[HN Gopher] Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?
___________________________________________________________________
Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?
Author : theahura
Score : 183 points
Date : 2025-04-20 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theahura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theahura.substack.com)
| soared wrote:
| I've switched off of chatGPT for general use from a kind of
| moral/ethical standpoint. All the competitors are effectively the
| same for easy research questions, so I might as well use a vendor
| who's not potentially a scumbag.
| dangus wrote:
| Which vendor _isn 't_ a run scumbag or owned by a scumbag?
| trollbridge wrote:
| I've been using Grok (for free), so in theory I'm getting a
| vendor to spend money on me.
| asadotzler wrote:
| >Which vendor isn't a run scumbag or owned by a scumbag?
| >>I've been using Grok
|
| The biggest scumbag of them all, but hey "I use it for
| free."
| dangus wrote:
| But they can count you as a user and that positively
| impacts their valuation.
| nativeit wrote:
| One of the many inverted incentives in this space,
| considering every user Grok counts is actively burning
| through their cash.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Which one did you move to?
|
| I haven't found as good of an turnkey chat/search/gen interface
| as CGPT yet unfortunately.
|
| Even self hosted deepseek on an Ada machine doesn't get there
| cause the open source interfaces are still bad
| soared wrote:
| Gemini primarily - but I'm using it for help with house
| projects, landscaping, shopping, etc and not for coding. Not
| not a scumbag owner but feels better than OpenAI.
| itwillnotbeasy wrote:
| Weird choice, given Google's track record on privacy.
| Gemini uses your chats for training and human review them
| by default. You can opt out by turning off App Activity,
| but that disables chat history and integrations, which
| kinda kinda makes it useless. Claude respects your privacy
| by default and ChatGPT and Grok have an opt-out that
| doesn't totally cripple the app.
|
| So what makes Google less scummy? A cheaper price? I'm sure
| that won't last long - they've played this game before with
| YouTube, Google Reader, and Search: hook users, dominate,
| then enshittify. Same old Google playbook: good - monopoly
| - crap.
| kace91 wrote:
| >Some are better at the auto complete (Copilot), others at the
| agent flow (Claude Code). Some aim to be the best for non-
| technical people (Bolt or Replit), others for large enterprises
| (again, Copilot). Still, all of this "differentiation" ends up
| making a 1-2% difference in product. In fact, I can't stress
| enough how much the UX and core functionality of these tools is
| essentially identical.
|
| Is this exclusively referring to the ux or full functionality?
|
| Because I can tell you straight away that cursor (Claude) vs
| copilot is _not_ a 1% difference. Most people in my company pay
| their own cursor license even though we have copilot for
| available for free.
| tyleo wrote:
| Agreed, I've used both at work and personal projects. Copilot
| auto complete is great but it isn't ground breaking. Cursor has
| built near entire features for me.
|
| I think copilot could get there TBH. I love most Microsoft dev
| tools and IDEs. But it really isn't there yet in my opinion.
| theahura wrote:
| Can you say more?
|
| I was referring to UX, as that is the main product. Cursor
| isn't providing their own models, or at least most people that
| I'm aware of are bringing their own keys.
|
| I haven't used copilot extensively but my understanding is that
| they now have _feature_ parity at the IDE level, but the
| underlying models aren 't as good.
| rfoo wrote:
| > Cursor isn't providing their own models
|
| For use cases demanding the most intelligent model, yes they
| aren't.
|
| However, there are cases that you just can't use best models
| due to latency. For example next edit prediction, and
| applying diffs [0] generated by the super intelligent model
| you decided to use. AFAIK, Cursor does use their own model
| for these, which is why you can't use Cursor without paying
| them $20/mo even if you bring your own Anthropic API key.
| Applying what Claude generated in Copilot is just so
| painfully slow to the point that I just don't want to use it.
|
| If you tried Cursor early on, I recommend you update your
| prior now. Cursor had been redesigned about a year ago, and
| it is a _completely different product_ compared to what they
| first released 2 years ago.
|
| [0] We may not need a model to apply diff soon, as Aider
| leaderboard shows, recent models started to be able to
| generate perfect diff that actually applies.
| theahura wrote:
| (I most recently used cursor in October before switching to
| Avante, so I suspect I've experienced the version of the
| tool you're talking about. I mostly didn't use the
| autocomplete, I mostly used the chat-q&a sidebar.)
| rfoo wrote:
| And I pay Cursor only for autocomplete - this explains
| the difference I guess.
|
| I do sometimes use Composer (or Agent in recent
| versions), but it's being increasingly less useful in my
| case. Not sure why :(
| nicoritschel wrote:
| The redesign was ~5 months ago. If you switched in
| October, you 100% have not used the current Cursor
| experience.
| kace91 wrote:
| >Can you say more?
|
| My experience is that copilot is basically a better
| autocomplete, but anything beyond a three liner will deviate
| from current context making the answer useless - not
| following the codebase's convention, using packages that
| aren't present, not seeing the big picture, and so on.
|
| In contrast, cursor is eerily aware of its surroundings,
| being able to point out that your choice of naming conflicts
| with somewhere else, that your test is failing because of a
| weird config in a completely different place leaking to your
| suite, and so on.
|
| I use cursor without bringing my own keys, so it defaults to
| claude-3.5-sonnet. I always use it in composer mode. Though I
| can't tell you with full certainty the reasons for its better
| performance, I strongly suspect it's related to how it
| searches the codebase for context to provide the model with.
|
| It gets to the point that I'm frequently starting tasks by
| dropping a Jira description with some extra info to it
| directly and watching it work. It won't do the job by itself
| in one shot, but it will surface entry points, issues and
| small details in such a way that it's more useful to start
| there than from a blank slate, which is already a big plus.
|
| It can also be used as a rubber duck colleague asking it
| whether a design is good, potential for refactorings,
| bottlenecks, boy scouting and so on.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Agreed, although we're strictly prohibited from using cursor at
| work in enterprise, though they have been in discussion for an
| enterprise license.
|
| I use cursor for personal work though and it's night and day,
| even with the recent copilot agent mode additions. I told my
| CTO who asked about it if we should look into cursor and I told
| him straight up that in comparison copilot is basically
| useless.
| nativeit wrote:
| What are the most dramatic differences?
| aerhardt wrote:
| I don't use Cursor (I'm on Jetbrains) but from what I read
| it must be the autocomplete. Github Copilot is literally
| unusable. I've tried it many times in the last month and
| everything it suggests is stupid and utterly wrong. The
| suggestions are not subtly wrong - they often have nothing
| to do with what I'm working on. It wasn't _this_ bad at the
| beginning. Mind you, I code mainly in Python, pretty common
| stuff most of the time.
|
| I keep reading here that Cursor has great autocomplete so
| we could be talking about a 1000% improvement compared to
| Copilot rather than 1% as on of the other commenters is
| positing.
| wavemode wrote:
| Personally I've seen Cursor make boneheaded autocomplete
| suggestions at roughly the same rate that Copilot does.
| And Cursor was also buggy in other annoying ways, and its
| "jump" suggestions (where it tries to predict where to
| move your cursor next) were usually stupid. So I
| ultimately switched back to Copilot.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I wouldn't qualify the suggestions I'm getting as
| boneheaded, but rather disastrous. I have completions
| turned off by default because they're so stupid it's
| unbearable. But then maybe a few times a month I'm low on
| energy and faced with the typical repetitive task: fill
| out this large dictionary with predictable values, type
| these classes which are variations of another, write some
| very grindy tests, what-have-you. I turn it on in the
| hopes that it will save me some work, see what it's
| suggesting, and turn it off back again in seconds. It
| literally cannot pick up on blatantly predictable local
| patterns anymore. I don't know what's happened to it
| because it used to be able to at least do _that_.
| mellosouls wrote:
| _cursor (Claude) vs copilot is not a 1% difference_
|
| This is true, but as a user of both and champion of Cursor - VS
| Code Copilot is _quickly_ catching up.
| dstroot wrote:
| Currently using Claude code and Cursor, but VSCode is copying
| Cursor rapidly. Not sure if the VSCode forks will survive.
| Ideally we'd have VSCode with a robust agent capability and a
| fully open "bring your own LLM" feature.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| To me it's fairly straightforward.
|
| OpenAI is predominantly a consumer AI company. Anthropic has also
| won over developer hearts and minds since Claude 3.5. Developers
| are also, proportionally, the largest uses of AI in an enterprise
| setting. OpenAI does not want to be pigeonholed into being the
| "ChatGPT company". And money spent now is a lot cheaper than
| money spent later.
|
| But this is all just speculation anyways.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| > The worst case scenario for Apple is they decide to use user
| data late.
|
| Given how heavily Apple has leaned into E2E over the years, I
| don't see this happening at all, beyond local on-device stuff.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I was really liking windsurf but need to look for another option
| now unfortunately.
|
| It's a shame we can't have anything nice not get consumed but -
| such is the world.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Same here. I doubt they'll keep the option of letting me choose
| what model to use. Can't trust OpenAI.
| g8oz wrote:
| Reminds me of Snowflake purchasing Streamlit. A sign of a big
| wallet and slowing internal execution on the part of the
| purchaser rather than an indication of the compelling nature of
| the acquisition.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| 800 million for streamlit is still the most mind-blowing
| acquisition story I've heard. Codeium being a few bill sounds
| reasonable for that.
| mosdl wrote:
| The snowflake marketplace was/is such a mess. I always wondered
| what caused them to choose streamlit.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I predict we will hit peak vibe coding by this summer. The
| tooling can't be sold at a loss forever/costs will go up for all
| sorts of reasons, and I think the tech debt generated by the
| tooling will eventually be recognized by management as
| velocity/error quotas start to inverse. I don't think self-
| driving developers will happen in time, and another AI winter
| will settle in with the upcoming recession.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| IMHO: we will vibe:code with free local/cheaply hosted open
| source models and IDEs.. the hardware to facilitate is coming
| to consumers fast. But if Microsoft can sell Office to
| companies for decades then open ai can surely do the same for
| coding tools
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Unless there is a massive change in archiecture, it will
| always be much more cost effective to have a single cluster
| of GPUs running inference for many users than have each user
| have hardware capable of running SOTA models but only using
| it for the 1% of the time where they have asked the model to
| do something.
| exitb wrote:
| There are multiple orders of magnitude between the sizes of
| models people use for ,,vibe coding" and models most people
| can comfortably run. It will take many years to bridge that
| gap.
| nativeit wrote:
| > But if Microsoft can sell Office to companies for decades
| then open ai can surely do the same for coding tools
|
| This seems like a bold statement.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| I've seen a lot of AI hype, but "AI will make management
| recognize that tech debt is important" takes the cake. Maybe in
| 2040
| Magma7404 wrote:
| Management realizing and saying publicly that they made a
| mistake? Maybe in 3025.
| croes wrote:
| They still have to figure that out for cloud software
| tyre wrote:
| I hope you're able to find good managers. I prioritize paying
| down tech debt over feature development regularly, because it
| makes business sense.
|
| Like even in a cold capitalist analysis, the benefits to
| developer velocity, ease of new feature development, incident
| response, stability, customer trust, etc.
|
| It doesn't always; there are certainly areas of tech debt
| that bother me personally but I know aren't worth the ROI to
| clean up. These become weekend projects if I want a fun win
| in my life, but nothing terrible happens if there's a little
| friction.
| huntertwo wrote:
| How? I find it hard for my team to reduce tech debt as an
| OKR since other feature work is 1) sexier for engineers to
| work on 2) easier to put concrete value on. Everybody
| agrees in principle that tech debt is bad
| tyre wrote:
| Great question. It depends on why you want to kill it.
|
| Sometimes it's because there are regular bugs and on-call
| becomes a drag on velocity.
|
| Sometimes making code changes is difficult and there's
| only one person who knows what going on, so you either
| have a bus factor risk or it limits flexibility on
| assigning projects / code review.
|
| Sometimes the system's performance is, or will be in the
| short-medium term, going to start causing incidents.
|
| Sometimes incident recovery takes a long time. We had a
| pipeline that would take six-ten hours to run and
| couldn't be restarted midway if it failed. Recovering
| from downtime was crazy!
|
| Sometimes there's a host of features whose development
| timelines would be sped up by more than it would take to
| burn down the tech debt to unlock them.
|
| Sometimes a refactor would improve system performance
| enough to meaningfully affect the customer or reduce
| infra costs.
|
| And then...
|
| Sometimes you have career-driven managers and engineers
| who don't want to or can't make difficult long-term
| trade-offs, which is sometimes the way it is and you
| should consider switching teams or companies.
|
| So I guess my question to you is: why should you burn
| this down?
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Ok, I'm going to make a slightly controversial statement: Vibe
| coding is both A)potentially hugely important and
| transofrmative and B)massively good.
|
| Most of the criticisms of vibe coding are coming from SWEs who
| work on large, complicated codebases whose products are used by
| lots of people and for whom security, edge cases,
| maintainability, etc. are extremely important considerations.
| In this context, vibe coding is obviously a horrible idea, and
| we are pretty far away from AI being able to do more than
| slightly assist around the edges.
|
| But small, bespoke scripts that will be used by exactly 1
| person and are whose outputs are easily verified are actually
| _hugely_ important. Millions of things are probably done every
| single day where, if the person doing it had the skill to write
| up a small script, it would be massively sped up. But most
| people don't have that skill, and it's too expensive/there is
| too much friction to hire an actual programmer to solve it. AI
| can do these things.
|
| Each specific instance isn't a big deal, and won't make much
| productivity difference, but in aggregate, the potential gains
| are massive, and AI is already far more than good enough to be
| completely creating these kinds of scripts. It is just going to
| take people a while to shift their perspective and start asking
| about what small tasks they do every day that could be
| scripted.
|
| This is the true potential of "vibe coding". Someone who can't
| program, but knows what they need (and how to verify that it
| works), making something for their personal use.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I don't think that's a $3B market.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I actually literally think that these small scripts, if
| widely applied, are far, far more bigger than that. Even
| solely in the US, let alone globally. I'm also relatively
| certain that, if they weren't sinking money into research
| etc, subscriptions on inference are probably already
| profitable. These companies are burning money because they
| are investing in research, not because $10/month doesn't
| cover the average inference costs. Although I'd love to
| find a better source than the speculative ones I've seen
| about it.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I dislike the term, but eventually "vibe coding" should
| replace many existing no-code/low-code platforms, right? I
| see that as nearly guaranteed, for many use cases.
|
| > Low-code and no-code development platforms allow
| professional as well as citizen developers to quickly and
| efficiently create applications in a visual software
| development environment. The fact that little to no coding
| experience is required to build applications that may be
| used to resolve business issues underlines the value of the
| technology for organizations worldwide. Unsurprisingly, the
| global low-code platform market is forecast to amount to
| approximately 65 billion U.S. dollars by 2027. [0]
|
| We could argue about the exact no-code TAM, but if you have
| a decent chance to create the market leader for the no-code
| replacement, $3B seems fair, doesn't it?
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/topics/8461/low-code-and-no-
| code-pl...
| abxyz wrote:
| I disagree, it's the opposite. Low code / no code is
| valuable because you're deferring responsibility to a
| system that is developed and maintained by experts. A
| task running once a day on Zapier is orders of magnitude
| better for a business than the same task being built by
| someone on the marketing team with vibe coding. Low code
| / no code platforms have a very bright future, because
| they can leverage LLMs to help people create tasks with
| ease that are also reliable.
|
| LLM-enabled Zapier or Make or n8n is the future, not
| everyone churning out Claude-written NextJS app after
| NextJS app.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Yeah, I don't disagree with you at all. I almost wrote a
| longer and more nuanced comment to begin with. For one,
| low-code and no-code are actually two different very
| things.
|
| There are many use cases for low-code. The two major ones
| I've dealt with are MVPs where tools like Bubble are
| used, and the other is creating corporate internal tools,
| where MS Power Platform is common.
|
| Corporate IT departments are allergic to custom web apps,
| and have a much easier time getting a Power Platform
| project approved due to its easily understood security
| implications. That low-code use case is certainly going
| to be the last thing a tool like Windsurf conquers.
|
| However, even without that use case, in an AI-heavy
| investment environment, $3B doesn't seem all that bad to
| me. However, I have zero experience with M&A.
| croes wrote:
| Here is my controversial statement:
|
| Vibe coding is coding like a customer hiring a programmer is
| coding.
|
| If all the code is written by AI it isn't coding at all, it's
| ordering.
| theahura wrote:
| Strong plus one. This is more or less what my company is
| working on -- more and more ostensibly nontechnical people
| are able to contribute to codebases with seasoned engineers.
| pandemic_region wrote:
| > ostensibly nontechnical people are able to contribute to
| codebases with seasoned engineers.
|
| Who is the contributor then? The AI or the prompt writer?
|
| I mean I'd be more at ease if they would just contribute
| their prompt instead. And then, what value does that
| actually have? So many mixed feelings here.
|
| At work I had a React dev merging Java code into a rather
| complex project. It was clearly heavily prompt assisted,
| and looked like the code the junior Java developer would
| have written. The difference is that the junior Java
| developer probably would have sweated a couple of days over
| that code, so she would know it inside out and could
| maintain it. The React dev would just write more prompts or
| ask the AI to do it.
|
| If we're confident that prompting creates good code and
| solid projects, well then we don't need expensive
| developers anymore do we?
| luckylion wrote:
| > But small, bespoke scripts that will be used by exactly 1
| person and are whose outputs are easily verified are actually
| _hugely_ important.
|
| Are they easily verified though?
|
| I have a bunch of people who are "vibe coding" in non-dev
| departments. It's amazing that it allows them to do things
| they otherwise couldn't, but I don't think it's accurate to
| say it's easily verified, unless we're talking about the most
| trivial tasks ("count the words in this text").
|
| As soon as it gets a bit more complex (but far from
| "complex"), it's no longer verifiable for them except "the
| output looks kinda like what I expected". Might still be
| useful for things, but how much weight do you want to put on
| your sales-analysis if you've verified its accuracy by "looks
| intuitively correct"?
| kjellsbells wrote:
| > This is the true potential of "vibe coding". Someone who
| can't program, but knows what they need
|
| I would argue that the real money, and the gap right now, is
| in vibe tasking, not vibe coding.
|
| There are millions of knowledge workers for whom the ability
| to synthesize and manipulate office artifacts (excel sheets,
| salesforce objects, emails, tableau reports, etc) is
| critical. There are also lots of employees who recognise that
| a lot of these tasks are "bullshit jobs", and a lot of
| employers that would like nothing more than to automate them
| away. Companies like Appian try to convince CEOs that digital
| process automation can solve this problem, but the difficult
| reality is that these tasks also require a bit of flexible
| thinking ("what do I put in my report if the TPS data from
| Gary doesnt show up in time?"). This is a far bigger and more
| lucrative market than the one made of people who need quick
| and dirty apps or scripts.
|
| It's also one that has had several attempts over the years to
| solve it. Somewhere between "keyboard automation" (macro
| recording, AutoHotKey type stuff) and "citizen programming"
| (VB type tools, power automate) and "application oriented
| LLM" (copilot for excel, etc) there is a killer product and a
| vast market waiting to escape.
|
| Amusingly, in my own experience, the major corps in the IT
| domain (msft, salesforce, etc etc) all seem to be determined
| to silo the experience, so that the conversational LLM
| interface only works inside their universe. Which perhaps is
| the reason why vibe tasking hasnt succeeded yet. Perhaps MCP
| or an MCP marketplace will force a degree of openness, but
| it's too early to say.
| abxyz wrote:
| I am very much in favor of anything that makes software
| engineering more accessible. I have no principled objection
| to vibe coding. The problem I have with vibe coding is
| practical: it's producing more low quality code rather than
| allowing people to achieve more than they previously could.
|
| Almost everything I've seen achieved with vibe coding so far
| has been long since achievable with low / no code platforms.
| There is a great deal of value in the freedom that vibe
| coding gives (and for that reason, I am in favor of it) but
| the missing piece of this criticism of the criticism is that
| vibe coding is not the only way to write these simple scripts
| and it is the least reliable way.
|
| Vibe coding as the future is an uninspired vision of the
| future. The future is less code, not more.
| gerad wrote:
| After watching a sales person and a PM vibe code I'll say
| that existing developers are not the initial for vibe
| coding. Vibe coding absolutely allows non-devs to achieve
| more than they previously could.
| abxyz wrote:
| The issue is one of education, not possibility. There is
| so much hype around vibe coding that it has penetrated
| non-technical circles and given non-technical people the
| confidence to try and make things. The same people could
| use Zapier or Airtable or Tally or Retool or Bubble or
| n8n to achieve their goals but they didn't have the
| confidence to do so, or knowledge of the tooling.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| > Almost everything I've seen achieved with vibe coding so
| far has been long since achievable with low / no code
| platforms.
|
| I tried showing someone Bubble as a solution to a fairly
| simple workflow (one form input, a few LLM calls, an
| output) that they should have been able to build in
| minutes.
|
| It was a horrific experience, as Bubble can't find the
| right balance between being "no-code" (simple) and
| "powerful enough" with customizations. The end result is
| that in my experience a non-technical person just can't get
| workflows to work in Bubble without investing a massive
| number of hours.
|
| In comparison, getting this done with either vanilla
| Claude.ai or Lovable is a *single* prompt. Just one!
|
| I think you are deeply underestimating the difference for
| true non-technical users. Or even bored/overwhelmed
| technical users who need something done that's non-mission-
| critical and would just never get done if it took hours of
| messing with a no-code GUI, vs. dictating it through
| whisper and letting the AI agent go at it.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Malleable software. This all reminds me of personal computing
| in 80's with BASIC in every machine, and environments like
| Emacs that are built for that.
|
| I think LLMs have a much better chance at this kind of
| software than Emacs or BASIC, but I also doubt it has any
| future: once AI is capable enough, you can just hide the
| programmatic layer entirely and tell the computer what to do.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I work in Enterprise IT, I'm the CTO of a small business.
| People executing small scripts all over the place sounds to
| me like the stuff of nightmares. Especially locally, but even
| if it's run online in a safer environment, as long as it
| causes side effects in other systems, the risk is massive.
| And if it doesn't cause side effects, well, chances are the
| program is worthless.
|
| Also, I've already seen this story play out with low-code.
| The pitch was the same, nearly line by line: "citizen
| developers will be able to solve so many problems by
| themselves at the edges of enterprise". It didn't take. Most
| users could not learn the technologies, but much more
| importantly: they did not even know how to verbalize their
| requirements. Take my word for it, most people do not want to
| design solutions, and of those that are willing, only a small
| subset is able.
| rfoo wrote:
| > I've already seen this story play out with low-code. The
| pitch was the same
|
| That's the point. Unlike low-code or no-code bullshit, this
| somehow worked. People "magically" want to design
| solutions, and are able to, now.
|
| > People executing small scripts all over the place sounds
| to me like the stuff of nightmares.
|
| Me too. However, watching how eager people want to (and
| they indeed can!) make progress with these LLM generated
| horror, I believe it's time to give up and start designing
| secure systems despite the existence of massive slightly
| broken scripts.
| aerhardt wrote:
| > People "magically" want to design solutions, and are
| able to, now.
|
| I agree that LLMs lower the barrier significantly
| compared to low-code/no-code, but most people are not
| able to design solutions because they lack the business
| analysis skills and are not detailed-oriented enough to
| follow through with the specification of requirements.
| Let's not even talk about the discipline to carry out
| maintenance over a working project in the face of
| changing requirements.
|
| Even if we agree that LLMs move a lot of the work up the
| stack towards business analysis / product ownership /
| solution design, my experience in Enterprise IT in
| companies ranging from small to gigantic is that users do
| not magically become BAs / POs / PMs. There's a reason
| those are professionalized and specialized roles.
|
| I wouldn't mind being proven wrong, it's not like I feel
| personally threatened or anything. I feel it's the
| integrity of the systems I oversee that would be
| threatened.
|
| > I believe it's time to give up and start designing
| secure systems
|
| OK, well I'm not going to bear that responsibility for
| that, I have enough on my plate as it is. I'm not
| allowing an arbitrary sales rep to interact with our
| production Salesforce instance by automated means,
| period. Even if they have the proper permission levels
| configured to a tee in Salesforce, I can think of a
| thousand ways they could badly mess up their own slice of
| data. Interacting with the local machine: also
| potentially a supermassive black hole of vulnerabilities.
| Some of them possibly more serious than data loss, such
| as the syphoning of data to malicious actors.
|
| If someone can think of secure ways for citizen devs to
| interact with critical enterprise systems via scripting,
| then fine. I'll sit here waiting!
| behnamoh wrote:
| > ... velocity/error quotas start to inverse ...
|
| Could you please elaborate? Is this how management (at least in
| your company) looks at code--as a ratio of how fast it's done
| over how many tests it passes?
| bobxmax wrote:
| AirBnb just did a 1.5 year engineering migration in 6 weeks
| thanks to AI.
|
| "Vibe" coding is here to stay and it's only devs who don't know
| how to adapt that are wishfully hoping for otherwise.
| gammarator wrote:
| Whatever the term "vibe coding" is taken to mean, it
| assuredly doesn't apply to a large scale migration undertaken
| by a professional software organization.
| bobxmax wrote:
| Vibe coding means AI-assisted programming. That is it.
| fragmede wrote:
| it means having it generate code and then _not looking at
| the code_ and going purely off of vibes. If you have it
| generate some code and then dig deep into the code and
| edit it to the point that you 're able to explain every
| variable name and the reasoning for each if clause like
| your boss is gonna call you out for cheating and using an
| LLM and is gonna fire you if you can't explain "your"
| code, that's gonna slow you down and you're no longer
| purely going off of ~/vibes/~
| firefoxd wrote:
| Hold on, we aren't even good at estimating but now we know
| how much time we saved by vibe coding? I can't wait to read
| the source of this info when you share it.
| bobxmax wrote:
| https://analyticsindiamag.com/global-tech/airbnb-uses-
| llms-t...
|
| You might not be good at estimating, but professional
| software teams at the most successful tech companies in the
| world generally are.
| exitb wrote:
| It wasn't vibe coding, they translated their tests from one
| framework to another.
| croes wrote:
| Lets wait for the first wave security bugs because of vibe
| coded software.
|
| I doubt that error free code is outnumbering code with errors
| in the training data.
| bobxmax wrote:
| Nobody cares. Ancient devs are insisting that vibe coding
| is going to lead to a bunch of tech debt.
|
| 1. Nobody cares. It's still worth the insane productivity
| improvements.
|
| 2. There is no proof that it's going to lead to long-term
| issues, because why would it?
| mech422 wrote:
| "Airbnb recently completed our first large-scale, LLM-driven
| code migration, updating nearly 3.5K React component test
| files from Enzyme to use React Testing Library (RTL) instead.
| We'd originally estimated this would take 1.5 years of
| engineering time to do by hand, but -- using a combination of
| frontier models and robust automation -- we finished the
| entire migration in just 6 weeks."
|
| Color me unimpressed - it converted some test files. It
| didn't design any architecture, create any databases, handle
| any security concerns or any of the other things programmers
| have to do/worry about on a daily basis. It basically did
| source to source translation, which has been around for 30+
| years.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| If you told me five years ago that such a conversion had
| been done in six weeks, I would not have believed it. Even
| though some level of source-to-source existed. And I would
| definitely expect that such a conversion would have
| resulted in hideous, non-idiomatic code in the target
| language.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > And I would definitely expect that such a conversion
| would have resulted in hideous, non-idiomatic code in the
| target language.
|
| and we don't know what is the quality of end code, it is
| possible that tech debt created by migration is well
| higher than 1.5 eng/y.
| bobxmax wrote:
| Do you really think Airbnb software engineers would
| accept the final code if it was low quality?
|
| Seriously, the wishful thinking around this stuff is
| embarassing.
| bobxmax wrote:
| It's easy to tell yourself you're not losing by constantly
| pushing the goal posts.
| mech422 wrote:
| great comeback - "Dude - Trust me" :-P got anything more
| compelling then your opinion ? Have you ever done source
| to source translation work (I have ...) Or is this just
| so exciting to you cuz you've never seen it before ?
| bobxmax wrote:
| I didn't say anything remotely close to "Dude Trust Me" -
| perhaps you need to try a bit of "vibe learning how to
| read english"
| mech422 wrote:
| exactly, you didn't provide any evidence or even decent
| arguements to support your position. I provided 3
| distinct areas (of many) that it didn't touch that
| programmers have to deal with everyday. I also pointed
| out that the capabilities to do the sorts of
| transformations it did have existed for decades.
|
| But given your comment history, backing up your arguments
| doesn't seem to be your strong suit...
| tyre wrote:
| I don't know, I've been using Gemini 2.5 for a bit. The daily
| quota caps at effectively $55/day. It's not a ton of
| development but it's definitely worth it compared to a human
| for projects that Claude 3.7 can't yet wrap its mind around.
|
| We'll see if Gemini 2.5 Flash is good enough, but it definitely
| doesn't feel like Google is selling for a huge loss post-
| training.
|
| Yes the training is a huge investment but are they really not
| going to do it? Doesn't seem optional
| yojo wrote:
| The chatter around vibe coding to me feels a lot like the late
| 90s early 2000s FUD around outsourcing. Who would pay a high-
| cost American engineer when you could get 10 in South Asia for
| the same price? Media was forecasting an irreversible IT
| offshoring mega trend. Obviously, some software development did
| move to cheaper regions. But the US tech sector also exploded.
|
| For some projects (e.g. your internal-facing CRUD app), cheap
| code is acceptable. For a high scale consumer product, the cost
| of premium engineering resources is a rounding error on your
| profits, and even small marginal improvements can generate high
| value in absolute dollar terms.
|
| I'm sure vibe coding will eat the lowest end of software
| development. It will also allow the creation of software that
| wouldn't have been economically viable before. But I don't see
| it notably denting the high end without something close to AGI.
| esafak wrote:
| Asian programmers are not improving at the rate LLMs are.
| mountainriver wrote:
| There hasn't been an AI winter since 2008 and there sure isn't
| going to be one now. In spite of everyone saying it every
| couple of months since then.
|
| Also what tech debt? If you have good engineers doing the vibe
| coding they are just way faster. And also faster at squashing
| bugs.
|
| I was one-shotting whole features into our Rust code base with
| 2.5 last week. Absolutely perfect code, better than I could
| have written it in places.
|
| Then later that week o3 solved a hard bug 2 different MLEs
| failed to solve as well as myself.
|
| I have no idea why people think this stuff is bad, it's utterly
| baffling to me
| gopher_space wrote:
| I won't recognize bugs the machine fixes if they appear
| outside the original context later on.
|
| If I'm not learning something every day this profession holds
| very little for me.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > and another AI winter will settle in with the upcoming
|
| Oh, please. Even if every cent of VC funding dries up tomorrow
| we'd still have years of discovering how to use LLMs and
| "generative models" in general to do cool, useful stuff. And by
| "we" I mean everyone, at every level. The proverbial bearded
| dude in his mom's basement, the young college grad, phd
| researcher, big tech researcher, and everyone in the middle.
| The cat is out of the bag, and this tech _is_ here to stay.
|
| The various AI winters came because of many reasons, none that
| are present today. Todays tech is cool! It's also immediately
| useful (oAI, anthropic, goog are already selling billions of $
| worth of tokens!). And it's highly transformative. The amount
| of innovation in the past 2 years is bonkers. And, for the
| first time, it's also accessible to "home users". Alpaca was to
| llama what the home computer was to computers. It showed that
| anyone can take any of the open models and train them on their
| downstream tasks for cheap. And guess what, everyone is doing
| it. From horny teens to business analysts, they're all using
| this, today.
|
| Also, as opposed to the last time (which also coincided with
| the .com bubble), this time the tech is supported and mainly
| financed by the top tech firms. VCs are not alone in this one.
| Between MS, goog, AMZ, Meta and even AAPL, they're all pouring
| billions into this. They'll want to earn their money back, so
| like it or not, this thing is here to stay. (hell, even IBM! is
| doing gen ai =)) )
|
| So no, AI winter is not coming.
| senko wrote:
| I agree on the underlying premise - current crop of LLMs isn't
| good enough at coding to completely autonomously achieve a
| minimum quality level for actually reliable products.
|
| I don't see how peak vibe coding in a few months follows that.
| Check revenue and growth figures for products like Lovable
| ($10m+ ARR) or Bolt.new ($30m+ ARR). This doesn't show costs
| (they might in fact be deep in red) but with story like that I
| don't see it crashing in 3-4 months.
|
| On the user experience/expectation side, I can see how the
| overhyped claims of "build complete apps" hit a peak, but that
| will still leave the tools positioned strong for "quick
| prototyping and experimentation". IMHO, that alone is enough to
| prevent a cliff drop.
|
| Even allowing for the peak in tool usage for coding
| specifically, I don't see how that causes "AI winter", since
| LLMs are now used in a wide variety of cases and that use is
| strongly growing (and uncorrelated to the whole "AI coding"
| market).
|
| Finally, "costs will go up for all sorts of reasons" claim is
| dubious, since the costs per token are dropping even while the
| models are getting better (for a quick example, cost of GPT-4.1
| is roughly 50% of GPT-4o while being an improvement).
|
| For these reasons, if I could bet against your prediction, I'd
| immediately take that bet.
| dangus wrote:
| > I've always been a staunch defender of capitalism and free
| markets, even though that's historically been an unpopular
| opinion in my particular social circle. Watching the LLM market,
| I can't help but feel extremely vindicated. Over the last 5
| years, the cost per token has been driven down relentlessly even
| as model quality has skyrocketed. The brutal and bruising
| competition between the tech giants has left nothing but riches
| for the average consumer.
|
| There's a rich irony to be saying this right after explaining how
| Google is dominating the market and how they're involved in an
| antitrust lawsuit for alleged illegal monopolistic practices.
|
| And of course this willfully ignores the phase of capitalism we
| are in with the AI market right now. We all know how the story
| will end. Over time, AI companies will inevitably merge and the
| products will eventually enshittify. As companies like OpenAI
| look to exit they will go public or be acquired and need to
| greatly trim the fat in order to become profitable long-term.
|
| We'll start seeing AI products incorporate things like
| advertising, raise their prices, and every other negative end
| state we've seen with every other new technology landscape. E.g.,
| When I get a ride from Uber they literally display ads to me
| while I'm waiting for my vehicle. They didn't do that when they
| were okay with losing moeny.
|
| And of course, "free market" capitalism isn't really free market
| at all in an enviornment where there are random tariffs being
| applied and removed on a whim to random countries.
|
| I really don't understand why people feel like they need to
| defend capitalism like this. Capitalism doesn't need a defender,
| if anything it constantly needs people restraining it.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I had a similar thought when I reached the part about Apple. A
| system that punishes the player respects their user's privacy
| while rewarding those that take everything that isn't nailed
| down is not a good system.
|
| The author frames Apple's choice as an own goal, but I'd rather
| see it as putting the failings of capitalism on display.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Windsurf/Codeium has an enterprise version that can be used by
| corporations to provide AI assisted coding environments using
| their own HW stack (non cloud). This is beneficial for privacy
| and proprietary reasons especially if your data cannot be
| exfiltrated off premises. The hardware recommended to run Codeium
| is a lot cheaper than if you were to have 700 developers generate
| tokens. This model has the chance to generate many paying
| customers. Whether that has a $40b market cap is unclear
| theahura wrote:
| Thanks, I had a feeling it may be something like this since it
| seemed like they were investing more in enterprise. That said,
| do they do better than copilot on this? Surely msft has more
| experience and ability to execute in that market?
| rfoo wrote:
| Codeium's completion model is better than whatever GitHub
| Copilot has. For me it's Cursor > Codeium >>> Copilot. Yes,
| Copilot is that bad.
|
| And yes Codeium/Windsurf focuses on enterprise customers
| more. As GP said they have an on-prem [0], a hybrid SaaS
| offering and enterprise features that just make sense (e.g.
| pooled credits). Their support team is more responsive
| (compared to Anysphere). Windsurf also "feels" more finished
| than Cursor.
|
| [0] but ultimately if you want to "vibe-coding" you have to
| call Claude API
| theahura wrote:
| Ok thanks, that was my follow-up -- I assumed that airgap
| implementations are significantly worse because they can't
| back into Claude or Gemini
| firesteelrain wrote:
| It's a Copilot competitor and it's used by Zillow, Dell, and
| Anduril (newish Defense company). Cursor can't work in
| airgapped environments right now. I don't know what Codeium
| charges to run an on prem licensed version but they boast
| over 1000 enterprise customers. Codeium is on a rapid growth
| trajectory from $1.25b to $2.85b in such a short period.
|
| Codeium can be fine tuned. Though it's trained on similar
| open source it does provide assurances that they do not
| inadvertently train on wrongly licensed software code.
|
| https://windsurf.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-
| does...
| mbreese wrote:
| I don't think the utility of Windsurf was the question. There
| is clearly a benefit for a tool/service like this.
|
| The questions raised by the article (as I saw it) were price
| and timing. $3B is a lot. Is that overpaying for something with
| a known value but limited reach? Not to mention competitors
| with deep pockets. And the other question is - why now? What
| was to be gained by OpenAI by buying Windsuf now.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| It's a Copilot competitor and it's used by Zillow, Dell, and
| Anduril (newish Defense company). Cursor can't work in
| airgapped environments right now. I don't know what Codeium
| charges to run an on prem licensed version but they boast
| over 1000 enterprise customers. Codeium is on a rapid growth
| trajectory from $1.25b to $2.85b in such a short period.
|
| Codeium can be fine tuned. Though it's trained on similar
| open source it does provide assurances that they do not
| inadvertently train on wrongly licensed software code.
|
| https://windsurf.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-
| does...
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Isn't the usual reason the people that work there?
| _jab wrote:
| A few thoughts:
|
| 1) I agree that the moat for these companies is thin. AFAICT,
| auto-complete, as opposed to agentic flows, is Cursor's primary
| feature that attracts users. This is probably harder than the
| author gives it credit for; figuring out what context to provide
| the model is a non-obvious problem - how do you tradeoff latency
| and model quality? Nonetheless, it's been implemented enough
| times that it's mostly just down to how good is the underlying
| model.
|
| 2) Speaking of models, I'm not sure it's been independently
| benchmarked yet, but GPT 4.1 on the surface looks like a
| reasonable contestant to back auto-complete functionality. Varun
| from Windsurf was even on the GPT 4.1 announcement livestream a
| few days ago, so it's clear Windsurf does intend to use them.
|
| 3) This is probably a stock deal, not a cash deal. Not sure why
| the author is so convinced this has to be $3B in cash paid for
| Windsurf. AFAIK that hasn't been reported anywhere.
|
| 4) If agentic flows do take off, data becomes a more meaningful
| moat. Having a platform like Cursor or Windsurf enables these
| companies to collect telemetry about _how_ users are coding that
| isn't possible just from looking at the repo, the finished
| product. It opens up interesting opportunities for RLHF and other
| methods to refine agentic flows. That could be part of the appeal
| here.
| theahura wrote:
| I mention in the footnotes that this is likely a stock deal!
|
| I didn't think about telemetry for RL, that's very interesting
| imtringued wrote:
| If it's a stock deal that's even worse, since OpenAI is saying
| that their stock is definitely worth less than $3 billion.
| Falimonda wrote:
| Agentic flows will soon overtake auto-complete. Models like
| claude sonnet 3.5 were already good enough, albeit requiring
| the user to actively limit context length.
|
| Most recently, gemini 2.5 pro makes the agentic workflow
| usable, and how!
| canadiantim wrote:
| What agentic workflow are you using with Gemini 2.5? Is there
| a Claude Code that uses Gemini 2.5?
| greymalik wrote:
| Aider or GitHub Copilot should work.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| It can be used with Aider. Although I absolutely hate the
| way that Gemini 2.5 writes Rust. It writes it like it's a
| C++ developer who skimmed the Rust reference yesterday.
| Perhaps it's great for other languages though
| boleary-gl wrote:
| There are a LOT of IDE extensions that allow for agentic
| workflows with Gemini 2.5 pro and flash
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Cline. It's literally black magic at this point.
| Falimonda wrote:
| Yeah, it is! SWE in a professional setting is changed for
| ever whether people like it or not.
|
| No sane organization will accept anything less than
| forcing SWEs to use these tools moving forward. The
| details might differ and some will delay because "IP",
| but they'll all converge very quickly.
|
| Not to say there's no joy in doing it the old-fashioned
| way on your own time :)
| Falimonda wrote:
| I've only used it with Cursor.
|
| I've seen the light!
| sebastiennight wrote:
| > Having a platform like Cursor or Windsurf enables these
| companies to collect telemetry about _how_ users are coding
| that isn't possible just from looking at the repo, the finished
| product.
|
| If you are powering the API for the underlying model, then
| don't you know exactly how users are coding?
|
| Since all of it is included in the context fed to your model.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > If you are powering the API for the underlying model, then
| don't you know exactly how users are coding?
|
| You have the code, but not all the other signals. An easy
| example is "acceptance signal" where someone gets an
| autocompletion and accepts it / rejects it. It can get more
| complicated with the /architect mode and so on, but there's
| probably lots of signals that you can get from an IDE that
| you can't just by serving API responses.
| peed wrote:
| 1) is out-of-date. Cursor started with auto-complete, but is
| all about agentic flows now.
| dzonga wrote:
| data has always been the greatest moat.
|
| some of the oldest companies are data companies think your
| credit rating provider, your business verifier. your american
| express.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| OpenAI realizes foundation models are a very expensive
| commodity.
|
| They need to buy revenue streams fast
|
| XAI has Twitter (ads) Meta has well everything
|
| It's why OpenAI will build a social network or search engine
| and get into Ads ASAP
| elicksaur wrote:
| >OpenAI has also announced a social media project
|
| I haven't heard about this before this post, but if they're
| starting a "Social Media but with AI" site in 2025, can't help
| but feel like they're cooked.
| seaourfreed wrote:
| I think the defensible business models in AI are up-the-stack.
| Windsurf category is one example. There are more.
|
| AI will lead to far bigger work accomplished than one prompt or
| chat at a time. Bigger work flows on humans upgrading and
| interacting with AI will be a big critical category for that.
| croes wrote:
| Can't be for the software because they claim AI can do it too, so
| $3B should be more than enough to write it from scratch.
| WA wrote:
| Ironically, 3 billion is proof that these tools do not work as
| expected and won't replace coders in the near future.
|
| Otherwise, why spend 3 billion if you could have it cooked up by
| an AI coding agent for (almost) free?
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| Existing customer base?
| arczyx wrote:
| OpenAI has way more users and brand recognition than
| Windsurf. If they decide to make their own code editor and
| marketed it, I'm pretty sure its customer base will surpass
| Windsurf's relatively quickly.
| whippymopp wrote:
| if you look closely at the communications coming out of windsurf,
| I think it's pretty obvious that the deal is not happening.
| dagorenouf wrote:
| where did you see this?
| whippymopp wrote:
| check the windsurf subreddit. the official reps have
| repeatedly said it's pure speculation
| rvz wrote:
| >pure speculation
|
| Or called plausible deniability. They will always deny
| these reports.
|
| At the end of the day, Windsurf has a private price tag
| which they know they will sell at.
|
| If they were smart, they should consider selling the hype.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| They have to say that, even if the deal is real. They might
| not even have been told.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Google Stadia team were saying they are not shuting down
| minutes before they were shut down.
| ramoz wrote:
| It's a vehicle that can hit the enterprise, broad user base,
| training data, and gain coverage of a competitor market (I'm sure
| the primary LLM in windsurf is Claude just like it is in cursor).
|
| Beyond that, these IDEs have a potential path to "vibe coding for
| everyone" and could possibly represent the next generation of
| general office tooling. Might as well start with a dedicated
| product team vs spinning up a new one.
| xnx wrote:
| The $3B number is largely and a marketing move to show what a
| big/real/important company OpenAI is. I hope Windsurf got some
| real money out of the deal too. If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow,
| people would just move to the next model.
| consumer451 wrote:
| For anyone interested, here is an interview with Windsurf CEO and
| co-founder, Varun Mohan. It was released today. Not sure if it
| covers the potential acquisition, though I imagine not.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z0RCxDZdrE
| theahura wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, super interesting!
| mrcwinn wrote:
| This is poor analysis. It claims OpenAI is spending "3 of its 40"
| billion in raised capital on Windsurf. Who said this was an all
| cash deal?
|
| And so if you're purchasing with equity in whole or in part, the
| critical question is, do you believe this product could be worth
| more than $3b in the future? That's not at all a stretch.
|
| Cursor is awfully cozy with Anthropic, as well, and so if I'm
| OpenAI, I don't mind having a competitive product inserted into
| this space. This space, by the way, that is at the forefront of
| demonstrating real value creation atop your platform.
| theahura wrote:
| (I mention in the footnotes that this is likely a stock deal!)
| jchonphoenix wrote:
| My guess is the telemetry data.
|
| OAI spends gobs of money on Mercor and Windsurf telemetry gets
| them similar data. My guess is they saw their Mercor spend
| hitting close to 1B a year in the next 5 years if they did
| nothing to curb it
| rvz wrote:
| Because Cursor got too greedy.
|
| Before approaching Windsurf, OpenAI wanted to buy Cursor (which
| is what I predicted thought too [0]) first, then the talks failed
| _twice!_ [1]
|
| The fact they approached Cursor more than once tells you they
| REALLY wanted to buyout Cursor. But Cursor wanted more and were
| raising over $10B.
|
| Instead OpenAI went to Windsurf. The team at Windsurf should
| think carefully and they should sell because of the extreme
| competition, overvaluation and the current AI hype cycle.
|
| Both Windsurf and Cursor's revenue can evaporate very quickly.
| Don't get greedy like Cursor.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708867
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/17/openai-pursued-cursor-
| make...
| bionhoward wrote:
| To take your codebase and make you dependent
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _OpenAI looked at buying Cursor creator before turning to
| Windsurf_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716856 - April
| 2025 (115 comments)
|
| _OpenAI in Talks to Buy Windsurf for About $3B_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725 - April 2025 (44
| comments)
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| The article opines "though it makes me wonder just how bad
| OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft has gotten if they no longer
| have access to GitHub". Is their relationship known to be
| souring?
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Just learned that 'Sam Altman says OpenAI is no longer
| "compute-constrained" -- after Microsoft lost its exclusive
| cloud provider status':
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43711688
| OxfordOutlander wrote:
| It is a talent and a distribution play. Talent: obvious.
|
| Distribution: OpenAI believes the marginal token they sell will
| be accretive to their bottom line, so the goal then is to deliver
| as many tokens as possible. Windsurf already has 1k+ enterprise
| logos and allegedly millions of downloads. 2 m tokens x $0.00001
| gross / token = $20/seat/mo; if windsrf runs 500k seats, oai
| books $120 m/yr gross @ 90% margin.
|
| I saw a similar dynamic play out in the UK with Pub (bar)
| companies. By mid-2000s, the major players were failing. Margins
| were nearly zero, thanks to rising costs, and securlar decline in
| demand, plus they had too much expensive term debt.
|
| But they represented profitable sources of distribution for the
| beer makers. So Heineken went on a buying spree. They didn't care
| about making money from the pubs themselves and were happy to run
| them break-even. This is because they then had a controlled
| channel of distribution for their beer (and they made a profit on
| every pint they shipped).
|
| The switching costs are very different here, and the market is
| still so nascent. It is a thin product and vscode-copilot can
| catchup. But 1% of enterprise value ($3bn of $300bn) is not a lot
| to gamble on owning the #2 horse in the most promising AI end
| market today.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| What's the net margin? Is anyone making money on inference yet?
| theahura wrote:
| I mention distribution in the post, and reasons to be skeptical
| of that as the primary driver (though I agree that may be the
| case)
|
| Re talent, I'm not sure how big windsurf is, but aren't these
| teams generally quite small? $3b for a small team still seems
| quite high, especially since (afaik) their core area of
| expertise is more in UX and product than in ml research. That's
| not to say that UX and product aren't worth acquiring, just
| that the price tag is surprising if that's the primary
| justification.
| OxfordOutlander wrote:
| Given Sam recently said he thinks consumer is going to be the
| valuable path _, perhaps it is not too much to pay for a
| great ux /product team
|
| _"Ben Thompson: What's going to be more valuable in five
| years? A 1-billion daily active user destination site that
| doesn't have to do customer acquisition, or the state-of-the-
| art model?
|
| Sam Altman: The 1-billion user site I think."
| goopthink wrote:
| Why couldn't OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor
| competitor? (Serious question).
|
| OpenAI is a technology company constantly in search of
| productization (ChatGPT, Sora, Dall-e), and they've been really
| good at creating product interest that converts to acquisition.
| An IDE is much more complex than a chat app, but given their
| literal billions of dollars and familiarity with developer
| tooling, this is a down-stack build that they could dogfood off
| their own tech. And especially given that some of these tools
| were built by tiny teams (Cursor is what, 10 people?), is this
| like Google and Facebook's implicit admission that they can't
| "build and grow" anymore, and need to turn to acquisitions to
| fuel growth?
| 1zael wrote:
| They are just too focused on more important problems to solve,
| primarily around model improvement and getting to AGI.
| echan00 wrote:
| They could. They prob need talent though, considering how much
| fish they're frying
| ivanbalepin wrote:
| it still takes time to spec out, build and sell to a comparable
| size user base, even with 10 people. And you're not guaranteed
| the same results if you just try to clone all of that. If the
| price is right, why not take the shortcut.
| goopthink wrote:
| Is $3 billion the right price? That might be what Windsurf is
| being valued at (cue the "selling to willing buyers at
| currently fair market prices" meme), but that's like saying
| "it would cost OpenAI more than $3b to staff from zero, build
| a competitor, and acquire a comparable volume of paying
| users" ... and that feels like an insane statement given the
| implications therein?
|
| Especially given that Windsurf (and I think Cursor too) is a
| VSCode fork and OpenAI is cozy enough with Microsoft? It's
| not even a zero to one build.
| ivanbalepin wrote:
| if they are optimizing for cost, which they are obviously
| not, then of course it would take them less to build. If
| they are optimizing for time, and the actual aforementioned
| "vibe code" step may not even be the most time-consuming
| part, then yes, it may be the right price.
| fullstackwife wrote:
| Anyone can vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor alternative, and
| adjust it accordingly to their needs. You don't need majority
| of the features, most of them are developed because of the
| usual "large enterprise customer wants a feature" mantra. The
| real value comes from the underlying model anyway.
|
| This looks more like a short term tactical move, and the goal
| is to improve their "API usage" KPIs, because compared to
| Gemini/Claude it looks not good. (majority of traffic are
| chatgpt.com free users)
| LZ_Khan wrote:
| Well I assume that's what Anthropic and Google are doing with
| Claude Code and Firebase Studio.
|
| The main thing is marketing and userbase, which shouldn't be
| underestimated.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| They couldn't care less about the tech. This was entirely about
| corporate accounts and user data. Windsurf caught the first
| wave of enterprise adoption to agentic coding IDEs, and they
| have tons of big customers now.
| goopthink wrote:
| No disagreement, I think developer augmentation is an amazing
| productization of LLMs, and will likely be better at
| converting enterprises so paying customers.
|
| But OpenAI has the best brand recognition and the largest
| user base, and they have the core tech powering all of this.
| Whats the number on "tons" of customers, given that these
| VSCode-spinoff/plugin GPT wrappers are sprouting around like
| mushrooms after a rain?
|
| If this is a build-vs-buy decision, $3 billion? Is that worth
| 1/3rd of the money in the bank when they're burning cash at
| insane rates just running servers, and the rest of the $30b
| fundraise is tenuous and there may not be a followup? I'm
| skeptical of the financial decision here.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| OpenAI has massive B2C brand value, but their enterprise
| offerings are scant. The era of consumer chatbot AI is
| coming to a close, and the winner will be the one who
| captures the B2B mindshare for real applications.
|
| It's about buying time as well. Could they put out a
| competitive product in less than six months? Maybe, but
| even that would leave them light years behind the market by
| the time it was ready.
| Terretta wrote:
| Interesting since OpenAI and Anthropic both still mostly
| refuse to talk to anyone with "corporate" (information
| security, AAA, audit log) needs for under 150 seats even if
| they're willing to pay.
| conartist6 wrote:
| I don't think there's anyone better positioned to answer your
| question than I am, given that I've spent the last 3 years
| building the IDE tech that OpenAI really wants and needs right
| now (though they don't yet know it).
|
| The problem is that what you're discussing is a political
| undertaking. I don't mean that it's "left versus right"
| political, I mean that the primary task that makes it hard is
| getting a lot of human beings to agree on some low-level
| details about how the gory internals of an IDE work. LLMs can
| produce text, but they have no will to political organization.
| They aren't going to accomplish a task by going out and trying
| align the needs of many individuals in a compromise that
| requires determined work to find out what those people really
| want and need, which is the only way to get this particular
| task done. Somehow the natural-language-as-API idea has made
| many people think that in the future APIs and formal technical
| standards will be unnecessary, something for which I do not see
| evidence.
|
| There's a second problem too, one of alignment: LLMs encourage
| you to give away the work of coding. I would not for anything
| give away the pain of using mediocre tools like VSCode to write
| a lot of code myself, because what I learn as the intelligence
| doing the work is what I need to know to be able to make tools
| for doing that work more efficiently. I use my learnings to
| design protocols, data structures, libraries, frameworks, and
| programming languages which don't just *mask* the underlying
| pain of software development but which can reduce it greatly.
| conartist6 wrote:
| And the next link I click captures it perfectly:
| https://blog.ollien.com/posts/llm-friction/
|
| To quote Ollien:
|
| > Even as an "LLM-skeptic", it would be silly for me to say
| that the tools are useless for software development. There
| are clearly times where they can be useful, whether that's to
| perform a refactoring too complicated for IDE tooling, or to
| get a proof-of-concept put together. With that said, in my
| time both using and watching others use LLMs, I have noticed
| a troubling trend: they help reduce friction when developing
| software - friction that can help us to better understand and
| improve the systems we work on.
|
| It's quite funny to me that in the case I'm talking about, "a
| refactor that's too complicated for IDE tooling" is exactly
| the kind of friction that needs to be felt
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > Why couldn't OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor
| competitor?
|
| The obvious answer is that vibecoding does not work.
|
| If it did, OpenAI wouldn't need to buy Windsurf
| conartist6 wrote:
| I'm as much of a skeptic about vibe coding as you are. I
| consider engineering a bit of an art, so it's not for me.
|
| That said, the kinds of things I've been hearing as going
| wrong with vibe coding are all or mostly fixable. I would
| even go as far as to say they're manifestations of the same
| problems that make IDEs such clumsy tools for humans to use
| at the moment, which is why we're trying to foist all this
| annoyance of using them off onto AIs.
|
| The biggest problem, THE problem in this space is that
| tools we use don't have the language to describe the logic
| -- the intent -- behind refactorings. If you've never
| captured the user's intent, you can't learn from it. The
| ability to capture that intent is absent all the way from
| the highest level UX right down the lowest level of
| serialization: the patch format
|
| That's why I believe it's my tech they really need and not
| Windsurf's -- I'm working on capturing the intent top to
| bottom.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| Iunno, Cline is vibe coding some stuff for me right now
| while I'm surfing through hacker News.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Yeah that's weird to me but I've made my peace with it. I
| do this to make the software I want to use, and I think
| that's a chance everyone should have.
| skydhash wrote:
| Isn't the intent described in the commit message, which
| is one of many ways the developer can use to share
| intent? Code is only the what and the how. The why should
| be in Wiki, Readmes, Commit, Issue tracker...
| runfaster2000 wrote:
| This excellent presentation (Veritasium) is making much the
| same point (learning comes from "reps").
|
| https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=rXg5_wjg4bEdMalw
| jv22222 wrote:
| I've been building text editor as notion from the ground up.
| Recently i've been uploading the full codebase to Gemini to
| discuss different tasks. I can fully agree that the LLM can
| simply not decide on how to do things! If you slightly tweak
| your prompt it will suggest an entirely different
| architecture. You have to be very careful about pulling out
| the right stuff from the cargo cult best practice stuff baked
| in to the model. Another thing, a really obvious optimization
| might be just staring it in the face and it won't suggest it
| unless you say "have you considered XYZ?" and then all of a
| sudden it won't stop talking about XYZ! But most of all you
| just have to be strong in your will power to guide it in the
| direction you want.
| siva7 wrote:
| Vibe coding with what? o4-mini? 4.1? Their coding models are a
| joke and their agent coder product as well. They would have to
| use claude
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I find 4.1 superior to Claude in my few adventures into vibe
| coding.
| siva7 wrote:
| Which tool do you use?
| rvz wrote:
| > Why couldn't OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor
| competitor? (Serious question).
|
| Because an IDE has to be tested to work and function correctly.
| Not "Vibe coded".
|
| Vibe-coding is not software engineering.
|
| It is better to build than to buy.
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| Cash is cheap. $3B isn't that much in the grand scheme of
| things for OpenAI and, allegedly, 1M users.
| yumraj wrote:
| Prediction:
|
| OpenAI will buy Windsurf and then make it free with one of the
| cheaper OpenAI plans, effectively trying to kill the other IDEs
| and getting access to data which helps it compete/better against
| Claude and Gemini.
|
| Google needs to launch its equivalent, and Anthropic needs to
| figure out their plan.
| gman83 wrote:
| Google already did: https://firebase.studio/
| memset wrote:
| Not stated in the article - and doesn't necessarily e explain the
| price tag - but windsurf if simply better than cursor or Claude
| code. Otherwise people wouldn't be switching to it.
| cheriot wrote:
| Coding assistants are likely to be a major profit source in the
| near term. It's useful today and the customers (ie employers) are
| willing to pay for productivity.
|
| Only the beginning of the enterprise spending more on AI than
| consumers. When it's time to stop giving away dollars for
| pennies, everyone will want to be in the enterprise.
|
| The article rightly points out that OAI is not cost effective for
| code right now. I imagine they will optimize for the use case
| now.
| intalentive wrote:
| Has anyone solved the problem of the IDE/LSP complaining about
| LLM generated code? I ran into this with Copilot and VS Code. An
| IDE with proper AI integration should always spit out valid code.
| Either constrain the generation of concrete syntax, or else train
| an LLM to generate ASTs.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "it's not yet clear OpenAI actually has $40bn to spend"
|
| Do we have confirmation it was a cash transaction?
| tagalog wrote:
| OpenAI probably has 3 main reasons
|
| 1. Opportunity cost of shifting their team to work on a cursor/
| firebase studio/ windsurf clone while they are locked into a
| model arms race might be worth much more than $3 billion if risk
| losing supremacy
|
| 2. They get a million users day one of the deal getting done and
| instantly own the team + the number 2 best IDE which gives them a
| massive boost over all their other model competitors like Google
| and Anthropic. Personally, I still think we are early enough that
| building makes more sense, so reason 1 still feels the strongest.
|
| 3. You get the dedicated windsurf team that can focus 100% on
| this product while your main model teams can keep cranking
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