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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
I trialled Cursor for a month and then Windsurf. Cursor read entire code files in while Windsurf would read the first 100 lines (or was it 50?), then the next 100, and often stop before it got to the part of the file with the method in which was needed.
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).
$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)..
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
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.
> Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's?
They should and probably will soon, and if I were them I'd even consider giving plugin devs a cut of their paying customer subs if MS gets competitive about it.
> but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.
Agentic AI coding is more important to customers than VSCode's extension ecosystem. VSCode is who has to worry in this equation unless they ship the same tools in the next few months and heavily subsidize them.
VS Code is shipping agentic coding in the form of updates to GitHub Copilot. I haven't used it extensively yet since they added agent mode, but it's obvious that they're gunning for this market hard, and if I were into VS Code I would not personally choose to lose the ecosystem for marginally better agent mode.
But that's a false dichotomy, Cursor is far from the only capable agentic option. Personally I switched back to using VS Code with Cline + Github Copilot (just for autocomplete and included model access to Gemini Pro 2.5/Claude 3.5/7 that I can use with Cline).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
As a competitor in that key segment I don't feel locked out. I could almost jump for joy that this very weak-tea move is the most they can do with that much money. They're just quintupling down on the technology of 50 years ago. There's no threat to me at all here as a creator of from-first-principles IDE technology.
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.
These products are not complicated at their core — you can pretty much just drop in something like Monacopilot [1] and be 80% of the way there. But the last 20% is a real slog, and it mostly comes down to handling edge cases (bracket closing...) and optimizing prompting/context so you aren't burning cash. Whatever anyone claims about "feeling the AGI," AI isn't there yet.
They did. They’ve just released codex (CLI client).
They don’t have access to copilot users in general, Microsoft and Google does. And perhaps they are realizing that Microsoft is hedging them over multiple LLM providers and maybe no longer feeding them juicy copilot data, with humans in a tight loop, correcting LLMs.
yeah Microsoft could never conceivably develop an extensible source available IDE people love so much they even fork to build $3B companies on the scraps of. absolutely alien!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I use vscode for personal javascript projects but the time I spent on a .NET team using VS was an incredible downgrade compared to years and years of intellij. I ended up leaving because tech debt/bugs kept causing weekly overnight on call incidents that we were never given time to fix, but when they asked who wanted a Rider license I got myself on the list immediately.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I doubt they'll restrict it to their own models. The amount of business intel they'd get on the coding performance of competing models would be invaluable.
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.
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.)
Same. Cursor might be the only tool I've purchased a year's subscription to before the end of my free trial.
I've tried just about every model on its own over the years, and yet there's something about the Cursor workflow that frequently still gives me chills when it shows me again that it had clearly anticipated what I would think next in a way I just don't experience with other tools.
Holistic seems like the right word?
If it's all smoke and mirrors as some folks imply, then it's Penn and Teller level smoke and mirrors. Beware those who tell you that they could duplicate anything of value in a weekend.
Windsurf does it all the time like a wife of 40yrs completing your sentences. A good example is when you remove a function parameter. It automatically prompts to remove the arguments in all usages of the function, saving me a lot of time.
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.
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.
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.
It's a close call - I make this based on the fact that GitHub is viewed as an anti-choice by some in the community, a huge change from the "you don't use GitHub?!?!" energy they had pre-acquisition.
The MS acquisition traded the developer community to briefly appeal to enterprises, then quickly let both down.
Both the startups I worked at and the mega corps are all on github or moving there from bitbucket. They are in a bit of autpilot mode in terms of useful new features aside from actions but I can't think of any new bitbucket feature since I graduated and started working.
Bitbucket is not a player, as you said there are only people leaving. Gitlab has a better enterprise posture than GitHub and can be deployed more securely. Most developers aren't unhappy with GitHub, but IT and security teams are.
I dunno, for me Github is better than it was pre-acquisition. Sure, the rate of improvement has slowed a lot, but they did fix some old annoyances. But come to think of it, I can't really think of any ways that it has enshittified. I don't use any of the CI/Actions stuff though.
To be fair, they have been behind the competition for many years. Gitlab had extremely good CI, security scanning, organisational concepts, etc. for years before GitHub introduced their ones (and Actions still has a worse UX, and GitHub still doesn't have anything below an organisation).
And it being open core (MIT) means spinning up a version to test something is incredibly easy. Not exactly resource cheap, as it's still a rails app with multiple servers "smuggled" in the docker image, but it is easy
And I have long held that they are hungry, shipping like clockwork on or about the 20th of every month, showing up with actual improvements all the time https://about.gitlab.com/releases/ It seems this month brings 18.0 with it, for whatever that version bump happens to include
They also have a pretty good track record of "liberating" some premium features into the MIT side of things; I think it's luck of the draw, but it's not zero and it doesn't seem to be tied to any underhanded reason that I can spot
Yeah, it's almost certainly the network effect. Although poor GitLab isn't doing themselves any favors by picking what seems to be the slowest web framework one can possibly imagine
But, anytime I am empowered to pick, I'm going to pick GitLab 100% of the time because it has every feature that I care about and "being popular" isn't a feature that I care about
Well you’re right (especially wrt things like security scanning), but you sort of have to include Azure DevOps in the conversation nowadays. I think the end goal for Microsoft is to get the larger organizations into ADO, either cross-pollinate pipelines and actions or just replace actions with pipelines at some point, and leave GitHub for simpler project structures and public codebases.
That’s why you won’t see a ton of work go into e.g. issues/projects on GitHub. Those features all already exist and are very robust in ADO, so if you need those kinds of things (and the reporting an enterprise would want to be able to run on that data), then you belong on ADO.
I can say with a high level of confidence that the goal is definitely not to push larger orgs to ADO over GitHub. ADO is and will continue to be supported and you’re right that its project management features are much more advanced than GitHub, but the mission is not to push people off of ADO and into GitHub.
Your opening and closing statements aren’t mutually exclusive, but I can’t tell if one is a typo (or if so, which one it is).
I didn’t mean to imply that MS wanted to migrate anyone, just that the different offerings serve different kinds of customers, so you can’t really just compare GitLab to GitHub and say MS is lacking in serving some group of them.
GitLab UI is inferior IMO, and I've used both quite extensively.
I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus
I also disagree about GitLab CI, not that it wasn't smart for them to include alot sooner than GitHub, but Actions is really good and really easy to get up and moving with. I find they run faster, have better features - like they can annotate a PR with lint errors and test failures - with very little comparative configuration.
GitLab CI yaml is a mess by comparison. GitHub was smart to push things to the runner level once a certain complexity threshold is hit.
This has been my experience of course, and so much of it is really subjective admittedly, but I don't think GitLab is truly ahead at this point.
> I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus
Nah, I hate that. At my job we have a few different orgs, with terrible SSO boundaries (having to auth multiple times to GitHub because I work on repositories from different GitHub orgs). Allowing you to have a proper structure with nestedness, while still having good search, is great. You can also easily move projects and namespaces around, so if the structure doesn't work, it can evolve.
Why would you have the 50 library repositories you've had to fork as top level projects polluting your org? You also can't really do shared variable, environment, CI configs between repos of the same project/type.
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.
I'm too lazy to grab my work laptop, but one of the funniest things about copilot to me is which one? There's M365 copilot, Teams Premium (which gives you copilot in Teams), browser extension, the coding plugin, and others. It's been extremely time consuming to field requests from our users because every time our help desk gets a request for it, they have to have a conversation about which one the user is asking about. They don't even know, and of course I can't blame them.
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
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.
If a company can align it's business model with user goals, then it can work in the long run. Apple has somewhat aligned it's integrated hardware sales business model with user privacy. Google and Meta are advertising companies and capturing user data and attention will always drive the business.
Yes, but it's not a meaningful part of their revenue unlike Google where it's' their entire revenue.
They are very different companies in structure and it certainly is a "pick your poison" but it's completely stupid to act like they're the same on this front. Apple is better on user privacy
...unless you care about state actors, which you should, in which case your data is the US government's either way.
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.
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!
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
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...
Our plan is to be a superset of Cline and Roo's features (we already have all the major features from both) [0]
We also have our own provider, which means no need to bring your own API keys (you can if you like, but it is batteries included by default) and we're not charging anything on top of the API pricing. Instead of monetizing on individual developers, we want it to be free for them and make money eventually off enterprise contracts [1]
Yes - with our built-in provider, we provide all the models that OpenRouter provides but without OpenRouter's 5% markup. We provide them at cost (the AI provider cost)
maybe you could answer a question about kilo usage: If I choose Google Gemini as the API provider and give it my Gemini API key, why does it say that I'm low on credits (and I get API request failures immediately)? As far as I understand gemini 2.5 pro preview is free to use. (and in Cline I'm able to choose Google Gemini as the API provider & provide my API key and it will successfully make API requests)
I am constantly surprised how seldom aider is mentioned in threads like this. I understand that it's not directly integrated into the editor, but the "editor + parallel CLI tool chain" paradigm feels so natural to me because we drop to terminal for so many other parts of building software. If you haven't tried it (particularly the architect/editor modality), it's worth a couple of hours of experimenting.
Aider doesn’t provide any interface that’s integrated into the editor tool, as you point out. That might be true for other similar side-by-side tools that I am not aware of.
But, if you tell aider to watch your files, you can drop a specially formatted comment into your file, and aider will see that and use it as a prompt.
So the integration is sort of “implicit”. Which sounds kinda like the cheap way to go, in comparison to the current brand name tools that have their own chat boxes, dropdowns with mode selectors (ask, edit, agent), and so on.
But look further into the future and an ambient interface is probably where we end up. Something where the Ai agent is just watching what you do, maybe even watching your eyes and seeing what you’re attending to, and then harmonizing its attention to what you are attending to.
Tight editor integration means better diffs (right in your editor), easier context manager, and other convenience features that CLI-only tools can't have.
This doesn't mean that aider, claude code, etc. aren't very good tools, but it does make sense to distinguish between built-in tools vs external ones. A similar non-AI example is debugging or linting: IDE integration makes it much easier than using a separate tool.
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.
JetBrain's main business model depends on buying the editor, and if users still see the overall editor better, any AI plugin support will likely just increase the sales.
LSP is amazing but also kinda sucks balls. It’s impossible to run VSCode without a million pops in the corner with a million extension errors. It’s so bad.
And autocomplete is the least interesting thing an LLM can do. Cursor’s UX isn’t the end game but has lots great features.
The ideal UX is still being worked out. It’s good that different people are building tools to try different ideas.
Microsoft has been dragging their feet when it comes to updating the LSP spec. Many of their Copilot features are done in VSCode, in fact using private APIs that are not accessible to other extensions.
I am all for everyone adopting LSP, but the reality is harsh.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
Because if you're referencing to a headline (without reading the article) that was on H a couple of days ago, it stated that 20-30% of the code in the repos was written by software.
Software != AI
To quote wongarsu in the same post:
"Considering that most of their software has been developed for decades and AI assistants have only started becoming useful in the last ~4 years it would be very surprising if 30% of their code is AI written. I doubt they even touched 30% of their code in the last 4 years. But what is perfectly plausible is that 30% of their code is written by code generators. Microsoft has a lot of interface code. All the windows DLLs that are just thin syscall interfaces, the COM and OLE interfaces in their office suite and everywhere else, whatever Office uses nowadays for interoperability to allow you to embed content of one product in another, whatever APIs their online products use, etc. In the leaked Windows XP source code it can be difficult to find the actual source code in between the boilerplate files containing repeated definitions, and in the decades since then the world has only leaned more into code generation."
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.
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).
I would contend that JetBrains has only grown even with VS Code around. They're still more than viable, support things on a near similar cadence (and even in some cases, faster and/or better) than VS Code gets support for it.
I agree with the rest, they've all mostly lost market share or completely no longer exist due to VS Code, but not IntelliJ, that platform is going really strong.
Though no doubt, VS Code has pushed JetBrains to rethink some things, and be better in general.
Free doesn't matter here. JetBrains is an established toolset that people pay for. They've already been competing with free, and free didn't put them out of business. In some ways, free likely made business better than ever (I know alot of devs that started with VS Code and moved to JetBrains for various reasons)
They can have all the money in the world and it doesn't mean much in this context.
For while Microsoft is going to invest heavily in a Cursor / Windsurf like product and likely do alot to ship it in their editors - likely with exclusions or lag times between updates on other platforms - there's zero reason for Google to do this for example, when they could sell through Gemini for Code as an extension across all editors.
I don't see JetBrains having issues because of AI tooling, for most of these companies, its a boon to be on the JetBrains platform. Especially because JetBrains has lots of enterprise customers who would naturally be very interested in buying AI tooling for their developers. Its a natural market
100%, I swore by emacs, but then switched to vs-code recently, and believe-me, switching editors is one of the hardest things to do due to ingrained muscle-memory - but vs-code made it easy with emacs-mode etc.
vs-code is one of the few products coming of of microsoft that leads the pack by a big margin, and it is no surprise that all of these startups are forking it.
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).
I wouldn’t say that. JetBrains is incredibly bloated and has significantly less community support.
I’ll agree on Teams being crap though, mostly for how dumb it is that they’ve rewritten it multiple times and created a confusing slate of weird versions like “Teams (work or school)”
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
How long ago was that? 6 months ago I switched from VS Code to Cursor, which at the time was FAR superior to Copilot. Around a month ago I switched back to VS Code, and found there's not much difference any more. Autocomplete in VS Code is still less good, but the agent mode in VS Code feels pretty similar to Cursor's (albeit a little slower, perhaps).
To be honest I think both are quite limited by context length (in that they try to limit the context they send to the LLM and hence cost), and so I find myself using Gemini 2.5 in AI studio with the 1m context length, and asking it to generate instructions for Copilot (which seems to work pretty well)
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.
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?
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
> If they start walling off features like TypeScript 7.0 from forks, the open source pushback will be fierce—and that could backfire hard.
Do they have the man power to compete with Microsoft?
Linux managed to do it but Linux is the biggest, most successful free software project there is. Firefox and its forks are a better example. If Mozilla stopped working on Firefox, the forks would be pretty much dead in the water: they simply do not have the man power necessary to maintain a modern browser.
Does microsoft have the wisdom to predict where this line of technology is headed, and/or the agility to course correct when their predictions don't quite hit the mark?
Cursor blows copilot out of the water in my experience. Man power clearly isn't the most decisive factor in this battle.
Copilot is limited to 64k context window. Even if the underlying model is gemini with 20x that. It’s gotta be a major reason copilot is so bad in comparison. They are all the same sets of models under the hood
> Do they have the man power to compete with Microsoft?
There are a fair number of examples where smaller companies and/or open source beat Microsoft's entrenched products. Usually a key indicator is that MS's products stagnate (which doesn't yet appear to be happening currently).
Microsoft’s army of cheap offshored labor isn’t going to be useful for something like that. And they already have copilot, which is miles behind cursor, where was the manpower on that?
The sheer number of AI written message board posts might just make me stop reading the comments on sites like Reddit and HN. I wanted to stop anyway, this seems like a good push to encourage me to wean myself.
Every one of us leaving (not engaging/commenting) increases the share of AI generated comments (vs real users) the next iteration will train on. I'm not even sure which option is worse. Withdraw and let everyone dilute their own training data, or stay and feed them our mindset and experience...?
To be fair, only 3 posts within "possible LLM usage" timeframe. Also I don't think using LLM to comment == bot.
More curious about the motivation behaviour such behaviour, if it is occurring
This is beginnings of AI discrimination. If an answer is written by an LLM but equal or superior in quality to a human answer why question or disparage it?
I don't know but it looks like you're probably a white guy. Your mannerisms and vibes make it look like you're white. Nothing wrong with this, just wanted to point it out. See what I'm saying.
I find this comment odd but not at all discriminatory and will happily inform that yes, I am white British.
I can see the point you’re going for but I do think it’s more complex than that. I don’t think LLMs are equivalent to another human race.
Principally, LLMs have many pretty major differences to humans which you don’t really see at the inter-racial level.
Secondly the reasoning for why asking someone their race in this context would be weird involved a lot of human history. If you’d asked my height or eye colour there’s nothing discriminatory feeling about that. That historical context doesn’t exist with LLMs
The LLM provided an answer that has superior quality or equal quality to a human. Then instead of judging the statement rationally on this quality we decided to judge the question on whether or not it was AI.
This is the same irrationality we used to discriminate humans. There is no difference in logic. The reasoning you used here about how LLMs are not equivalent to human beings is the same reasoning Hitler used on Jewish people.
And here’s the thing. I agree with you. If you gassed and holocausted LLMs wouldn’t give two shits.
The main point here is that the logic and irrationality and evil present in racism is all at work here. We are literally being discriminatory, there’s no difference. Everyone missed the point about the quality of the statement itself and immediately based their judgement on whether or not it’s AI as if that was actually a rational thing to do. (It’s not).
> 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.
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.
It wasn't any better for me. It deleted all my code. The answers were like it was a completely different model. I used Windsurf once and never opened it again
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
They only get the preprocesses stuff that is sent to their api. But if you want to do complex coding tasks, you need the whole user interaction with the project and not just bits and pieces.
That was my thoughts too. No text editor is worth $3B, and probably not even VSCode is. So I think this deal was about buying more customers/users and buying "relevance". OpenAI lost it's monopoly and they're worried they might become irrelevant so they basically just purchased something popular to remain relevant.
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.
Yeah, in the recent Lightcone Podcast episode, Varun was talking about how they have a lean eng team but large sales org. I thought that was super interesting for a dev tool since I was expecting a dev tool to involve bottom-up sales to the dev instead of top-down sales to a leader like a CTO or VP of Eng
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.
Dev tools are still very hard to sell (I know, I have a dev tools company). Claude Code, Aider and Codex are given away for free. What people are buying is access to proprietary general purpose models.
Your comment only questioned why OpenAI cares about Windsurf from a first party perspective. I expanded the rationale for why the acquisition makes sense at a different level.
There's much more to be gained if you also have the client side of those interaction. You can get signals from "accepted" completions/plans/etc, number of edits made to those completions, how users use context, what was passed in context from a code base, and so on.
And that's just on their models. They'd also get (at the very least) signals on their direct competition, if not straight up prompts+completions as well.
That's a bit like saying having access to Google is as good as being Google.
All they really see as a model provider is little fragments of the picture, like trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa by knowing which paint swatches Leonardo used.
In other words, they only saw whatever Windsurf sent as context with a "fix the bugs" prompt stapled to it.
By owning Windsurf, they see the entire source code of what's being built, all the time, plus how the model is interacting with it.
There's a massive amount of value in what happens client-side, and behind the scenes. The "director's cut" of context.
So just put up together a comparable VS Code based AI IDE in a couple of months and bundle it together with the ChatGPT subscription? They'd get loads of users very fast..
I think it is exactly this. There is no doubt whatsoever OpenAI can do this, but they decided not to. The reason, I think, is that they don't want to be a couple of months late. In other words, they spent $3B to save a couple of months.
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.
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.
Uber has already been replaced, at least in some parts of the world. We recently went on holiday to Malta and on check-in the hotel staff told us not to bother with Uber, Bolt worked way better and had more drivers (Bolt is a European Uber competitor based in Estonia).
So we signed up for Bolt and sure enough drivers were plentiful, the app worked great and there was no downside over Uber. I'll certainly be trying it again in future in other markets.
The reason Uber invested in self-driving cars for years is that otherwise they have no sustainable edge. It's just a taxi company, which is a low margin business. People who can make slick mobile apps are plentiful and it takes a minute or less to sign up for a new service. Uber grew to its current size by buying market share using investors dollars, which was always a time-limited strategy. Once they started having to turn a profit prices rose and their edge over their competitors was lost.
Uber feels like such an apt comparison to OpenAI to me. The service they provide is obviously going to be absolutely huge, but no guarantees at all that they’ll win it or be last man standing. I don’t see a world in which generative AI doesn’t continue to be a massive disrupting force, but no particular reason to think Anthropic or OpenAI will still be independent entities in a few years.
I’m even more bearish on Uber than I used to be, as someone who’s used Grab and Careem and Bolt extensively, and seen Uber have to beat a retreat from SE Asia. If their more nimble competition get a foothold in the US they’re toast.
I feel like the value-proposition of Uber was three-fold.
1. Solving a pain-point of many people re: hailing a cab, via an app that works everywhere.
2. Using VC funds to (initially) pay drivers more than you, the customer, were paying them.
3. Ignoring local regulations and passing the savings/convenience on to you.
1 is nice but I don't think they established much of a moat (both drivers and customers are willing to use multiple apps); 2 isn't sustainable in the long-term, and they failed to leverage 3 to establishing a permanent right to operate as they had been in most markets.
I think this makes Uber an even more interesting benchmark for other unicorns, since besides "solving a real problem without establishing a moat" they are also often burning through VC cash to prop up their business model while ignoring some laws which they may not be able to get away with ignoring long-term.
1 especially is a social function. Having to have a million different apps is terrible, but if there is too much competition for drivers it's inevitable to churn through apps because of marketplace pricing and rent seeking on all sides
I don't think that's the case here. Windsurf wasn't leading the agentic coding market. They were doing a decent job but others are bigger. Cursor has the brand recognition and Claude is getting a lot of recognition too. MS has github copilot which is still a good brand and Google has been catching up with Gemini.
OpenAI has a new thing called codex but it isn't very good yet. I tried it and it's super flaky. Lot's of errors and it gets stuck when that happens. OpenAI needs something good urgently because agentic coding is the key AI feature right now and the blue print for non coding agentic solutions later. Cursor is probably too expensive currently and windsurf looks like their models are a bit better.
So, OpenAI gains something they don't have: a credible developer option with an active user base and some core IP in the form of training data and know how as well as custom models that they can fold into openai.
3 billion is a lot but not if you consider that world + dog in the enterprise world will be spending big time on AI subscriptions for their developers. This stops being optional in 2025. Millions of developers will be on paid subscriptions permanently very soon. If you start a new job you can expect to get a laptop and a paid subscription to whatever is the agentic coding tool of choice in your new company.
OpenAI wants double digit percentages of that revenue. 1M users paying something like 50$/month would amount to 600M revenue per year. I think the prices will go up and the amount of active users as well. Reason: as these tools are getting better they start saving non trivial amounts of engineering time. At that point you have to value the tool in terms of developer cost. Not 1 to 1. But it's worth a sizable portion of that.
I work in a small startup as the CTO. This is an no-brainer for us. We're cash strapped so we only spend on important things. This would be one of those things. We're doing things I previously would have needed to expand the team for because I would have had no capacity to do those things in the current team. So, in terms of value for money spending on these tools is easy to justify.
I get lots of people are skeptical about AI stuff here. But I would say that a lot of those people suffer from a short term focus and bias. Three years ago none of this stuff existed. Now it's a multi billion$ market that is set to grow rapidly. Stuff is getting better at a very rapid pace. Just stating facts here. 3 billion is a bargain if Openai can make this acquisition work for them. They are buying time to market here. They don't have a year to figure it out. In a year or so this market will be carved up and locked into hard to change year long SAAS contracts. At that point getting people to switch tools will get harder and harder.
> OpenAI has a new thing called codex but it isn't very good yet. I tried it and it's super flaky. Lot's of errors and it gets stuck when that happens.
I agree with this, not sure the experience of everyone else but I felt like Claude Code is more useful.
Meanwhile, I'm keeping tabs on Aider and open-codex, what other options are there?
Thanks for mentioning open-codex. Did not notice that there is a codex fork which is open to other models (update: totally missed that original codex allows that too now). How do you like it? Especially in comparison to Claude Code?
Thanks for answering! I also skipeed that the original codex now allows for other models (perhaps they pulled the open-codex part???). To be fair, I prefer Claude Code to both codexes.
Not replace but it allows me to scale what we do for things we previously would have dropped because it would require growing the team, which we can't really afford. It's a case of getting a bit more out of developers in terms of quantity and scope (mostly this) of what they do. Not a full developer but enough for it to be meaningful. But it's not nothing either. Worth paying for. AI is a lot cheaper than a developer is so I don't need to replace my developers. I prefer people that are multi disciplinary and able to pick up new skills as they are needed. Agentic AIs are good for that because they give you enough to work with that you can get productive with whatever you need to wrap your head around in little to no time.
Companies can be a bit slow to update their hiring processes to their needs. But good developers should be ahead of the curve in any case. For this, just be proficient with the tools.
Be ready for the inevitable interview question "so, AI ... explain me how you are using it and what you are doing with it?". Much easier to answer that question if you have some meaningful time of routinely using this stuff behind you and can articulate what works and doesn't work for you.
And if they don't ask, that's actually a great question to ask back if you get the opportunity "I've been using agentic tooling, how are you guys using that a <company name>? Also I would like a subscription to <my favorite AI tool> if I work for you". Stuff like that makes you stand out as ambitious and interested in the future. There are of course going to be places that maybe don't like that. But then ask yourself whether you'd want to work there. So, either way, you learn something.
I would look forward to the next 20 years and not backward to the last 20.
The whole frontend/backend distinction did not really exist until the web. And infrastructure is definitely something that should be automated far more than it currently is. If it needs babysitting by a team of devops, you just created a lot of work rather than automating/solving it. Tedious and repetitive. It has "AI will make this a lot easier" written all over it.
So, just be ready for the ambition level to be raised for developers. Learn to build the whole system, not just bits and pieces of the system. Lean on AI to get stuff done and figure things out. It's all just code. None of it is really that hard. But it can be a lot of work if you do all of it manually.
And let's be honest, agentic tools are showing promise and great progress but they are nowhere close to independently working on existing code bases. That's not how I use them. But they are great for problem solving, debugging, prototyping, exploring some new languages and APIs, and generally taking care of more tedious coding tasks.
> I wanna pick your brain a lil. Are you saying agentic AI has helped you replace devs that you would otherwise need for your startup?
I need fewer devs to get more work done... but interestingly it has put a premium on experience because a lot of the "human work" is debugging and fixing where the LLM missed the mark. So less headcount, higher skill required.
> 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!
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.
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.
That's a really interesting thought, I'd love to get involved in software PE/M&A on the technical analysis side but I don't have the academic pedigree for it (it seems every shop that does this work is 90% Ivy and Ivy-adjacent universities and FAANG-level work history).
So if I'm understanding your point then part of the value in paying $3B for Windsurf is that it acts as a pricing anchor on future raises (and presumably acquisitions as well) for competing products? So Cursor is less likely to raise at a $30B valuation if Windsurf is 95% as good and just sold for 1/10 that.
You have superbly summarized the point I was trying to make regarding valuations.
Regarding your other point about pedigree: I’ve a high school level education. I was considered senior at this specific co. as I had played an important role in building the product (I’m a “classic case” of self taught generalist). I’m not at all clear on how I was selected to take part in that effort to be frank. It was fun.
I would also think that a critical component of X there would be the opportunity cost of time spent on building in-house while competition chugs along.
For sure, as was the opportunity cost of redirecting our engineering teams to produce the competing product. That is, slowing the roadmap on our core product to deliver a tangential product.
Also, we had to factor into account user management, infosec bring-up, streamlining deployment, cross training teams, etc.
This was a large co., there was generally the belief that everything can be copied relatively quickly to reach something like parity. Obviously, the discovered path has tons more learning in it that the copier doesn’t benefit from when making subsequent decisions, which can result in lots of time lost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
Sometimes it almost seems like the idea that LLMs are capable of instantly creating real, maintainable software is vastly overblown to inflate valuations...
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.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadChatGPT 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
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?
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.
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.
I'm sure Cursor has more than few devs that primarily use Linux...
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.
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.
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.
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.
So I went back to Cursor.
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).
Is OpenAI worth the $260 billion valuation... No, of course not, they're losing >$4 billion a year.
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.
They should and probably will soon, and if I were them I'd even consider giving plugin devs a cut of their paying customer subs if MS gets competitive about it.
> but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.
Agentic AI coding is more important to customers than VSCode's extension ecosystem. VSCode is who has to worry in this equation unless they ship the same tools in the next few months and heavily subsidize them.
You’re in the minority if you favor manual coding + extensions over something doing your job for you.
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.
and still MS could not build a chat App, they had to acquire Skype. Google could not build a social network.
Didn't they change names months ago? I know them as Codeium.
I think it's going to be fine.
This is xAI buying Twitter, with extra steps.
Cursor yesterday was a 45X for comparison (9B, 200M)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/openai-is-reportedly-in-ta...
So, I'd be inclined to believe the vast majority of the deal is stock (or whatever that is called pre-IPO).
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.
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...
We've seen this before with Office.
We'll see it again.
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
[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/05/19/openSourceAIE...
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?
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.
this is the question i am still asking...
[1]: https://github.com/arshad-yaseen/monacopilot
They don’t have access to copilot users in general, Microsoft and Google does. And perhaps they are realizing that Microsoft is hedging them over multiple LLM providers and maybe no longer feeding them juicy copilot data, with humans in a tight loop, correcting LLMs.
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.
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...
Maybe it's fine if you only do local development in other languages (Javascript?), but I completely swore it off.
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.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/copilot-customiza...
I gave up on Cursor because my trial ran out, while VS Code with Copilot doesn't seem to charge me anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What groundbreaking solutions does Windsurf offer?
Or you chat and suddenly it wants to use the azure copilot instead because reasons.
Horrible experience.
I've tried just about every model on its own over the years, and yet there's something about the Cursor workflow that frequently still gives me chills when it shows me again that it had clearly anticipated what I would think next in a way I just don't experience with other tools.
Holistic seems like the right word?
If it's all smoke and mirrors as some folks imply, then it's Penn and Teller level smoke and mirrors. Beware those who tell you that they could duplicate anything of value in a weekend.
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.
I actually find it a little reassuring that they can't seem to get out of their own way.
The fact that they are is not the results of the Microsoft takeover.
The MS acquisition traded the developer community to briefly appeal to enterprises, then quickly let both down.
And I have long held that they are hungry, shipping like clockwork on or about the 20th of every month, showing up with actual improvements all the time https://about.gitlab.com/releases/ It seems this month brings 18.0 with it, for whatever that version bump happens to include
They also have a pretty good track record of "liberating" some premium features into the MIT side of things; I think it's luck of the draw, but it's not zero and it doesn't seem to be tied to any underhanded reason that I can spot
I think the GitHub brand is still stronger and people just don't "care" about gitlab.
But, anytime I am empowered to pick, I'm going to pick GitLab 100% of the time because it has every feature that I care about and "being popular" isn't a feature that I care about
That’s why you won’t see a ton of work go into e.g. issues/projects on GitHub. Those features all already exist and are very robust in ADO, so if you need those kinds of things (and the reporting an enterprise would want to be able to run on that data), then you belong on ADO.
I didn’t mean to imply that MS wanted to migrate anyone, just that the different offerings serve different kinds of customers, so you can’t really just compare GitLab to GitHub and say MS is lacking in serving some group of them.
The official guidance from Microsoft since probably 2019 has been to encourage all greenfield projects to GitHub, as opposed to ADO.
I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus
I also disagree about GitLab CI, not that it wasn't smart for them to include alot sooner than GitHub, but Actions is really good and really easy to get up and moving with. I find they run faster, have better features - like they can annotate a PR with lint errors and test failures - with very little comparative configuration.
GitLab CI yaml is a mess by comparison. GitHub was smart to push things to the runner level once a certain complexity threshold is hit.
This has been my experience of course, and so much of it is really subjective admittedly, but I don't think GitLab is truly ahead at this point.
Nah, I hate that. At my job we have a few different orgs, with terrible SSO boundaries (having to auth multiple times to GitHub because I work on repositories from different GitHub orgs). Allowing you to have a proper structure with nestedness, while still having good search, is great. You can also easily move projects and namespaces around, so if the structure doesn't work, it can evolve.
Why would you have the 50 library repositories you've had to fork as top level projects polluting your org? You also can't really do shared variable, environment, CI configs between repos of the same project/type.
This reminds me of "big companies moves slow.." line.
Buying competition while everyone’s still fighting might straddle you with a lame horse
Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: embrace, extend, extinguish.
They are very different companies in structure and it certainly is a "pick your poison" but it's completely stupid to act like they're the same on this front. Apple is better on user privacy
...unless you care about state actors, which you should, in which case your data is the US government's either way.
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.
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/
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.
We also have our own provider, which means no need to bring your own API keys (you can if you like, but it is batteries included by default) and we're not charging anything on top of the API pricing. Instead of monetizing on individual developers, we want it to be free for them and make money eventually off enterprise contracts [1]
[0]: https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/roo-or-cline-were-building-a-supe... [1]: https://kilocode.ai
Not sure how they'd do it considering you bring your own API keys. Can you link me to a resource?
But, if you tell aider to watch your files, you can drop a specially formatted comment into your file, and aider will see that and use it as a prompt.
So the integration is sort of “implicit”. Which sounds kinda like the cheap way to go, in comparison to the current brand name tools that have their own chat boxes, dropdowns with mode selectors (ask, edit, agent), and so on.
But look further into the future and an ambient interface is probably where we end up. Something where the Ai agent is just watching what you do, maybe even watching your eyes and seeing what you’re attending to, and then harmonizing its attention to what you are attending to.
But I dunno, i’m just guessing
This doesn't mean that aider, claude code, etc. aren't very good tools, but it does make sense to distinguish between built-in tools vs external ones. A similar non-AI example is debugging or linting: IDE integration makes it much easier than using a separate tool.
What doesn't the current API allow plugins to do? I'm guessing custom UI stuff that lives outside a panel?
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.
No, they should be LSPs so that they can be integrated into any editor, not just VSCode.
And autocomplete is the least interesting thing an LLM can do. Cursor’s UX isn’t the end game but has lots great features.
The ideal UX is still being worked out. It’s good that different people are building tools to try different ideas.
I am all for everyone adopting LSP, but the reality is harsh.
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.
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.
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
Because if you're referencing to a headline (without reading the article) that was on H a couple of days ago, it stated that 20-30% of the code in the repos was written by software. Software != AI
To quote wongarsu in the same post: "Considering that most of their software has been developed for decades and AI assistants have only started becoming useful in the last ~4 years it would be very surprising if 30% of their code is AI written. I doubt they even touched 30% of their code in the last 4 years. But what is perfectly plausible is that 30% of their code is written by code generators. Microsoft has a lot of interface code. All the windows DLLs that are just thin syscall interfaces, the COM and OLE interfaces in their office suite and everywhere else, whatever Office uses nowadays for interoperability to allow you to embed content of one product in another, whatever APIs their online products use, etc. In the leaked Windows XP source code it can be difficult to find the actual source code in between the boilerplate files containing repeated definitions, and in the decades since then the world has only leaned more into code generation."
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43841868
Probably.
> And deliver them with far greater stability and polish
That seems ... overly optimistic given MS's history.
I agree with the rest, they've all mostly lost market share or completely no longer exist due to VS Code, but not IntelliJ, that platform is going really strong.
Though no doubt, VS Code has pushed JetBrains to rethink some things, and be better in general.
They can have all the money in the world and it doesn't mean much in this context.
For while Microsoft is going to invest heavily in a Cursor / Windsurf like product and likely do alot to ship it in their editors - likely with exclusions or lag times between updates on other platforms - there's zero reason for Google to do this for example, when they could sell through Gemini for Code as an extension across all editors.
I don't see JetBrains having issues because of AI tooling, for most of these companies, its a boon to be on the JetBrains platform. Especially because JetBrains has lots of enterprise customers who would naturally be very interested in buying AI tooling for their developers. Its a natural market
vs-code is one of the few products coming of of microsoft that leads the pack by a big margin, and it is no surprise that all of these startups are forking it.
One exception in 50 years does not inspire confidence.
Only for azure devops, there are +6k problems listed on developer community website with 500 still not closed for the last 6 months. [1]
The complete integration in the ecosystem is what's flawless.
Any company with a better product has to fight that integration and they almost always lose (Sybase, Borland, WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape...)
1 : https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/AzureDevOps?ftyp...
it was crap compared to Borland's products 20 years ago
and today it's crap compared to JetBrains'
and christ knows how anyone could consider the Azure UI to be "great"
other than Teams I don't think I've used a worse piece of software
I’ll agree on Teams being crap though, mostly for how dumb it is that they’ve rewritten it multiple times and created a confusing slate of weird versions like “Teams (work or school)”
Care to place a bet?
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be honest I think both are quite limited by context length (in that they try to limit the context they send to the LLM and hence cost), and so I find myself using Gemini 2.5 in AI studio with the 1m context length, and asking it to generate instructions for Copilot (which seems to work pretty well)
Mentally, I'm replacing claims like this with "it will do magic!" and I think I'm just about as likely to be correct.
Do they have the man power to compete with Microsoft?
Linux managed to do it but Linux is the biggest, most successful free software project there is. Firefox and its forks are a better example. If Mozilla stopped working on Firefox, the forks would be pretty much dead in the water: they simply do not have the man power necessary to maintain a modern browser.
Cursor blows copilot out of the water in my experience. Man power clearly isn't the most decisive factor in this battle.
There are a fair number of examples where smaller companies and/or open source beat Microsoft's entrenched products. Usually a key indicator is that MS's products stagnate (which doesn't yet appear to be happening currently).
- Plenty of em-dashes
- "you're absolutely right"
- "They're X, not just Y"
- "some introduction or callback: description or phrase"
I don't know but it looks like you're probably a white guy. Your mannerisms and vibes make it look like you're white. Nothing wrong with this, just wanted to point it out. See what I'm saying.
It's like the blade runner movies.
This is the same irrationality we used to discriminate humans. There is no difference in logic. The reasoning you used here about how LLMs are not equivalent to human beings is the same reasoning Hitler used on Jewish people.
And here’s the thing. I agree with you. If you gassed and holocausted LLMs wouldn’t give two shits.
The main point here is that the logic and irrationality and evil present in racism is all at work here. We are literally being discriminatory, there’s no difference. Everyone missed the point about the quality of the statement itself and immediately based their judgement on whether or not it’s AI as if that was actually a rational thing to do. (It’s not).
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.
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.
Stable and polished are not words that ever came to my mind while using any Microsoft product.
> 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.
> 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.
How many customers do they have? At $30 per month it would take forever to pay off even with a lot of growth.
Open AI could release an equivalent VS Code clone and make it entirely free and it would still be a lot cheaper than $3 billion.
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.
Only thing better would be a social network, which supposedly they're working on.
And that's just on their models. They'd also get (at the very least) signals on their direct competition, if not straight up prompts+completions as well.
All they really see as a model provider is little fragments of the picture, like trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa by knowing which paint swatches Leonardo used.
In other words, they only saw whatever Windsurf sent as context with a "fix the bugs" prompt stapled to it.
By owning Windsurf, they see the entire source code of what's being built, all the time, plus how the model is interacting with it.
There's a massive amount of value in what happens client-side, and behind the scenes. The "director's cut" of context.
Huge difference.
[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.
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.
So we signed up for Bolt and sure enough drivers were plentiful, the app worked great and there was no downside over Uber. I'll certainly be trying it again in future in other markets.
The reason Uber invested in self-driving cars for years is that otherwise they have no sustainable edge. It's just a taxi company, which is a low margin business. People who can make slick mobile apps are plentiful and it takes a minute or less to sign up for a new service. Uber grew to its current size by buying market share using investors dollars, which was always a time-limited strategy. Once they started having to turn a profit prices rose and their edge over their competitors was lost.
I’m even more bearish on Uber than I used to be, as someone who’s used Grab and Careem and Bolt extensively, and seen Uber have to beat a retreat from SE Asia. If their more nimble competition get a foothold in the US they’re toast.
1. Solving a pain-point of many people re: hailing a cab, via an app that works everywhere.
2. Using VC funds to (initially) pay drivers more than you, the customer, were paying them.
3. Ignoring local regulations and passing the savings/convenience on to you.
1 is nice but I don't think they established much of a moat (both drivers and customers are willing to use multiple apps); 2 isn't sustainable in the long-term, and they failed to leverage 3 to establishing a permanent right to operate as they had been in most markets.
I think this makes Uber an even more interesting benchmark for other unicorns, since besides "solving a real problem without establishing a moat" they are also often burning through VC cash to prop up their business model while ignoring some laws which they may not be able to get away with ignoring long-term.
OpenAI has a new thing called codex but it isn't very good yet. I tried it and it's super flaky. Lot's of errors and it gets stuck when that happens. OpenAI needs something good urgently because agentic coding is the key AI feature right now and the blue print for non coding agentic solutions later. Cursor is probably too expensive currently and windsurf looks like their models are a bit better.
So, OpenAI gains something they don't have: a credible developer option with an active user base and some core IP in the form of training data and know how as well as custom models that they can fold into openai.
3 billion is a lot but not if you consider that world + dog in the enterprise world will be spending big time on AI subscriptions for their developers. This stops being optional in 2025. Millions of developers will be on paid subscriptions permanently very soon. If you start a new job you can expect to get a laptop and a paid subscription to whatever is the agentic coding tool of choice in your new company.
OpenAI wants double digit percentages of that revenue. 1M users paying something like 50$/month would amount to 600M revenue per year. I think the prices will go up and the amount of active users as well. Reason: as these tools are getting better they start saving non trivial amounts of engineering time. At that point you have to value the tool in terms of developer cost. Not 1 to 1. But it's worth a sizable portion of that.
I work in a small startup as the CTO. This is an no-brainer for us. We're cash strapped so we only spend on important things. This would be one of those things. We're doing things I previously would have needed to expand the team for because I would have had no capacity to do those things in the current team. So, in terms of value for money spending on these tools is easy to justify.
I get lots of people are skeptical about AI stuff here. But I would say that a lot of those people suffer from a short term focus and bias. Three years ago none of this stuff existed. Now it's a multi billion$ market that is set to grow rapidly. Stuff is getting better at a very rapid pace. Just stating facts here. 3 billion is a bargain if Openai can make this acquisition work for them. They are buying time to market here. They don't have a year to figure it out. In a year or so this market will be carved up and locked into hard to change year long SAAS contracts. At that point getting people to switch tools will get harder and harder.
I agree with this, not sure the experience of everyone else but I felt like Claude Code is more useful.
Meanwhile, I'm keeping tabs on Aider and open-codex, what other options are there?
In your opinion, what should one do/learn to get a SDE/related gig now? What do you/other companies look for?
Companies can be a bit slow to update their hiring processes to their needs. But good developers should be ahead of the curve in any case. For this, just be proficient with the tools.
Be ready for the inevitable interview question "so, AI ... explain me how you are using it and what you are doing with it?". Much easier to answer that question if you have some meaningful time of routinely using this stuff behind you and can articulate what works and doesn't work for you.
And if they don't ask, that's actually a great question to ask back if you get the opportunity "I've been using agentic tooling, how are you guys using that a <company name>? Also I would like a subscription to <my favorite AI tool> if I work for you". Stuff like that makes you stand out as ambitious and interested in the future. There are of course going to be places that maybe don't like that. But then ask yourself whether you'd want to work there. So, either way, you learn something.
So, would you consider it a bad idea to get into web dev, more specifically backend and infra?
Do you think using LLMs can accelerate learning software dev and programming skills?
The whole frontend/backend distinction did not really exist until the web. And infrastructure is definitely something that should be automated far more than it currently is. If it needs babysitting by a team of devops, you just created a lot of work rather than automating/solving it. Tedious and repetitive. It has "AI will make this a lot easier" written all over it.
So, just be ready for the ambition level to be raised for developers. Learn to build the whole system, not just bits and pieces of the system. Lean on AI to get stuff done and figure things out. It's all just code. None of it is really that hard. But it can be a lot of work if you do all of it manually.
And let's be honest, agentic tools are showing promise and great progress but they are nowhere close to independently working on existing code bases. That's not how I use them. But they are great for problem solving, debugging, prototyping, exploring some new languages and APIs, and generally taking care of more tedious coding tasks.
I need fewer devs to get more work done... but interestingly it has put a premium on experience because a lot of the "human work" is debugging and fixing where the LLM missed the mark. So less headcount, higher skill required.
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!
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?
So if I'm understanding your point then part of the value in paying $3B for Windsurf is that it acts as a pricing anchor on future raises (and presumably acquisitions as well) for competing products? So Cursor is less likely to raise at a $30B valuation if Windsurf is 95% as good and just sold for 1/10 that.
Regarding your other point about pedigree: I’ve a high school level education. I was considered senior at this specific co. as I had played an important role in building the product (I’m a “classic case” of self taught generalist). I’m not at all clear on how I was selected to take part in that effort to be frank. It was fun.
Also, we had to factor into account user management, infosec bring-up, streamlining deployment, cross training teams, etc.
This was a large co., there was generally the belief that everything can be copied relatively quickly to reach something like parity. Obviously, the discovered path has tons more learning in it that the copier doesn’t benefit from when making subsequent decisions, which can result in lots of time lost.
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.
dot-com vibes. Maybe not quite the same as Pets.com but still...
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.
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.
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
They have certainly lost the monopoly.
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.
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.
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.