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.
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...
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.
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]
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
> 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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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. 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.
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 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'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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
I don't get why people want the AI right in their editor. In another windows inside the editor, fine, but not inline with code I'm writing. It's super distracting to have AI auto complete pop up at random all the time. As always, typing speed, or speed at generating raw code, is not the bottleneck in programming. The crux remains design, in which case having the LLM on the side is just fine (if you use it for that).
There are some niceties about inline completion (like spelling out a log message that's obvious from the surrounding code) but I don't get the hype much beyond that.
You'd think with all these super hyper advanced AI tools they're shitting out they would be able to make a mediocre VSCode extension of their own instead of flushing 3B down the drain. Guess that's slightly out of reach of their "AGI"s though.
OpenAI knows that everyday someone uses Gemini their ChatGPT brand dies a bit faster. Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May, would be a death sentence to just steamroll with Gemini-3.
- A $3B signal that OpenAI is unable to do product
- AI assisted coding is mostly about managing the context and knowing what to put in the context to avoid confusion and dumb mistakes, it's not about the UI.
- This signals that OpenAI believes that highly effective coding assistant LLMs will become a commodity / open source and so UI / tooling lock-in is a good investment.
chatgpt is massively popular, I'm not sure that's the signal I'd get
they're acquiring one of the biggest the front doors to developers, with Windsurf - whether it'll _remain_ in fashion or not, that's a different debate. This can be like facebook acquiring instagram (if developers turn out to be the actual profit-driver niche for LLMs, which currently seems to be the case)
> developers turn out to be the actual profit-driver niche for LLMs
AI is definitely huge for anyone writing code, though one can imagine a model like o3 completely replacing 90% of white collar jobs that involve reading, writing and analysis.
Interestingly, o3 is particularly bad at legalese, likely not fully by accident. Of all professions whose professional organizations and regulatory capture create huge rents, the legal profession is the most ripe for disruption.
It's not uncommon for lawyers to bill $250 to $500 per hour for producing boilerplate language. Contracts reviewed or drawn up by lawyers never come with any guarantees either, so one does not learn until too late that the lawyer overlooked something important. Most lawyers have above average IQs and understand arcane things, but most of it is pretty basic at its core.
Lawyers, Pharmacists, many doctors, nearly all accountants, and most middle managers will be replaceable by AI agents.
Software engineers are still expected to produce novel outputs unlike those other fields, so there is still room for humans to pilot the machine for a while. And since most software is meant to be used by humans, soon software will need to be usable by AI agents, which will reduce a lot of UI to an MCP.
Your take on lawyers is absolutely insane. If you don't think the extremely specialized and well trained professionals can successfully navigate contracts then I can't wait for the absolute garbage the LLMs spit out when faced with similar challenges.
Honestly, same for doctors and accountants. Unless these model providers are willing to provide "guarantees" that they will compensate for damages faced as a result of their output.
Doctors and Lawyers are required in many areas to carry malpractice insurance. Good luck getting "hot new AI legal startup" to sign off on that.
While malpractice insurance exists for human docs and lawyers, there is not really any difference between an ai-powered lawyer drawing up a contract, an ai-powered doc reviewing a chart and recommending next steps, and a self-driving car making a turn.
The most obviously "lethal" case (cars) is already in large scale rollout worldwide.
At scale, self-driving car "errors" will fall under general liability insurance coverage, most likely. Firms will probably carry some insurance as well just in case.
LLMs already write better prose than 95% of humans and models like o3 reason better than 90% of humans on many tasks.
In both law and medicine there are many pre-existing safeguards that have been created to reduce error rates for human practitioners (checklists, text search tools (lexis nexis, uptodate, etc.), continuing education, etc.) which can be applied to AI professionals too.
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.
If I recall correctly from the recent YC interview, the Windsurf founder noted their team leans more toward GTM than engineering. That makes this less likely to be a classic acquihire (as with Rockset) and more plausibly a data play rather than a product integration.
My current read is that this is a frontier lab acquiring large-scale training data—cheaply—from a community of “vibe coders”, instead of paying professional annotators. In that light, it feels more like a “you are the product” scenario, which likely won’t sit well with Windsurf’s paying customers.
Agreed. It seems like a data play and a hedge to beef up vibe code competition against upcoming Google and MS models so OpenAI doesn't lose API revenue. I would assume vibe coding consumes more tokens than most other text based API usage.
Sometimes it almost seems like the idea that LLMs are capable of instantly creating real, maintainable software is vastly overblown to inflate valuations...
Windsurf is terrible, I always use AI just in a normal website and I tried this product a few days ago and it asks me if it can run a command to make a file, which I find extremely strange, then it fails to write valid commands even to do mkdir.
It worked allright for me when I was using it, a month ago. I cancelled because they somhow lost my paid credits and refused to refund me. No matter how great an AI tool, if the company is mismanaging user payments or usage tracking, it is useless.
probably a rare area I fully agree with HN on– the IP here seems weak and it's not hard to swap out code editors, nothing like tearing out Salesforce or other sales-driven tooling. and idk if first mover advantage actually means much in the next 10 years given how dynamic the underlying models are.
but undeniably these cos are all a great lesson in just how much cash lies in executing first/near first
does that mean that Windsurf will only support OpenAI models going forward? I doubt OpenAI will pay to have users use Gemini/Claude? Especially as all of these Ai coding tools (Windsurf, Augment, Cursor) are heavily subsidizing the users.
I wonder what Anthropic makes of this. Windsurf was like a top 3 customers of them, might be a big revenue blow too?
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
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I cannot pretend that I know what is going on - I don't.
I think the long-term play here is something to do with Agents and they are simply cornering the market because coding tools are part to it.
That being said, quick search around what people are building with these VIDEs reveals mostly landing pages that are actually not even that good. For the amount of money spent one could have easily bought a good template or pay someone to customise an existing one.
I need someone to convince me this isn't one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition. If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion then what are they even doing? Windsurf can't have that high of a userbase that you feel the need to pay for it.
These deals are mostly in stock, not cash. $3b cash is not something most companies can afford to part with, and additionally, making deals that are stock-heavy creates an incentive for the leadership of the acquired company to keep working towards the general interest of OAI, and not instantly retire.
instinctively I agree but it's all about timing: if they try to build their own IDE and hired people it would probably still take a couple of years to get a decent product. I don't know about patents.
> if they try to build their own IDE and hired people
Oh, haven't you heard? Hiring people to write software is so last decade. Maybe they just didn't want to vibe code a Windsurf implementation and decided to buy a press cycle for $3B
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).
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.
https://archive.md/l6n9H
Windsurf and Cursor feel like temporary stopgaps, products of a narrow window in time before the landscape shifts again.
Microsoft has clearly taken notice. They're already starting to lock down the upstream VSCode codebase, as seen with recent changes to the C/C++ extension [0]. It's not hard to imagine that future features like TypeScript 7.0 might be limited or even withheld from forks entirely. At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.
Both Windsurf and Cursor are riddled with bugs that don't exist upstream, _especially_ in their AI assistant features beyond the VSCode core. Context management which is supposed to be the core featured added is itself incredibly poorly implemented [1].
Ultimately, the future isn't about a smarter editor, it's about a smarter teammate. Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets: generating PRs with tests, taking feedback, and iterating like a real collaborator.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/microsoft_vs_code_sub...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1kbt790/rules_in_49...
The thing is: we should not need standalone editors just to use AI coding agents. They could be just plugins, but Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that. Windsurf has a "plugin edition" for JetBrains IDEs that works really, really well[0] (they also have a VSCode plugin[1] but it's lacking in comparison).
However, given that JetBrains also have their own AI offering[2], I'm not sure how long that will last too...
[0] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-windsurf-plugin-f...
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Codeium....
[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/
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.
There are already a bunch of open source, free, and popular "AI coding agent" extensions for VS Code:
1) Cline (1.4mil downloads)
2) Roo Code (a fork of Cline, 450k downloads)
Still a drop in the bucket compared to Cursor in terms of # of users, but they're growing pretty fast.
Disclaimer: I maintain Kilo Code, which competes with 1) and 2) so I'm pretty familiar with this space/the growth patterns.
Continue.dev as well
How are you differentiating from the cline/roo's of the world?
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]
[0]: https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/roo-or-cline-were-building-a-supe... [1]: https://kilocode.ai
I can't find any reference to Cline/Roo charging anything on top of API pricing.
Not sure how they'd do it considering you bring your own API keys. Can you link me to a resource?
> Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that.
What doesn't the current API allow plugins to do? I'm guessing custom UI stuff that lives outside a panel?
> They could be just plugins
No, they should be LSPs so that they can be integrated into any editor, not just VSCode.
They should do this, but this is not the entirety of what they do.
I haven't found any of the jetbrains options (including Windsurf) nearly as satisfying to use as Cursor. But YMMV I guess!
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.
> 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.
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...
That seems pretty bold. I still find myself switching to basically anything but the VS code copilot agent any chance I get.
Can you expand on that? What's so bad about VSC's copilot agent? What do you switch to?
If the VS Code team are delivering the product, I have some amount of trust. If it’s the VS team, good luck to everyone involved
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.
VS developers are okay, it is the VS product managers that are The problem
Indeed, Copilot within Visual Studio is nowhere close as good as Copilot within VSCode, and even that is still worse than Cursor in my experience.
VSCode is still miles behind for .NET and C++ tooling, have a bit of fate on VS team.
What’s the use of being miles ahead if you’re traveling in the wrong direction?
Doesn't look like, given Windows market share.
Wow, folks almost had me convinced MS turned a new leaf 5 years ago.
Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Nah, folks keep giving human behaviours to big corporations instead of understanding everyone is in the game for the shareholders.
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.
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.
Windsurf works well with Claude and Gemini models, so if OpenAI forces Windsurf users to only use OpenAI models, then it wouldn't be as useful.
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.
> They offer some groundbreaking solutions
What groundbreaking solutions does Windsurf offer?
What groundbreaking solutions specifically?
AFAIK their Cascade coding flow implementation was the first done well and then copied than most.
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.)
My experience is the same. And the agent mode in copilot is terrible, it simply will stop halfway through files.
Or you chat and suddenly it wants to use the azure copilot instead because reasons.
Horrible experience.
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.
They're not the champion of code hosting?
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.
They were before they got acquired by Microsoft.
The fact that they are is not the results of the Microsoft takeover.
Then I don't understand the inclusion in the list above.
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).
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.
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.
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
Why gitlab hasn't been able to capitalize on GitHub's many failures is almost as interesting as GitHub's fall.
I think the GitHub brand is still stronger and people just don't "care" about gitlab.
I still can't believe how they let Cursor (which is amazing until somepoint) take away all the shine.
This reminds me of "big companies moves slow.." line.
> Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year.
Probably.
> And deliver them with far greater stability and polish
That seems ... overly optimistic given MS's history.
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).
Their tooling have never been flawless, and it still isn't.
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...
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.
These are investment plays a company makes when holding too much money, and not a smart move this early in the technology imo
Buying competition while everyone’s still fighting might straddle you with a lame horse
Agreed. Especially with tools like Claude Code, which can get better over time and remove the need to use Windsurf and Cursor.
> 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.
30% of their code is now written with AI.
Their “programmers” are more busy with making blogs and videos than functioning tests or technical documentation, and they start using JavaScript and Python for everything.
I’m not surprised their quality went to shit. There are some pearls left, C# in general is pretty good, and Aspire is becoming quite neat.
The latter I think mainly because David Fowler is just a great developer
/s?
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
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?
why OpenAI purchased windsurf instead of prompting openai to create something like windsurf?
this is the question i am still asking...
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.
[1]: https://github.com/arshad-yaseen/monacopilot
Controlling demand (developer workflow and mindshare) is a good position if you're trying to build scale on supply.
Maybe to avoid the Second System Effect.
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.
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.
so much for ai turning everyone at openai into 1000x coders
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.
> At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.
We've seen this before with Office.
We'll see it again.
They don't even need to be good - just in the bundle you (your company) are already paying for and the competition can't compete.
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.
...as done with Teams.
Microsoft Build is this month [0] and it will tell where they are going next (other than price cuts).
I'm expecting disappointment for now, but also expecting GitHub Copilot to be upgraded. Then we'll see if they are ahead or so far behind.
[0] https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/home
Cursor ($9 bil) has a higher valuation than JetBrains ($7 bil). Think about that.
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.
Tells me that the markets ability to sensibly valuate companies is pretty messed up.
These aren't public companies, so the values are mostly made up.
or intellij is beyond its peak while cursor is just on the rise
this. valuation is the discounted cash flow of expected future cash flows, not the past successes
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
Github Copilot is pretty much the same UI as cursor on vscode already
"riddled with bugs". "incredibly poorly implemented". Man, what are you talking about? Your comment seems based on nothing but what you read online.
Have you used Cursor on a daily basis? I have. Every day for six months now. I haven't encountered a single bug that prevent me to work.
Moreover, while Microsoft tries to catch up lately, it's still very far behind, especially on the "tab autocompletion" front.
I use Cursor in anger every day. The core idea behind Cursor is genuinely smart. But the execution is like the classic "unfinished horse" meme [0].
Microsoft provides the editor base, foundation models provide the smarts, and Cursor provides some, in my experience, extremely buggy context management features. There is no moat.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/unfinished-horse-drawing-flam...
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.
Does not look like a bit moat, is that different from the reusable prompt files feature?
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/copilot-customiza...
It’s literally allowing those to be in more than one file. It’s not a moat at all. It’s an oversight in the plugin.
Plus, cursor & windsurf excel in user experience which is an alien concept to Microsoft.
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 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'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.
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 dont care about a vibe coders experience
> Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets
Care to place a bet?
I completely disagree and feel MS would never do it. Not a MS Employee, but they have moved on from such battles.
They should have restricted the Marketplace several years ago, however, they are doing it now.
With C++, they are part of MFC's, they are the legal owners, not like Google vs Oracle in case of Java.
Lastly, with AI Code IDEs I think yes, there is a case, the need for IDE might be very less. Like a steering on a self driving car.
ISO C++ has nothing to do with MFC.
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
Incredible timeline to a $3B exit
> Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf.
> Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation.
> Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a $1.3 billion valuation.
> May 2025: $3 billion acquisition from OpenAI
I wonder how much of the value is really from the model or the tooling around it. They all use the same models (mostly Claude, others have been horrible and buggy in my experience). Even co-pilot agent mode now uses Claude. The editor has their own LLM (?) that does the apply since LLMs often return snippets. They work well enough on Cursor. And then you have the auto-complete, which I think is their own model as well.
But the main value from me is from the agent mode and 95% of the value is the underlying model. The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin. The other benefit is the fixed pricing. I have no idea how much 500 calls cost if I were to use the API, but I expect they're probably losing money.
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.
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.
> I wonder how much of the value is really from the model
> The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin
The other stuff would take a team 6 months to implement. This is where the valuation comes from. Time to market, they are there TODAY.
I don't get why people want the AI right in their editor. In another windows inside the editor, fine, but not inline with code I'm writing. It's super distracting to have AI auto complete pop up at random all the time. As always, typing speed, or speed at generating raw code, is not the bottleneck in programming. The crux remains design, in which case having the LLM on the side is just fine (if you use it for that).
There are some niceties about inline completion (like spelling out a log message that's obvious from the surrounding code) but I don't get the hype much beyond that.
Maybe I'm missing some feature though ...
You'd think with all these super hyper advanced AI tools they're shitting out they would be able to make a mediocre VSCode extension of their own instead of flushing 3B down the drain. Guess that's slightly out of reach of their "AGI"s though.
OpenAI knows that everyday someone uses Gemini their ChatGPT brand dies a bit faster. Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May, would be a death sentence to just steamroll with Gemini-3.
> Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May
"Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906018
Google IO in may? Guess we'll be getting a huge OpenAI release May 19th then.
Edit: Oh of course, it's the open weights model they've been teasing.
So soon after Gemini 2.5?
- A $3B signal that OpenAI is unable to do product
- AI assisted coding is mostly about managing the context and knowing what to put in the context to avoid confusion and dumb mistakes, it's not about the UI.
- This signals that OpenAI believes that highly effective coding assistant LLMs will become a commodity / open source and so UI / tooling lock-in is a good investment.
chatgpt is massively popular, I'm not sure that's the signal I'd get
they're acquiring one of the biggest the front doors to developers, with Windsurf - whether it'll _remain_ in fashion or not, that's a different debate. This can be like facebook acquiring instagram (if developers turn out to be the actual profit-driver niche for LLMs, which currently seems to be the case)
> developers turn out to be the actual profit-driver niche for LLMs
AI is definitely huge for anyone writing code, though one can imagine a model like o3 completely replacing 90% of white collar jobs that involve reading, writing and analysis.
Interestingly, o3 is particularly bad at legalese, likely not fully by accident. Of all professions whose professional organizations and regulatory capture create huge rents, the legal profession is the most ripe for disruption.
It's not uncommon for lawyers to bill $250 to $500 per hour for producing boilerplate language. Contracts reviewed or drawn up by lawyers never come with any guarantees either, so one does not learn until too late that the lawyer overlooked something important. Most lawyers have above average IQs and understand arcane things, but most of it is pretty basic at its core.
Lawyers, Pharmacists, many doctors, nearly all accountants, and most middle managers will be replaceable by AI agents.
Software engineers are still expected to produce novel outputs unlike those other fields, so there is still room for humans to pilot the machine for a while. And since most software is meant to be used by humans, soon software will need to be usable by AI agents, which will reduce a lot of UI to an MCP.
Your take on lawyers is absolutely insane. If you don't think the extremely specialized and well trained professionals can successfully navigate contracts then I can't wait for the absolute garbage the LLMs spit out when faced with similar challenges.
Honestly, same for doctors and accountants. Unless these model providers are willing to provide "guarantees" that they will compensate for damages faced as a result of their output.
Doctors and Lawyers are required in many areas to carry malpractice insurance. Good luck getting "hot new AI legal startup" to sign off on that.
While malpractice insurance exists for human docs and lawyers, there is not really any difference between an ai-powered lawyer drawing up a contract, an ai-powered doc reviewing a chart and recommending next steps, and a self-driving car making a turn.
The most obviously "lethal" case (cars) is already in large scale rollout worldwide.
At scale, self-driving car "errors" will fall under general liability insurance coverage, most likely. Firms will probably carry some insurance as well just in case.
LLMs already write better prose than 95% of humans and models like o3 reason better than 90% of humans on many tasks.
In both law and medicine there are many pre-existing safeguards that have been created to reduce error rates for human practitioners (checklists, text search tools (lexis nexis, uptodate, etc.), continuing education, etc.) which can be applied to AI professionals too.
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.
If I recall correctly from the recent YC interview, the Windsurf founder noted their team leans more toward GTM than engineering. That makes this less likely to be a classic acquihire (as with Rockset) and more plausibly a data play rather than a product integration.
My current read is that this is a frontier lab acquiring large-scale training data—cheaply—from a community of “vibe coders”, instead of paying professional annotators. In that light, it feels more like a “you are the product” scenario, which likely won’t sit well with Windsurf’s paying customers.
Interesting times.
Agreed. It seems like a data play and a hedge to beef up vibe code competition against upcoming Google and MS models so OpenAI doesn't lose API revenue. I would assume vibe coding consumes more tokens than most other text based API usage.
~$40M ARR makes this a 75x
Cursor yesterday was a 45X for comparison (9B, 200M)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/openai-is-reportedly-in-ta...
keep in mind a lot of $3B is ClosedAI paper money, so 75x ain't that ridiculous.
Do you know the cash / equity split?
I do know that OpenAI doesn't have 3B in cash to just throw around.
So, I'd be inclined to believe the vast majority of the deal is stock (or whatever that is called pre-IPO).
Growth rate matters a lot though. If they are growing quickly that multiple reduces quickly
Easy to grow when you're selling one dollar bills for 75 cents
You think they can double every year for the next 5 years?
We're reaching a point where we don't need to switch to another IDE (from VS Code/IntelliJ/insert-your-IDE-here) for "AI/vibe coding"
IDEs can support "AI coding agents" on their own.
The entire workflow for "AI coding agents" boils down to:
1. You write a prompt
2. The "agent" wraps it in a system prompt and sends it to the LLM
3. The LLM sends back a response
4. The agent performs specific actions based on that response (editing files, creating new ones, etc.)
Microsoft already started doing that with Copilot. And they have a vibrant ecosystem of VS Code extensions (I maintain one of them [1])
"AI agents" should be a feature, not a separate piece of software (IDE) that's integral to software devs.
[1] https://github.com/Kilo-Org/kilocode
It blows my mind OpenAI wouldn't be able to build a Windsurf alternative for orders of magnitude less than $3B.
They can, of course, but why would they waste time on it? They are buying a tool, talent, and a heap of paying enterprise customers. This is a steal.
And they're probably buying it with equity, not cash.
Why didn't they just use ChatGPT to build it? Weird.
Sometimes it almost seems like the idea that LLMs are capable of instantly creating real, maintainable software is vastly overblown to inflate valuations...
it would be only a few millions if they used cursor and Claude but their ego prevented it
Windsurf is terrible, I always use AI just in a normal website and I tried this product a few days ago and it asks me if it can run a command to make a file, which I find extremely strange, then it fails to write valid commands even to do mkdir.
It worked allright for me when I was using it, a month ago. I cancelled because they somhow lost my paid credits and refused to refund me. No matter how great an AI tool, if the company is mismanaging user payments or usage tracking, it is useless.
What is Windsurf's (or for that matter: Cursor, Cline, or CoPilot) moat? This seems like a great deal and timing for them.
probably a rare area I fully agree with HN on– the IP here seems weak and it's not hard to swap out code editors, nothing like tearing out Salesforce or other sales-driven tooling. and idk if first mover advantage actually means much in the next 10 years given how dynamic the underlying models are.
but undeniably these cos are all a great lesson in just how much cash lies in executing first/near first
does that mean that Windsurf will only support OpenAI models going forward? I doubt OpenAI will pay to have users use Gemini/Claude? Especially as all of these Ai coding tools (Windsurf, Augment, Cursor) are heavily subsidizing the users.
I wonder what Anthropic makes of this. Windsurf was like a top 3 customers of them, might be a big revenue blow too?
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
Where's this non-compete clause? In ChatGPT T&Cs?
$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.
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.
> And it has a brand
Didn't they change names months ago? I know them as Codeium.
given that they lose >$4B/year I guess everything is peanuts
OpenAI have $40 billion in funding from SoftBank for the next two years, so they can afford to buy Windsurf.
Is OpenAI worth the $260 billion valuation... No, of course not, they're losing >$4 billion a year.
That $40 billion is actively being spent being lit on fire to serve all the ChatGPT requests though. It's not just sat in the bank doing nothing.
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.
Microsoft "owns" OpenAI, which now owns Windsurf, which cloned VSCode.
I think it's going to be fine.
This is xAI buying Twitter, with extra steps.
This is probably a response to Claude Code, which is still experimental and terminal-only.
In my experience Claude Code is fantastic, both for answering questions about the codebase and coding.
OpenAI has Codex CLI https://github.com/openai/codex
Recent announcements from OpenAI seem to indicate they know they're losing the race
You are referring to the nonprofit continuation?
They have certainly lost the monopoly.
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.
In my experience, Windsurf was significantly more effective when working with a big codebase.
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.
Have you checked Augmentcode.com? On reddit/youtube people are praising it for how well it handle large codebase compared to Cursor and Windsurf
Your other comments indicate you work there, you might consider mentioning that.
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).
> 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.
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.
There's a difference between understanding the community and prioritizing investments.
I'm sure Cursor has more than few devs that primarily use Linux...
> https://www.cursor.com/downloads
Linux builds are in the AppImage format.
Which makes a lot more sense to me than deb/rpm when it's just a single executable.
>just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.
This what all developers want for a platform. They can release their software and not have to worry about some "maintainer" switching out dependencies out from under them introducing bugs and crashes in what they shipped.
Cursor ships as an AppImage.
appimage is more Linux than .deb/.rpm.
Of course it's a win, dude that cloned a GitHub repo is now personally a billionaire
From a customer point of view it makes sense to pay a fixed monthly price for both chat and coding, instead of having two separate subscriptions.
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.
Question: has there been any announcements of bundling Windsurf with the ChatGPT $20/month package? (I could not access the linked article)
M&A activity needs much more strongly regulated. Buying up potential competitors is how we get monstrosities like Microsoft and Alphabet.
In what world is Windsurf an OpenAI competitor?
https://archive.ph/ocXFo
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.
A lot of this valuation must be aqui-hire and existing users, right? 6 months of development lead time can't be worth this much... can it?
I wonder how much of this is a data play for OpenAI as they work to improve language model performance on longer time horizons.
They didn't even buy an IDE since windsurf is more like a VS code plugin.
So what was it exactly that was worth the 3B that they couldn't replicate themselves? Their prompts? Their training sets? Their users or user data?
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.
I'd guess the prompts and employees.
I've found Windsurf more reliable/efficient than any other editors by leagues. How ever they have named the tools, crafted their prompts and generally how their internals reason is just on the money. I don't think that is easy to replicate, iterating on prompts over product releases whilst not pissing off your user base constantly is a feat in of itself.
Then perhaps it's about bringing in the human talent that wrote those prompts.
To be honest, Windsurf doesn't work like half of the time, so it's more likely their users, the data, and their branding/marketing potential.
Windsurf/Codeium plugin is at least 3 years old.
I cannot pretend that I know what is going on - I don't.
I think the long-term play here is something to do with Agents and they are simply cornering the market because coding tools are part to it.
That being said, quick search around what people are building with these VIDEs reveals mostly landing pages that are actually not even that good. For the amount of money spent one could have easily bought a good template or pay someone to customise an existing one.
I don't know. Maybe I am dumb.
Fortunately it is not the cursor. I am using the cursor and I don't want it to be sold.
This may end up saving openAI. their models have no moat
The companies they are buying have even less moat than openAi
Ok, now I have a question: Will OpenAI keep Windsurf open to third-party models, or will they limit it to their own models only?
What’s the equivalent in the Vim world?
I need someone to convince me this isn't one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition. If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion then what are they even doing? Windsurf can't have that high of a userbase that you feel the need to pay for it.
> one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition.
I think that was when intel acquired McAfee for 8B in 2010.
We don’t know how OpenAI is paying. A lot of comments seem to be assuming this is an all-cash deal. We have no evidence for that.
These deals are mostly in stock, not cash. $3b cash is not something most companies can afford to part with, and additionally, making deals that are stock-heavy creates an incentive for the leadership of the acquired company to keep working towards the general interest of OAI, and not instantly retire.
instinctively I agree but it's all about timing: if they try to build their own IDE and hired people it would probably still take a couple of years to get a decent product. I don't know about patents.
> if they try to build their own IDE and hired people
Oh, haven't you heard? Hiring people to write software is so last decade. Maybe they just didn't want to vibe code a Windsurf implementation and decided to buy a press cycle for $3B
> If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion
It's funny money / made-up value. This is not $3B cash.
you mean the company that spent $9B to make $4B in 2024? that openai?
i agree with you on this - it seems that openai hallucinates reality as much as their products do :-/
Very surprising outcome, since OpenAI went after Cursor (twice) [0] And I originally thought that Cursor would be bought instead a day before the rumour [1].
It was smart for Windsurf to take the offer and to get greedy in this hype cycle. Unless Cursor is thinking that Anthropic or someone else will buy them for a lot more, its going to get extremely competitive as the switching cost for Cursor is zero and that ARR can disappear very quickly.
Copilot will attempt to destroy Cursor on price and functionality for however long they want to.
Very risky for Cursor at $9B valuation (which I think is overvalued and based on VC FOMO).
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/17/openai-pursued-cursor-make...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698819
sometimes products stick, like slack, dropbox, box cursor may survive
"$3B" should be in heavy quotes if this is paid in OpenAI shares.
probably paid in pro accounts
Pure speculation without official voice.
oh wow, meaning I won't need to pay for Windsurf? What do you think will be the monetization path for this?
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.
Now their models may have limits on how VS code and Cursor use it. Competition heating up!
An _ide_ sold for $3B? VCs and other early investors got their 1000% ROI on this one.