus on agentic coding efforts at Google DeepMind and work largely on Gemini. Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology.

Sounds to me like they're "hiring" them like one "hires" a consultant?

nilamo• 1 year ago

Why the quotes? Consultants are indeed hired for consulting work to be done.

barbazoo2• 1 year ago

Wasn’t meant in any negative way, just ESL.

consumer4512• 1 year ago

I did not see this coming. Wow. The game of thrones in SV.

I wonder what happened with the OpenAI deal. Anyone have any guesses? My first guess is "Look at Claude Code, we can do this ourselves." But, I am likely thinking too simply.

edit: does this mean that Windsurf and its users will stop being iced-out by Anthropic? Or, is this the end of Windsurf?

consumer4512• 1 year ago

Derp. Weird IP sharing issues.

imiric7• 1 year ago

I did not see this coming. Wow. The game of thrones in SV.

You must be new around here.

wagwang4• 1 year ago

All of this game of thrones is going to create an amazing documentary if AI capabilities taper off and valuations vaporize.

tamersalama• 1 year ago

Are the AI capabilities tapering-off, or commoditized? Building the next Windsurf (iteration 0) doesn't feel it's quite niche anymore.

wagwang4• 1 year ago

I think the current valuations imply at least 2 magnitudes of improvement over existing functionality.

h1fra• 1 year ago

I know David Fincher is jumping on his seat

DiscourseFan3• 1 year ago

Obviously these things are difficult to tell from the outside

xyst2• 1 year ago

Apparently somebody missed crypto mania between 2019-2022

sothatsit3• 1 year ago

AI has nothing in common with crypto other than it being hyped a lot. The better comparison is the dot-com bubble.

asdev5• 1 year ago

Gary-Marcus-eating-popcorn.gif

zer00eyz• 1 year ago

if AI capabilities taper off

AI growth has slowed to a crawl, and it's priced it self out vs cost of compute.

NVIDIA feels a lot like SUN.

amazing documentary

Been there, done that: 2001, Startup Dot Com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP4PGjnZwJE

seydor2• 1 year ago

If by Documentary, you mean a new Silicon Valley sitcom, yes , all the ingredients are there: The AGI believers, the doomers, the "cure all diseases" people, the board drama, the money grabbers, the VC dance , the poaching, the lawsuits for copyrights ... there s a whole new universe of caricatures

sinenomine• 1 year ago

Even a very risky attempt at "cure all diseases“ is worth all this economic upheaval, though.

And AI applied to biomedicine arguably already delivered some acceleration.

0cf8612b2e1e• 1 year ago

Pour one out for the regular employees not getting absorbed by Google and suddenly not millionaires like they imagined they were a week ago.

plumeria• 1 year ago

Like in WeCrashed (2022)?

kylehotchkiss2• 1 year ago

Maybe the expectation that a job leading to an equity windfall is something people should be more cautious about.

gsibble2• 1 year ago

It's something you should never assume is true until the wire hits your account. I had a deal where I was going to make $15 million called off 36 hours before closing.

kirlev• 1 year ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250711213611/https://www.theve...

metadat5• 1 year ago

It's another Character.ai situation [0]. Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company.

What a harsh time to work for an AI startup as a rank and file employee! I wonder how the founders justify going along with it inside their mind.

[0] Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer Returns to Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141112 - 11 months ago (87 comments)

Edit: Thank you @jonny_eh for the clarification. I can't imagine it feels awesome being a leftover but at least you vested out. "Take the money and leave" is still a bit raw when the founders and researchers are now getting the initial payout + generous Google RSU's.

takklz2• 1 year ago

The rank and file equity pitch is quickly falling apart…

bix69• 1 year ago

Always has been

bravetraveler• 1 year ago

Think it started that way... I'm currently in a vesting/allocation situation where the incentive is to drive the share price down.

silenced_trope• 1 year ago

This.

Character.ai reached out to me for an opportunity, but they've already been carved up.

I think it's great that the rank and file got some of their equity cash-out (based on the other comment), but I imagine it isn't an attractive prospect as a start-up to join at this point.

I just ignored the recruiter. I can't imagine their would be a second liquidity event.

jonny_eh3• 1 year ago

The “leftover” employees at Character were NOT screwed over. Options were converted to cash at the deal’s valuation.

Hopefully Windsurf employees are treated well here.

Note: I worked at Character until recently.

_jab• 1 year ago

On the flipside, I’m pretty sure the investors got screwed.

gowld2• 1 year ago

Whose cash? OpenAI isn't paying, and Google isn't paying, and Windsurf investors already paid.

ipsum2• 1 year ago

Not really true, I believe the "acquiring" (i.e. Google) company buys some equity from the employees (windsurf).

Edit: the people downvoting this clearly can't read, I made the exact same point as jonny_eh.

gowld2• 1 year ago

The acquisition of Windsurf was cancelled.

pydry• 1 year ago

This might be the beginning of the end of tech VC startups in general.

High interest rates make VC funding more expensive and now bigtech can swoop in, poach all the necessary staff and deprive investors of an exit.

What is the point any more?

lsllc2• 1 year ago

Isn't there not some contractual agreement between the VCs and the founders? (I understand that a non-compete might not apply [in CA], but taking VC money is a little different that simply getting hired).

Were I a Windsurf investor, I'd be pissed right now and calling my lawyer.

se4u• 1 year ago

FYI, It wasn't taken the money and leave, a lot of them got absorbed into GDM.

Source: I was in GDM when character was acquired.

metadat5• 1 year ago

Do you mean Google Deep Mind? Curious what use deep mind had for the leftovers (kubernetes and web scraping experts, etc)?

Otherwise why not merge all of engineering into ElGoog?

Aurornis• 1 year ago

Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company.

Windsurf’s value didn’t go to $0 overnight. The company will continue and their equity is likely still worth a decent amount wherever the company ends up.

Obviously a disappointing outcome for the people who thought life changing money was right around the corner, but they didn’t lose everything.

cavisne2• 1 year ago

Just like with Character I'm assuming the employees get something. Whatever nonsense "licensing" fee Google is paying to not cause an antitrust investigation should be paid out straight to employees

ipnon• 1 year ago

The general character of capital markets is to pay as little as possible. Otherwise you lose out to those who are more ruthless. It is plausible that Windsurf employees really are getting very little value for their work. We need to see details of the deal.

tjwebbnorfolk• 1 year ago

I wonder how the founders justify going along with it

$2.4 billion.

metadat5• 1 year ago

This reads like a Dr. Evil plot.

sampton• 1 year ago

Zuck swoops in and hire them 100mm a piece.

baal80spam• 1 year ago

I really think that Apple is smart to sideline this shitshow.

raspasov• 1 year ago

This.

metadat5• 1 year ago

https://archive.today/urwCT

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

What is the source Verge? Give us a link more than "Google and Windsurf announced Friday"

asdev5• 1 year ago

I never knew anyone who used Windsurf. These AI acquisitions have been unbelievable(in a bad way). WIX acquired some garbage Lovable.dev clone for 80 million. I think many of us are waiting for this bubble to pop(economy will likely pop too)

sunaookami3• 1 year ago

It was barely better than Cursor and they got shafted by Anthropic because of the takeover announcement so nobody really used it anymore because let's face it - Claude Sonnet is just the best coding model. Design-wise the chat panel and autocomplete integration was a bit nicer than in Cursor but not by much. Subscription for Windsurf was/is also 5$ cheaper.

break_the_bank• 1 year ago

i don't think it was better than or comparable to cursor at all. except for the month prior to the OpenAI Acquisition news where some minor influencers on X were calling it better.

if it was better it would have survived.

cellis2• 1 year ago

Base44 is absolutely not garbage. I’ve tried it and can say it’s as good or better of a vibe-builder than Lovable or Bolt. Have you benchmarked it against the competition or can you otherwise substantiate the “garbage” claim? FWIW I do know one amazing engineer using Windsurf

asdev5• 1 year ago

all those projects are garbage and just create half bake prototypes that never see the light of day

raincole3• 1 year ago

Well I use Windsurf. It's a good alternative to GitHub Copilot. The free tier is on par with Copilot's paid plan.

...which no one talks about anymore. Okay I guess you have a point.

manquer4• 1 year ago

Everyone has a niche, Windsurf is the only large provider if you are a Jetbrains shop.

There are some alternatives like continue.dev or Jetbrains own AI offering but no Cursor or Claude Code ( Sonnet 3.7/4) you can get through Jetbrains plugin or others, but Anthropic does not provide support same with cursor.

agnokapathetic• 1 year ago

claude code has a Jetbrains plugin which is delightful!

paulbgd• 1 year ago

Check out sweep. Completely unaffiliated, their only offering is the jetbrains plugin so it gets a lot more focus than windsurf. Only downside is that Claude code is still a better agent, but at least its tab complete is some of the best

rafaelmn2• 1 year ago

GitHub copilot now has agents in jetbrain (not sure about stable - my nightly does).

Jetbrains Junie is supposedly the same thing but no Rider and that's my current project so didn't get into that yet.

Windsurf was just disappointingly bad in intellij (like any other plugin I've tried so far)

sschueller• 1 year ago

Jetbrain's Junie works incredibly well. I much prefer it over cursor's or continue's UI.

c0ff• 1 year ago

Augment Code is great on JetBrains

lp4x• 1 year ago

Been using AugmentCode on Jetbrains. By far the best. I tried Junie and Windsurf

iammrpayments• 1 year ago

The first time they hit the news, I’ve tried to open their website to see what it was all about and it froze my phone lol

sumedh4• 1 year ago

I was on Windsurf's grandfather $10 per month plan, it was really good during the Sonnet 3.5 and 3.7 days

I am still a paid subscriber but most of my usage is claude code now becaue Windsurf does not Sonnet 4 included in their plan.

Fethbita• 1 year ago

Windsurf was also used by enterprises because of their on-prem plan. They gutted that after OpenAI acquisition was announced and since then I am sure none of those enterprises that used it will switch to their cloud offering and look for other venues.

vitaflo• 1 year ago

It’s the modern day dotcom boom and all these agents are the modern day Dreamweaver.

physicles• 1 year ago

I used it for about six weeks in the spring, at which point I tried cursor and found out that it was far better for my use case (backend Go): better and faster autocomplete that can work across files, less buggy UI, and it actually follows your rules.

I’m not bothered by this news — it’d be pretty shortsighted to assume that any of these disposable AI assistants will continue to exist forever.

upmind• 1 year ago

Does anyone know which side cancelled the deal?

lvl1552• 1 year ago

OpenAI needs to up their game on Codex to be on par with Claude Code. o3 is a better planner relative to Opus.

beering2• 1 year ago

Where do you think Codex lags behind Claude Code?

romanovcode2• 1 year ago

The big one is that they do not offer "unlimited" plans where you can forget about the tokens and just use it.

UI is also worse compared to Claude.

They still have some work to do if they want to compete with Claude TBH.

WeirderScience• 1 year ago

I wonder if this is a result of the previously reported clashes between OpenAI and Microsoft over access to the Windsurf IP (under their investment agreement)

ghuntley• 1 year ago

For the love of God, can we get a reboot of the Silicon Valley television show? Just on AI. Like when they wrapped it, they wrapped it on AI usage. So, it's got the perfect arc for a reboot that focuses perfectly on AI.

beering2• 1 year ago

Even the original Silicon Valley didn’t match the zaniness of real life. Why do we need a reboot? Just check HN!

OkayPhysicist• 1 year ago

My favorite thing about that series was watching it with friends who weren't from the Bay Area. Often they'd be laughing at the sheer absurdity of a situation, and I'd get to point out that it was barely exaggerated from real life.

seydor2• 1 year ago

Why ? we get to watch the original reality show in real time, for free!

mizzao• 1 year ago

The "Son of Anton" was an coding agent that deleted the entire codebase. Not so far off from Cursor's YOLO mode, is it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262383

xyst2• 1 year ago

C-level executives get paid. Labor gets stuck grinding at Google. What a waste. Google will probably shelve/hoard the IP from Windsurf.

bhl2• 1 year ago

I don't know anyone who heard or used Windsurf outside the Bay Area. Even Cursor feels very Bay Area bubbly (although that is the market to go after if you're in ai dev tools).

jongjong• 1 year ago

Cursor does add value but it's just a thin layer on top of VSCode so companies could just build that in-house and don't need to acquire. There's no moat there.

bhl2• 1 year ago

Cursor has custom tab and embedding models. And has a lot of distribution / paying users already.

Arguably they have the strongest product moat, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they beat OpenAI in a vertical coding model from that. Easy for them to have users generate evals and have model product feedback loop here.

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

Before being known as Windsurf it was Codeium - the only good free autocomplete extension for VS Code and Jetbrains ides.

layer8• 1 year ago

According to The Information, Microsoft gaining access to Windsurf’s IP if OpenAI acquired them was a factor: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-windsurf-brea... (paywalled)

modeless3• 1 year ago

I don't understand why Windsurf would care after they've exited.

gk12• 1 year ago

Not Windsurf… OpenAI. And OpenAI cares because they’re competing (in part) against Copilot, so if Msoft gets all the benefits of Windsurf then OpenAI would effectively be paying 3B to feed their competitor.

extr9• 1 year ago

IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there.

Let's review the current state of things:

- Terminal CLI agents are several orders of magnitude less $$$ to develop than forking an entire IDE.

- CC is dead simple to onboard (use whatever IDE you're using now, with a simple extension for some UX improvements).

- Anthropic is free to aggressively undercut their own API margins (and middlemen like Cursor) in exchange for more predictable subscription revenue + training data access.

What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?

- Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)

- Some UI niceties like "add selection to chat", and etc.

Personally I think this is a harbinger of where things are going. Cursor was fastest to $900M ARR and IMO will be fastest back down again.

alanmoraes• 1 year ago

I never understood why those tools need to fork Visual Studio Code. Wouldn't an extension suffice?

extr9• 1 year ago

IIRC problem is that VS Code does not allow extensions to create custom UI in the panels areas except for WebViews(?). It makes for not a great experience. Plus Cursor does a lot with background indexing to make their tab completion model really good - more than would be possible with the extensions APIs available.

efitz• 1 year ago

Cline and Roo Code (my favorite Cline fork) are fantastic and run as normal VS Code extensions.

Occasionally they lose their connection to the terminal in VSCode, but I’ve got no other integration complaints.

And I really prefer the bring-your-own-key model as opposed to letting the IDE be my middleman.

lozenge• 1 year ago

When the Copilot extension needs a new VS Code feature it gets added, but it isn't available to third party extensions until months later... Err, years later... well, whenever Microsoft feels like it.

So an extension will never be able to compete with Copilot.

arresin5• 1 year ago

It was so they could close source it.

NitpickLawyer• 1 year ago

Wouldn't an extension suffice?

Not if you want custom UI. There are a lot of things you can do in extension land (continue, cline, roocode, kilocode, etc. are good examples) but there are some things you can't.

One thing I would have thought would be really cool to try is to integrate it at the LSP level, and use all that good stuff, but apparently people trying (I think there was a company from .il trying) either went closed or didn't release anything note worthy...

fnordpiglet• 1 year ago

I use Augment extensively and find it superior to cursor in every way - and operates as an extension. It has a really handy task planning interface and meta prompt refinement feature and the costs are remarkably low. The quality of output implantation is higher IMO and I don’t have to do a lot of model selection and don’t get Max model bill explosions. If there’s something Cursor provided that Augment doesn’t via extension it was not functionally useful enough to notice.

mattuk89• 1 year ago

I've really struggled with using the extensions - their UI/UX is worse, they're much more limited in what they can do and they're much more unstable (in IntelliJ at least).

Then again writing mostly kotlin I cannot get along with the VS Code forks as they're just not that great outside of typescript projects in my experience.

I tend to prompt in cursor/windsurf and refactor in IntelliJ which is okay but a bit of a pain.

libraryofbabel3• 1 year ago

Some excellent points. On “add selection to chat”, I just want to add that the Claude Code VS code extension automatically passes the current selection to the model. :)

I am genuinely curious if any Cursor or Windsurf users who have also tried Claude Code could speak to why they prefer the IDE-fork tools? I’ve only ever used Claude Code myself - what am I missing?

rhodysurf2• 1 year ago

It already does this btw, when you use Cc from the vscode terminal and select things it adds it to cc context automatically

extr9• 1 year ago

Cursor's tab completion model is legitimately fantastic and for many people is worth the entire $20 subscription. Lint fixes or syntax-level refactors are guessed and executed instantly with TAB with close to 100% accuracy. This is their final moat IMO, if Copilot manages to bring their tab completion up to near parity, very little reason to use Cursor.

druskacik• 1 year ago

I'd like to ask the opposite question: why do people prefer command line tools? I tried both and I prefer working in IDE. The main reason is that I don't trust the LLMs too much and I like to see and potentially quickly edit the changes they make. With an IDE, I can iterate much faster than with the command line tool.

I haven't tried Claude Code VS Code extension. Did anyone replaced Cursor with this setup?

sunnybeetroot• 1 year ago

I can roll back to different checkpoints with Cursor easily. Maybe CC has it but the fact that I haven’t found it after using it daily is an example of Cursor having a better UX for me.

macrolime4• 1 year ago

I like using Claude Code through Roo Code (vscode extension). I find it easier to work with text using a mouse, vscode diff viewer etc. I guess if you're very good at vim shortcuts etc you can use that in Claude Code instead of selecting text with a mouse. Claude Code has a vscode extension too so I feel that using Claude Code through vscode just adds a better UI.

wagwang4• 1 year ago

As far as I can tell, terminal agents are inferior to hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged environments when it comes to concurrent execution and far inferior to assisted ide in terms of UX so what exactly is the point?. The "UI niceties" is the whole point of using cursor and somehow, everyone else sucks at it.

rhodysurf2• 1 year ago

You’re missing the point tho. The point of the cli agent is that it’s a building block to put this thing everywhere. Look at CCs GitHub plugin, it’s great

extr9• 1 year ago

Not sure what you mean. "Hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged environments"? The entire selling point of CC is that you can do

- > curl -fsSL http://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

- > claude

- > OAuth to your Anthropic account

Done. Now you have a SOTA agentic AI with pretty forgiving usage limits up and running immediately. This is why it's capturing developer mindshare. The simplicity of getting up and going with it is a selling point.

adamoshadjivas• 1 year ago

Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans.

I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the next 2 years. Then i can see a big push for UX if models are truly a commodity. But as long as claude is much better then yes they hold all the cards. (And don't have a bigger company to have a civil war with like openai)

virgildotcodes2• 1 year ago

Seems like the survival strategy for cursor would be to develop their own frontier coding model. Maybe they can leverage the data from their still somewhat significant lead in the space to make a solid effort.

teruakohatu2• 1 year ago

CC at like a 500% loss

Do you have a citation for this?

It might be at a loss, but I don’t think it is that extravagant.

Aeolun2• 1 year ago

It probably doesn’t cost them all that much? Maybe they were offering the API at a 500% markup, and code is just breaking even.

threatripper• 1 year ago

But Cursor is also offering OpenAI and Google models.

adidoit• 1 year ago

Not sure this is true. Inference margins are substantial and if you look at your claude code usage it's very clever at caching

  Input │      Output │  Cache Create │     Cache Read
 916,134 │  11,106,507 │   199,684,538 │  2,767,614,506

as an example here's my usage. Massive daily usage for the past two months.

manojlds3• 1 year ago

If open models become big, open coding agents would be bigger at that point. Even more motivation as well.

lvl1552• 1 year ago

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

7thpower• 1 year ago

Where is a citation on Anthropic increasing cost to cursor? I had not seen that news, but it would make sense.

bernawil• 1 year ago

you mean the plans are subsidized? pay-per-use doesn't look subsidized to me, I can spend 5$ a day on a medium sized codebase easily.

nikcub• 1 year ago

Cursor see it coming - it's why they're moving to the web and mobile[0]

The bigger issue is the advantage Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have in developing and deploying their own models. It wasn't that long ago that Cursor was reading 50 lines of code at a time to save on token costs. Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to, and it blew everything else away.

Cursor could release a cli tomorrow but it wouldn't help them compete when Anthropic and Google can always be multiples cheaper

[0] https://cursor.com/blog/agent-web

extr9• 1 year ago

I think this is an interesting and cool direction for Cursor to be going in and I don't doubt something like this is the future. But I have my doubts whether it will save them in the short/medium term:

- AI is not good enough yet to abandon the traditional IDE experierence if you're doing anything non-trivial. Hard finding use cases for this right now.

- There's no moat here. There are already a dozen "Claude Code UI" OSS projects with similar basic functionality.

Aeolun2• 1 year ago

Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to

I don’t think this is true at all. The reason CC is so good is that they’re very deliberate about what goes in the context. CC often spends ages reading 5 LOC snippets, but afterwards it only has relevant stuff in context.

ripberge• 1 year ago

Forking an IDE is not expensive if it's the core product of a company with a $900M ARR.

I doubt MS has ever made $900M off of VS Code.

extr9• 1 year ago

"The same editor you already use for free, but with slightly nicer UI for some AI stuff" is not a $900M ARR product.

shados• 1 year ago

CC would explode even further if they had official Team/Enterprise plan (likely in the work, Claude Code Waffle flag), and worked on Windows without WSL (supposedly pretty easy to fix, they just didn't bother). Cursor learnt the % of Windows user was really high when they started looking, even before they really supported it.

They're likely artificially holding it back either because its a loss leader they want to use a very specific way, or because they're planning the next big boom/launch (maybe with a new model to build hype?).

absurddoctor• 1 year ago

They quietly released an update to CC earlier today so it can now be run natively on Windows.

dboreham• 1 year ago

Conversely Cursor is still broken on WSL2.

bredren• 1 year ago

with a simple extension for some UX improvements

What are the UX improvements?

I was using the Pycharm plugin and didn’t notice any actual integration.

I had problems with pycharm’s terminal—not least of which was default 5k line scroll back which while easy to change was worst part of CC for me at first.

I finally jumped to using iterm and then using pycharm separately to do code review, visual git workflows, some run config etc.

But the actual value of Pycharm—-and I’ve been a real booster of that IDE has shrank due to CC and moving out of the built in terminal is a threat to usage of the product for me.

If the plugin offered some big value I might stick with it but I’m not sure what they could even do.

extr9• 1 year ago

#1 improvement for VS Code users is giving the agent MCP tools to get diagnostics from the editor LSPs. Saves a tremendous amount of time having the agent run and rerun linting commands.

asdev5• 1 year ago

for those who seldom use the terminal, is Claude Code still usable? I heard it doesn't do tab autocomplete in IDE like Cursor

virgildotcodes2• 1 year ago

Claude Code is totally different paradigm. You don't edit your files directly so there is no tab autocomplete. It's a chat session.

There are IDE integrations where you can run it in a terminal session while perusing the files through your IDE, but it's not powering any autocomplete there AFAIK.

neoecos• 1 year ago

I think lots of issues with the integration of CC or other TUI with graphical IDEs will be solved with stuff like the Agentic Coding Protocol that the guys at Zed at working on https://www.npmjs.com/package/@zed-industries/agentic-coding...

satvikpendem5• 1 year ago

What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?

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

robryan• 1 year ago

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

arresin5• 1 year ago

Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for documentation

I strongly disagree. It will put the wrong doc snippets into context 99% of the time. If the docs are slightly long then forget it, it’ll be even worse.

I never use it because of this.

N3cr0ph4g1st• 1 year ago

Context7 mcp

zackify• 1 year ago

Almost all of this was true before they even announced the purchase. I was so shocked and now I’m not surprised it fell through

bionhoward• 1 year ago

does claude code have a privacy mode with zero data retention?

james_marks3• 1 year ago

Haven’t looked recently but when it came out, the story was that it was private by default. It uses a regular API token, which promises no retention.

davidclark• 1 year ago

Is this $900M ARR a reliable number?

Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a sub to Cursor.

If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that would be 375K paid users.

There’s 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if everyone using Cursor were paying $200/month.

Seems impossibly high, especially given the number of other AI subscription options as well.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-d...

ashraymalhotra2• 1 year ago

Maybe the OP got confused with Cursor's $900mil raise? https://cursor.com/blog/series-c

Last disclosed revenue from Cursor was $500mil. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-05/anysphere...

smcleod2• 1 year ago

The $20/month cursor sub is heavily limited though, for basic casual usage that's fine but you VERY soon run into its limits when working at any speed.

helloericsf2• 1 year ago

The base plan limit is not hard to hit. Then you're on the usage based rocket.

sumedh4• 1 year ago

Enterprise pay more.

lunarcave• 1 year ago

Strictly speaking about large, complex, sprawling codebases, I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent.

Auto-regressive nature of these things mean that errors accumulate, and IDEs are well placed to give that observability to the human, than a coding agent. I can course correct more easily in an IDE with clear diffs, coding navigation, than following a terminal timeline.

teruakohatu2• 1 year ago

I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent.

CC has some integration with VSC it is not all or nothing.

nojs• 1 year ago

You can view and navigate the diffs made by the terminal agent in your IDE in realtime, just like Cursor, as well as commit, revert, etc. That’s really all the “integration” you need.

petesergeant• 1 year ago

I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent.

I resisted moving from Roo in VS Code to CC for this reason, and then tried it for a day, and didn't go back.

xnx3• 1 year ago

Is the case for using Claude Code much weaker now that Gemini CLI is out?

apwell238• 1 year ago

no. CC is not just a cli. Its cli + their pro/max plan.

gemini cli is very expensive.

apwell238• 1 year ago

thats not a fair comparision CC is

agentic tool + anthropic subsidized pricing.

Second part is why it has "exploded"

baby• 1 year ago

I've tried all the CLI and vscode with agent mode (and personally I prefer o4-mini) is the best thing out there.

socalgal2• 1 year ago

just curious because I'm inexperienced with all the latest tools here

- Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)

What is that? I have Gemini Code Assist installed in VSCode and I'm getting tab completion. (yes, LLM based tab completion)

Which, as an aside I find useful when it works but also often extremely confusing to read. Like say in C++ I type

    int myVar = 123

The editor might show

    int myVar = 123;

And it's nearly impossible to tell that I didn't enter that `;` so I move on to the next line instead of pressing tab only to find the `;` wasn't really there. That's also probably an easy example. Literally it feels like 1 of 6 lines I type I can't tell what is actually in the file and what is being suggested. Any tips? Maybe I just need to set some special background color for text being suggested.

and PS: that tiny example is not an example of a great tab completion. A better one is when I start editing 1 of 10 similar lines, I edit the first one, it sees the pattern and auto does the other 9. Can also do the "type a comment and it fills in the code" thing. Just trying to be clear I'm getting LLM tab completion and not using Cursor

james_marks3• 1 year ago

This feeling of, “what exactly is in the file?” is why I have all AI turned off in my IDE, and run CC independently.

I get all AI or none, so it’s always obvious what’s happening.

Completions are OK, but I did not enjoy the feeling of both us having a hand on the wheel and trying to type at the same time.

ec1096856• 1 year ago

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

anonymid• 1 year ago

I never got the valuation. I (and many others) have built open source agent plugins that are pretty much just as good, in our free time (check out magenta nvim btw, I think it turned out neat!)

HenriNext• 1 year ago

- Forking VSCode is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.

- Anthropic doesn't use the inputs for training.

- Cursor doesn't have $900M ARR. That was the raise. Their ARR is ~$500m [1].

- Claude Code already support the niceties, including "add selection to chat", accessing IDE's realtime warnings and errors (built-in tool 'ideDiagnostics'), and using IDE's native diff viewer for reviewing the edits.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...

edoceo• 1 year ago

The cost of the fork isn't creating it, it's maintaining it. But maybe AI could help :/

jahewson• 1 year ago

Forking Linux is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.

threecheese2• 1 year ago

Claude Code is just proving that coding agents can be successful. The interface isn’t magic, it just fits the model and integrates with a system in all the right ways. The Anthropic team for that product is very small comparatively (their most prolific contributor is Claude), and I think it’s more of a technology proof than a core competency - it’s a great API $ business lever, but there’s no reason for them to try and win the “agentic coding UI” market. Unless Generative AI flops everywhere else, these markets will continue to emerge and need focus. The Windsurf kerfuffle is further proof that OpenAI doesn’t see the market as must-win for a frontier model shop.

And so I’d say this isn’t a harbinger of the death of Cursor, instead proof that there’s a future in the market they were just recently winning.

extr9• 1 year ago

I was being hyperbolic saying their ARR will go to zero. That's obviously not the case, but the point is that CC has revealed their real product was not "agentic coding UI", it was "insanely cheap tokens". I have no doubt they will continue to see success, but their future right now looks closer to being a competitor to free/open tools like cline/roo code, as well as the CLI entrants, not a standalone $500M ARR juggarnaut. They have no horse in the race in the token market, they're a middleman.

They either need to create their own model and compete on cost, or hope that token costs come down dramatically so as to be too cheap to meter.

hv23• 1 year ago

Digging in here more... why would you say it isn't in Anthropic's interest to win the "agentic coding UI" market?

My mental model is that these foundation model companies will need to invest in and win in a significant number of the app layer markets in order to realize enough revenue to drive returns. And if coding / agentic coding is one of the top X use cases for tokens at the app layer, seems logical that they'd want to be a winner in this market.

Is your view that these companies will be content to win at the model layer and be agnostic as to the app layer?

ryanobjc• 1 year ago

Just cancelled my Cursor sub due to claude code, so heavily agree.

kmarc• 1 year ago

The forked IDE thing I don't understand either, but...

During the evaluation at a previous job, we found that windsurf is waaaay better than anything else. They were expensive (to train on our source code directly) but the solution the offered was outperforming others.

RestlessAPI• 1 year ago

I use Windsurf so I remain in the driver's seat. Using AI coding tools too much feels like brain rot where I can't think sharply anymore. Having auto complete guess my next edit as I'm typing is great because I still retain all the control over the code base. There's never any blocks of code that I can't be bothered to look at, because I wrote everything still.

firesteelrain• 1 year ago

Windsurf big claim to fame was that you could run their model in airgap and they said they did not train on GPL code. This was an option available for Enterprise customers until they took it away recently to prevent self hosting

ec1096856• 1 year ago

Good analysis. And Claude code itself will be mercilessly copied, so even if another model jumps ahead, small switching cost.

That said, the creator of Claude Code jumped to Cursor so they must see a there there.

bilsbie2• 1 year ago

Is Claude code expensive? Can you control the costs or can it surprise you.

aaronbrethorst• 1 year ago

On a subscription, it is 100% predictable: $20, $100, or $200/month

chatmasta• 1 year ago

The Microsoft investments in both VSCode and GitHub are looking incredibly prescient.

oblio4• 1 year ago

Turns out, Balmer was right.

Abishek_Muthian3• 1 year ago

- Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)

My local ollama + continue + Qwen 2.5 coder gives good tab completion with minimal latency; how much better is Cursor’s tab completion model?

I’m still weary of letting LLM edit my code so my local setup gives me sufficient assistance with tab completion and occasional chat.

mark_l_watson6• 1 year ago

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

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

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

oblio4• 1 year ago

What kind of hardware are you using?

osigurdson4• 1 year ago

> Claude Code has absolutely exploded

Does anyone have a comparison between this and OpenAI Codex? I find OpenAI's thing really good actually (vastly better workflow that Windsurf). Maybe I am missing out however.

sunaookami3• 1 year ago

Codex CLI is very bad, it often struggles to even find the file and goes on a rampage inside the home directory trying to find the file and commenting on random folders. Using o3/o4-mini in Aider is decent though.

coolKid721• 1 year ago

never met anyone who used codex lol

brundolf• 1 year ago

I also just prefer CC's UX. I've tried to make myself use Copilot and Roo and I just couldn't. The extra mental overhead and UI context-switching took me out of the flow. And tab completion has never felt valuable to me.

But the chat UX is so simple it doesn't take up any extra brain-cycles. It's easier to alt-tab to and from; it feels like slacking a coworker. I can have one or more terminal windows open with agents I'm managing, and still monitor/intervene in my editor as they work. Fits much nicer with my brain, and accelerates my flow instead of disrupting it

There's something starkly different for me about not having to think about exactly what context to feed to the tool, which text to highlight or tabs to open, which predefined agent to select, which IDE button to press

Just formulate my concepts and intent and then express those in words. If I need to be more precise in my words then I will be, but I stay in a concepts + words headspace. That's very important for conserving my own mental context window

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

I think CC is just far more useful; I use it for literally everything and without MCP (except puppeteer sometimes) as it just writes python/bash scripts to do that far better than all those hacked together MCP garbage bins. It controls my computer & writes code. It made me better as well as now I actually write code, including GUI/web apps, that's are always fully scriptable. It helps me, but it definitely helps CC; it can just interrogate/test everything I make without puppeteer (or other web browser control, which is always brittle as hell).

moltar• 1 year ago

And open source tools like aider are, of course, even more validated and get more eyes.

Plus recently launched OpenCode, open source CC is gaining traction fast.

There was always very little moat in the model wrapper.

The main value of CC is the free tool built by people who understand all the internals of their own models.

selvan• 1 year ago

Cursor - co-pilot/AI pair programming usecases.

Claude Code - Agentic/Autonomous coding usecases.

Both have their own place in programming, though there are overlaps.

khurs2• 1 year ago

What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?

A lot of devs are not superstar devs.

They don't want a terminal tool, or anything they have to configure.

A IDE you can just download and 'it just works' has value. And there are companies that will pay.

dukeyukey• 1 year ago

CC _is_ that took. npm install, login, give tasks. Diff automatically appears in your IDE (in VSC/Intellij at least).

loandbehold• 1 year ago

You don't need to be a superstar dev to use CC. If you can use chat window you can use CC.

old_man_cato• 1 year ago

A lot of engineers underestimate the learning curve required to jump from IDE to terminal. Multiple generations of engineers were raised on IDEs. It's really hard to break that mental model.

firecall• 1 year ago

Unless I’m understanding it wrong, the Tab Completion in Cursor isn’t a moat anymore.

VSCode & CoPilot now offer it.

Is it as good? Maybe not.

But they are really working hard over there at Copilot and seem to be catching up.

I get an Edu license for Copilot, so just ditched Cursor!

andrewingram• 1 year ago

I agree it has a good chance of catching up, but the difference in quality is pretty noticeable today. I'd much rather stick with vscode, because I hate all the subtle ways Cursor changes the UI; like taking over the keyboard shortcut for clearing the scrollback in the terminal. But I find it's pretty hard to use Copilot's tab completion after using Cursor for a while.

redhale2• 1 year ago

Cursor's multi-file tab completion and multi-file diff experience are worth $20 easily IMO.

I truly do not understand people's affinity for a CLI interface for coding agents. Scriptability I understand, but surely we could agree that CC with Cursor's UX would be superior to CC's terminal alone, right? That's why CC is pushing IDE integration -- they're just not there yet.

ghc2• 1 year ago

surely we could agree that CC with Cursor's UX

I can't stand the UX, or VS Code's UX in general. I vastly prefer having CC open in a terminal alongside neovim. CC is fully capable of opening diffs in neovim or otherwise completely controlling neovim by talking to its socket.

iwontberude2• 1 year ago

I don’t see how there will be any money to be made in this industry once these models are quantized and all local. It’s going to be one of the most painful bubble deflations we have ever seen and the biggest success of open source in our lifetimes.

manojlds3• 1 year ago

Since then OpenAI has released Codex as well (the web one)

mountainriver2• 1 year ago

I too am an engineer that thinks CLI's are cool, but if you believe it's even remotely as useful as an IDE then give me a break.

benjaminwootton• 1 year ago

I do agree, Claude Code absolutely changed the game. It is outstanding.

janpaul1232• 1 year ago

Kilo Code CEO here. This is why open source is so important!!

oooyay• 1 year ago

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

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

9cb14c1ec0• 1 year ago

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

sagarpatil• 1 year ago

I strongly agree with you. I’m more of a CLI guy, and Claude Code just works. Most good projects have a CLI anyway (gcloud, GitHub CLI, Vercel, etc.). I prefer CLI vs MCP’s. I’m on the $200 plan, and it’s absolutely worth it (never thought I’d say this for a CLI app).

jiggunjer• 1 year ago

But CC is more work to setup, especially if you want to use multiple models. Not even sure it supports all the models that the IDE products do.

acaloiar• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/Rdt3z

dalemhurley2• 1 year ago

Cursor (and Garry Tan’s X post) has shown us that the VC money is propping up these companies astounding growth, the only way for them to become profitable is to increase the cost per a request, which means they need to innovate like crazy.

The moat is paper thin.

GitHub has open sourced copilot.

The open source community is working hard on their own projects.

No doubt Cursor is moving fast to create amazing innovations, but if the competition only focuses on thin wrappers they are not worth the billion dollar valuations.

I love watching this space as it is moving extremely fast.

tootie• 1 year ago

I think the recent Grok release and considering xAI was relatively late to the game shows that the only moat to training giant models is how many GPUs you can buy. ChatGPT was earth-shattering and it took less than two years for multiple credible competitors to match or exceed them. Making these models profitable is proving extremely difficult in the face of so much competition and such unsustainable expectations being set. Google seems to be most likely to sustain themselves through this melee. Them and the Chinese companies.

bmau5• 1 year ago

What was Garry's post?

forrestthewoods3• 1 year ago

I have same question

ec1096856• 1 year ago

https://x.com/garrytan/status/1941553682736439307

The thesis is that once you’re paying $200 a month, you’re beholden and won’t pay and compare it with anything else.

woeirua• 1 year ago

There is no moat. If you’re a true believer that strong agents are around the corner, then all of these add on companies will be obsolete in a few years. The first company to strong agents can trivially rebuild Cursor or Windsurf.

herval5• 1 year ago

If you believe AGI is around the corner, doesn’t it mean it’ll replace ALL products?

seunosewa• 1 year ago

Google spent 2.4 billion dollars

dalemhurley2• 1 year ago

I am saying the subsidies tokens are the paper thin moat.

TechDebtDevin3• 1 year ago

Cursor just committed mass consumer fraud at worst, and at best pissed off all their best customers. I feel really sorry for those who invested at a 9bb valuation.

jen729w2• 1 year ago

I feel really sorry for those who invested at a 9bb valuation.

Because they didn't do their jobs properly?

aeve890• 1 year ago

Cursor just committed mass consumer fraud at worst, and at best pissed off all their best customers.

What happened?

parthdesai• 1 year ago

Gary gives off a grifter vibe to me. Such a shame seeing how YC has fallen

sebmellen2• 1 year ago

He blocked me (a relative nobody) on X for remarking on the number of people I know who’ve made it to YC on completely fraudulent credentials.

BrtByte5• 1 year ago

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

anton-c2• 1 year ago

I seriously cannot keep up. I fell a bit behind and now I feel I need a primer to know who owns/acquired/developed all these additional things surrounding the ai space

theyinwhy• 1 year ago

That information is as important as knowing about soap opera characters.

ashvardanian• 1 year ago

The title made sense until the comma, and then it didn’t :)

rvz• 1 year ago

This deal always looked strange in the first place. The usage of Windsurf was significantly lower than Cursor and Copilot and somehow it was worth $3B.

Given the release of Claude Code, it was already over for them.

pimlottc• 1 year ago

@dang - The title’s wording suggest that OpenAI’s CEO is leaving, not Windsurf. A more accurate title might be: “Windsurf’s deal with OpenAI is off, and its CEO is going to Google”

dang• 1 year ago

Ok, thanks! (Submitted title was ""OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off — and its CEO is going to Google"")

tlogan4• 1 year ago

Could anyone explain the implications of this for Windsurf as a company? Are they going to close?

jamesliudotcc2• 1 year ago

Nothing for certain, but yes. The IP payout is to give the investors something.

mrcwinn• 1 year ago

What if OpenAI is buying Cursor instead?

jamesliudotcc2• 1 year ago

Not out of the question after a week of Cursor just absolutely torching goodwill

frays• 1 year ago

Could you elaborate or provide more context for those who don't use Cursor?

submeta11• 1 year ago

I went from Emacs to VS Code, then to Cursor, next to Claude Code, which is so good that I feel like I am having half a dozen junior devs at my fingertips, 24/7.

Since Claude Code is cli based, I reviewed my cli toolset: Migrated from iTerm2 to Ghostty and Tmux, from Cursor to NeoVim (my God is it good!).

Just had a 14h workday with this tooling. It’s so good that I complete the work of weeks and months within days! Absolutely beast.

At this point I am thinking IDEs do not reflect the changing reality of software development. They are designed for navigating project folders, writing / changing files. But I don’t review files that much anymore. I rather write prompts, watch Claude Code create a plan, implement it, even write meaningful commit messages.

Yes I can navigate the project with neovim, yes I can make commits in git and in lazygit, but my task is best spent in designing, planning, prompting, reviewing and testing.

didibus2• 1 year ago

I don’t review files that much anymore

You don't review the code? Just test it works?

yoz-y• 1 year ago

At work we’re encouraged to use AI, so I do. For me the one thing that works well is using it to write one off scripts that do stuff and would be a chore to write.

Usually in 2-3 prompts I can get a python or shell script that reads some file list somewhere, reads some json/csv elsewhere. Combines it in various ways and spits out some output to be ingested by some other pipeline.

I just test this code if it works it’s good.

Never in my life would I put this in a critical system though. When I review these files they are full of tiny errors that would blow up in spectacular manner if the input was slightly off somewhere.

It’s good for what it is. But I’m honestly afraid of production code being vibe coded by these tools.

rileymichael• 1 year ago

It’s so good that I complete the work of weeks and months within days

and yet you're pulling 14 hour workdays..

nilslice• 1 year ago

i get it... i find the productivity is extremely addictive

jen729w2• 1 year ago

Well you can't risk Claude quitting overnight. It forgets everything it did the day before and now you have to start over ... must ... finish ... tonight ... within ... context ... window.

lbrito• 1 year ago

So half a dozen junior devs plus 14h workday. That's a ton of surplus value right there. Hope he's getting a cut!

handfuloflight2• 1 year ago

That doesn't negate that he is compressing his backlog.

apwell238• 1 year ago

yes vibecoding is addicting like that. but if you are not reviewing any code and simply vibing then in my expreience you'll eventually get stuck in "its still not working" loops beause you have no other context or insight to provide it other than that. Then you have either accept what you have or throw the whole thing out and/or actually read the code . kind of rules out last option because code is now just too far gone with too many special cases hardcoded because AI sucks at abstraction or real software engineering.

imiric7• 1 year ago

I'm curious to see what you've built with all that extra productivity.

forrestthewoods3• 1 year ago

No one ever shares their great and shipped products. AI built slop is for generating hype not revenue or users.

submeta11• 1 year ago

I work at a company with over 700 employees. And there are tons of use cases where a simple CRUD app is sufficient. Or where glue code needs to be written / changed for legacy systems. Or where an OS system like Camunda is deployed and needs to be configured, workflows developed, etc

The reality of companies out there is much simpler than the challenges of a startup that needs to build systems that are state of the art, scale for millions of users, etc There are companies out there that make millions, in areas you‘ve never heard of, and their core business does not depend on software development best practices.

In our company we have an IT team with the median age of fifty, team members who never have developed software, just maintain systems, delegate hard work to expensive consultants.

Now in that setting someone coming from a startup background is like someone coming from the future. I feel like a wizard who can solve problems in days, instead of weeks or months waiting for a consultant to solve.

AJRF• 1 year ago

Do you do all this switching during the workday?

shivenigma• 1 year ago

But I don’t review files that much anymore.

Say no more.

danielbln2• 1 year ago

I review PRs/commits, not files. Given the right cage to lock the agent inside, and guardrails built around, and conventions and guidelines, and agentic flows so it can pull in what's needed.. the need to look at every line and file during implementation is significantly lessened. So then I review the final output (which is a unit of work/task wrapped in a PR).

mr_toad• 1 year ago

IDEs were a crutch, and now that crutch has been replaced by a semi-autonomous bot that can fetch and carry.

prashantsengar• 1 year ago

Curious - how did moving from iTerm2 to Ghostty help? I currently use iTerm2 and have never used Claude Code

submeta11• 1 year ago

Ghostty is gpu accelerated. It’s super fast, and tmux in it is a joy to use. That combined with NeoVim gives me an increadibly smooth dev experience in the terminal, something I had never have with iTerm2 and emacs.

Eggpants• 1 year ago

Try again. No self respecting Emacs user would ever call vim “good”.

submeta11• 1 year ago

Haha :) I lived inside Emacs, used orgmode for everything, have written tons of Elisp, used org-roam as my second brain, used vanilla Emacs shortcuts instead of Evil (with a special keyboard settup using Karabiner Elements), did even my googling from Emacs, used emacs calc instead of my calculator, but in the end I spent more time tinkering my Emacs setup than doing real work. Emacs was a lifestyle. At some point I realized: Unix and the terminal are what Emacs try to be: It tries to be a one-stop shop offering you everything: Surfing the web, writing emails, word processor, calculator, planner, terminal. Unix and the terminal offer me all of that. Plus any scripting language. Why miss all the beautiful apps, just to be an Emacs zealot? The editor in emacs is just one usecase. Neovim does it just as well, if not better.

But relax, noone is taking your Emacs from you :) I still like it, but am not a disciple anymore ;)

mountainriver2• 1 year ago

When generating code that is often wrong and needing to review it, and IDE is demonstrably better, this isn't an argument

apwell238• 1 year ago

But I don’t review files that much anymore.

they don't review files anymore though.

MarcelOlsz• 1 year ago

Migrated from iTerm2 to Ghostty and Tmux

Would love to hear more.

mvkel• 1 year ago

Bullet dodged.

Windsurf's value to OpenAI was for the latter to "see the whole chessboard" of context, which is helpful when you're training models to be good at coding.

But codex (and Claude Code) fulfill this from the CLI, and it's a first-party utility, not an acquisition.

mrdependable• 1 year ago

I wonder how these two events came to be declared in the same news release.

seatac76• 1 year ago

How long does Windsurf go on now? Losing your CEO to a poach job not even an acquihire must blow up any fund raising plans.

m3kw9• 1 year ago

Smart move, I always wonder if they have disposable money to spend on stuff like this and figure out what to do with it after.

xnx3• 1 year ago

Nice to get a sanity check that confirms Windsurf was never really worth $3B to all those who thought that number was ridiculous.

fnord77• 1 year ago

Google is paying $2.4billion to them

diegof79• 1 year ago

I'm not surprised. I started using Windsurf when it came out because I liked its UX better than Cursor's.

However, while Cursor and GH Copilot improved, Windsurf went in the opposite direction. On each update, I started to get more and more issues. The agent often tried to run shell commands, and it hung up, or I found minor UI bugs. One day, I decided to give GH Copilot another chance, and I was surprised by how it evolved, to the point that it worked better than Windsurf for my usage. I don’t know what happened internally at Windsurf, but I notice the degradation as a user. If my case indicates what happened to other users, maybe OpenAI saw declining subscriptions and canceled the deal.

beambot• 1 year ago

Are these "acquihire & license" the new M&A...? I recall hearing that this was a "hack" to avoid DOJ and FTC scrutiny over acquisitions, but I have no clue how such deals are structured. Anyone care to chime in?

smcleod2• 1 year ago

Honestly there's no value that windsurf, cursor and all the other VSCode forks provide that couldn't be provided as an extension and even then - none of them perform as well for agentic coding as Cline / Roo Code (debates about the subscription pricing aside due to people often not realising their model limits, public US only based APIs, pay for useful API limits etc aside).

sashank_15092• 1 year ago

So the result of aggressively scrutinizing big tech acquisitions is acquihires, not a more competitive tech ecosystem with say more IPO’s.

The libertarian spin on this would be government should have never scrutinized acquisitions and the result is just worse for everyone.

The progressive spin would be to now ban acquihires somehow, and then whatever new legal invention will be created next. I can imagine the next step being, creating a consulting company out of your startup and then selling yourself as consultants to big techs. Now you are neither acquired nor technically acqui-hired and the whackamole continues.

At some point, we need to realize the solution is the culture of people involved. If the government could just ask to reduce acquisitions to make the ecosystem more competitive and companies tried following it in spirit to the best of their ability, we might have much better results than whatever we have now. When culture degrades, the govt can’t trust companies, the companies can’t trust the govt, everything just gets worse, regardless of what rules you write and enforce.

agd• 1 year ago

This wasn't a result of regulator scrutiny. The issue was that MS (owner of Copilot) was demanding access to the IP (due to their existing agreement with OpenAI), and OpenAI was resisting. In addition, Claude blocked access to Windsurf, which also damaged them as an acquisition target.

Nothing to do with regulators.

sashank_15092• 1 year ago

I find this hard to believe considering all the recent acquihires that happened recently like Character AI, Inflection, Covariant AI, Scale AI, context AI and so on. Maybe you’re right about the specifics of this situation, but my prior for this being an acquihire is very high and I would need to see very compelling evidence that that is not the case.

arrosenberg• 1 year ago

The culture of the people involved got us to this point, I’m not sure it’s the solution to the problem.

The progressive spin would be to now ban acquihires somehow, and then whatever new legal invention will be created next.

Progressive has become a moving target, but the pro-competition view would be to break up the massively concentrated companies that are further consolidating markets. Thats what the Khan FTC was trying to do, but we need a Congress interested in a competitive marketplace, which we haven’t had in a while.

ashraymalhotra2• 1 year ago

Just curious - would this negatively affect OpenAI's ability to acquire companies in the future?

ec1096856• 1 year ago

They have got get their act together from a structure standpoint or these types of acquisitions are going keep failing.

nrmitchi3• 1 year ago

This isn’t a great look for OpenAI, but acquisitions fall through all the time.

The issue isn’t an acquisition not working out, it’s that the founding/exec team felt it appropriate to arrange their own exits and abandon their team before even communicating that their “successful exit” wasn’t actually happening.

kolja005• 1 year ago

Funny to see this today.

I'm a rank and file dev at a non-big tech company and I got a call from a Windsurf sales rep this week who I had connected with on LinkedIn the day before (I never gave them my number). They told me my company was in talks with Windsurf about a licensing deal but that they would give me a 30 day trial of an enterprise account for use on personal projects to let me try it in advance. I guess the idea for them is to build enthusiasm among devs in the company?

Is this a standard sales strategy for products like this? It seems pretty aggressive to me but I'm just an engineer so I wouldn't know.

aabhay• 1 year ago

Very standard yep. Sales folks are sort of trained /indoctrinated into telling white lies like that in order to get in the door. There are loads of examples of using fake momentum to close deals. If its a senior person it’s “My CEO asked me to personally reach out to you” or a fake email from the CEO forwarded by the rep. If one person at the company uses it, it’s “we’re negotiating a company wide license” or “we already have a group license with extra seats” or “one of your teammates sent us a list of priority teammates” yada yada.

blindriver• 1 year ago

The founders fucked over the employees and the investors and sold out. I guess they don’t care if they are worth $200M each but they fucked every employee that poured their heart out into that company.

I hope no one works for them again.

almost_usual• 1 year ago

This is why working for startups is not worth it.

moralestapia2• 1 year ago

Lol.

I commented on the OG thread something like "weird since MSFT owns VS Code" and got downvoted to oblivion.

Yet here we are, always right :).

SamDc733• 1 year ago

When Claude kind of cut them off, they realized these AI Agentic tools are as good as your model, little to no moat here.

And it was a crazy deal to begin with, for reference JetBrains who's building IDEs for 24 years are evaluated at $7 billions

screye• 1 year ago

Works out for Google and the C-suite. Horrible for the employees. These fake-acquisitions are effectively arbitrage against employees, who get left holding nothing. Should be illegal and regulated.

Not sure how the VCs get their cut. I'm guessing that Google can balance it out by participating in rounds for other startups in that VC's porfolio.

bluefirebrand4• 1 year ago

It is always the case that the employees get screwed

another_twist• 1 year ago

I recently read a reddit thread about how somebody made 12M on a stock that IPOd. But yeah the majority opinion is that employees get shafted.

slad• 1 year ago

I have been using Windsurf for few months. They even have their own AI model SWE-1 model. I really liked using Windsurf. They also have integrations with other IDEs ex: jetbrains, VS code, etc.

This week I have been using Claude Code and Windsurf side by side. I would make change with one, stash it, ask the other for similar change and then would diff it.

Overall Windsurf was pretty on a par with Claude code.

yieldcrv2• 1 year ago

and Windsurf employees have worthless equity and no CEO

loool dead

SMAAART• 1 year ago

How does this happens?

They raised A, B, and C round (according to CrunchBase), and then the founders just walk away and get a job/deal at Google?

moralestapia2• 1 year ago

Nepotism.

The same set of rules that apply to you and me are not universal.

manquer4• 1 year ago

Perhaps it as combination of how much founders were diluted and how much they are being offered upfront. We are hearing about $100M signing bonuses.

It is hard to say no when Google/Meta gives you say $100M upfront and hundreds more if not Billion+ in RSUs. After 3 rounds it is not unreasonable to have only 5-10%.

10% of a company worth a few billion burning a lot of cash, that needs to keep raising more rounds i.e more dilution, may have less value than RSUs from multi-trillion dollar publicly traded liquid tech company today.

It is also quite hard to raise $5-10+Billion in cash. There are only handful of startups which have ever done so

Very few funds/investors can afford to do so large rounds. This was SoftBank's thesis for most of last decade, compete by just outfunding competing products in a market.

t0mas88• 1 year ago

The deal for the founders may not have been as good as what Google offered. They may only hold 10% after those rounds, a serious part of the acquisition price could go to liquidation preferences of the VCs and the deal is mostly in OpenAI stock instead of cash. Not that hard to imagine the Google option offering them much more actual cash right now.

osigurdson4• 1 year ago

This certainly aligns with my own usage. I'm currently using OpenAI's own Codex 50:1 compared to Windsurf. For me, I'd rather take some time to create a good quality prompt and have it work away for a few minutes and create a material delta. It isn't always perfect, and I often have to make a few tweaks myself, but it is much nicer and waiting around and watching Windsurf bang around on a tiny part of the solution. Windsurf is still nice to use for quick UI iteration however.

asciii• 1 year ago

This sounds terrible if they're just taking management and key employees?

Imagine backing this startup and the founder team takes a parachute...

awaymazdacx5• 1 year ago

nonexclusive proprietary licensing at its zenith

mortsmel• 1 year ago

I don't know if you noticed but cursors language server aspect that runs the coding edits and stuff like that from a server to the workstation is a lot better than windsurf.

Windsurf phone's home on every code edit that you have and takes on 30% load on your servers or on your workstation depending on what you're running.

I would strongly discourage the use of windsurf on your systems.

Case in point their AI model that they just built.

nrmitchi3• 1 year ago

This whole situation feels shockingly close to the Meta/Scale situation, where founders and specific employees were plucked out, and effectively gutted any future prospects for the company.

At least in the Scale case there seemed to be some form of payout to employees and equity holders, but this takes it a whole lot further by just throwing out all other employees.

There is supposed to be the concept that “all common stock is the same”. These fake-acquisitions completely undermine that.

BrtByte5• 1 year ago

Yep, if investors and early employees keep getting left out in the cold while execs get a soft landing at Big Tech, it's going to shake a lot of trust in the startup game

herval5• 1 year ago

I don’t think anyone trusts any tech company much these days. It’s been a steep decline in the past 5 years, from arbitrary mandates to the constant talk about firing everyone and hiring an AI. Even as an investor, it’s hard to trust that the “honor system” that once existed is still in play.

neilv4• 1 year ago

Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, [...] Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology. [...] Google didn’t share how much it was paying to bring on the team. OpenAI was previously reported to be buying Windsurf for $3 billion.

Why not an acquisition?

How did Google get Windsurf and investors to agree to this maneuver that decapitated the leadership and key talent, without a big exit event for everyone?

My read of the article: "Here's x% of what OpenAI offered you, you waive legal challenges while we cherry-pick your people and license the tech in their heads, and you can keep the company, and everyone left behind can promote themselves to fill the vacancies."

taspeotis• 1 year ago

If they acquire a company they might need approval due to anti-trust.

If the people instead just quit their jobs and start working at Google … nothing to see here.

neilv4• 1 year ago

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

Maxious3• 1 year ago

https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e3... explores this some more. The remaining employees need to make it look like the business is still viable

impulser_2• 1 year ago

Is Lina Khan to blame for this new acquihire meta? She was very aggressive in blocking any tech acquisition during her time and ever since we have seen more and more acquihires which I believe these companies are using to prevent themselves from getting sued.

Google is having a hard time acquiring Wiz for 32b, and if it's blocked they owe 3.2b to Wiz. So why risk it when you can just spend the money to hire the talent behind it and spend a few month building out a new product.

hatenberg• 1 year ago

The police is to blame for trying to enforce the law, it makes criminals innovate is exactly the kind of take I come here for.

impulser_2• 1 year ago

I mean that's exactly what is happening right now. Companies are buying the assets of companies instead of the companies themselves so they don't have to worry about being sued which is a timely and costly process that has become very unreliable due to how much politics are involved in the process now.

cornfieldlabs2• 1 year ago

Update:

Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in $2.4 billion AI talent deal

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/google-windsurf-ceo-varun-mo...

hedayet3• 1 year ago

I was so surprised (or shocked) to hear that Windsurf was getting acquired for 3 billion dollars, I made an HN post asking about the truth of that news - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933825. HN's system didn't like my tone I guess and removed it, lol.

But in any case, I just can't see how AI code editors like Windsurf or Cursor, without any proprietary model, can be valued at billions. What's the underlying IP that justifies these valuations?

rpunkfu• 1 year ago

Similar thing to what we’ve witnessed with crypto coins. It’s AI season and those with money invest in it, pump it and will exit post IPO. Difference here is, that besides value that those products “hold”, it’s possible also to provide AI as a service, making Google / Microsoft etc interested.

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

They both have proprietary models.

hedayet3• 1 year ago

Anyone can build a proprietary model in under a week; but the point is - Cursor and Windsurf don't have proprietary models that remove dependency on external models, and/or have capabilities that competitors don't have.

vachina2• 1 year ago

They sell stuff that actually works, and people who use it convince people who pay money to pay for it.

BrtByte5• 1 year ago

Maybe Google sees something under the hood

scotty792• 1 year ago

I just can't see how AI code editors like Windsurf or Cursor, without any proprietary model, can be valued at billions.

Windsurf used to be GPU rental company before they decided to make a text editor. I imagine they own a lot of silicon they are running their coding assistant on.

https://www.afp.com/en/infos/windsurf-launches-first-gpu-clu...

It's not a rinky-dinky startup that just forked VS Code in a month.

hedayet3• 1 year ago

you meant Exafunction? Nothing of Exafunction was discussed in OpenAI or Google deals.

Windsurf did start as a rinky-dinky starup, just as a plugin (Codeium). And in its current state, it still has no moat.

The only reason big tech leaders are throwing money at this is - they need to show they are doing something to stay ahead. And right now they are going on a hiring frenzy as a show for their investors.

I have been there when shopping businesses were being bought for billions of dollars, and then they all got bundled up into a mess swapped under the rug silently. I don't think this is going to be any different.

muskmusk• 1 year ago

I guess masks are completely off now. We can see who sells out to the highest bidder and who won't sell because they care more about the mission.

raphinou• 1 year ago

Anyone know what the deal was? Can it be scrapped like that? I expected to read more info about that but it's not even mentioned.

Weryj• 1 year ago

Could be conditional on DD and deliverables

BrtByte5• 1 year ago

Wow, this is a pretty fascinating twist. First OpenAI's $3B deal falls through, and now Google swoops in to poach the key talent anyway? Classic big-tech maneuvering

s_ting765• 1 year ago

Sounds like the death knell for Open AI. They can't outswim the FAANG sharks. Once Microsoft is out, it's over for them.

iwontberude2• 1 year ago

I can’t wait for these companies to start laying people off so I can buy their house. They are inflating real estate prices with their dumb AI money.

TechSquidTV• 1 year ago

If this isn't some kind of sign of the times, idk what is. This is too far.

d_sc3• 1 year ago

There’s a lot of talk about Claude Code in here, and I agree it’s a great agentic coding tool. One of the benefits of Cursor & Windsurf is/was the ease for smaller companies to setup Team accounts and have control over spend.

Claude Code I think misses this. You can get an enterprise account if you commit to over, what.. 70 seats annually?

If you’re an individual you can get Max 5x/20x ..

But for smaller companies, I don’t think they are addressing that space. Am I wrong? Are there any Agentic tools like Claude Code that can provide a fixed cost per user?

mikeg8• 1 year ago

A small company can just pay the $250 a month for X number of employees to each have CC max plan. Not that complicated

d_sc3• 1 year ago

I thought that was against the terms of service from Anthropic and they have the rights to disable/ban accounts doing that.

jimmydoe• 1 year ago

Enterprise is where you make the money. I’m sure they will have something soon.

For now, i can just piggybacking on bedrock or vertex which is peanuts comparing to production cost.

d_sc3• 1 year ago

piggybacking on bedrock or vertex Can you elaborate? I’m not familiar with this approach.

thorio• 1 year ago

This my friends is how the next iteration of venture capital contract templates becomes even longer...

Otherwise, normally with the amount of capital raised by Windsurf, the founders must have signed some kind of non-compete for the event of a bad-leaver (which this obviously is). Guess covering these penalties was just part of Google's deal, hm?

warthog• 1 year ago

i would be so pissed if I was an employee who got nothing out of the deal and left to dry now

sammerslam• 1 year ago

Wow must have seen the numbers and decideed they wanted to call it off. Not a good business model probably so the human talent is where you find the best amount. Still why would anyone ever want to work at Google? Don't they know they are contributing to a system that covertly disseminates information they want you to see. Especially the AI models. Has anyone ever wondered about the training data sometimes? What would people think of them if they knew they had the entire pestein list in their hands but decided its better to protect the ones that pay them. People need to reconsider what they believe from AI, it can be extremely abused to scale narratives.

jspaetzel• 1 year ago

It's somewhat telling that the most valuable part of an company is the people, some things don't change

asdf69692• 1 year ago

Can someone explain how this works financially for the acquihired? I know they aren’t joining like a regular employee with a high TC. Does Google offer them a giant multi-million (billion?) dollar signing bonus? Why would they tank the value of the company they own just to be another employee at Google?

janpaul1232• 1 year ago

Kilo Code CEO here. We’d like to welcome ex-Windsurf users by offering you $100 in credits. :D We'd love to show how through open source there is a better way (better community, more transparent pricing, won't mess with your or the product). https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/windsurf-is-over-switch-to-open-s...

twolf910616• 1 year ago

dang, I feel like my Bay to Breaker tote bag value just went up 10x right?

ur-whale• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/SkCKz

ivape2• 1 year ago

What could Google have possible offered? Must have been astronomical. Sundar has been aggressive ever since OpenAI knocked the wind out of them by being first release gpt.

senderista• 1 year ago

Not every exit is a liquidity event these days. Startup employees take note.

gmerc• 1 year ago

It's clearly designed to avoid anti-trust

https://centreforaileadership.org/resources/opinion_startups...

jschveibinz• 1 year ago

There are probably some extremely unhappy VC's, angels and employees over at Windsurf right about now.

Windsurf's Funding Rounds

Windsurf has raised a total of $243M over 2 funding rounds. One was Series C round of $150M from Investors like General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins and the other was Series B round of $65M from Investors like Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst. Here is the list of all funding rounds of Windsurf: Round Details Series C, $150M, Aug 29, 2024 Post money valuation - Revenue multiple - Investors General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Greenoaks Round Details Series B, $65M, Jan 30, 2024 Post money valuation - Revenue multiple - Investors Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, Greenoaks

benoau• 1 year ago

Bloomberg reports that Google is paying $2.4 billion to license Windsurf’s technology and hire its top employees.

Sounds like they're getting a payoff but probably not what they had in mind with the much larger numbers being thrown around for AI.

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

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