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...
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.
marricks · 1h ago
Wow, folks almost had me convinced MS turned a new leaf 5 years ago.
Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: embrace, extend, extinguish.
pjmlp · 54m ago
Nah, folks keep giving human behaviours to big corporations instead of understanding everyone is in the game for the shareholders.
doix · 1h ago
> At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.
I agree with the first part, I'm much less optimistic about the second part. I suspect they will create something that is worse, but cheaper if you already pay for Github/Office 365/whatever. Then many large enterprises will switch to save money whilst the engineers complain, just like with Teams.
Aeolun · 38m ago
That seems pretty bold. I still find myself switching to basically anything but the VS code copilot agent any chance I get.
pjmlp · 53m ago
They already succeedd well enough that VSCode is the only Electron app I tolerate on my private systems, naturally on device assigned ones I have less control.
preciousoo · 1h ago
If the VS Code team are delivering the product, I have some amount of trust. If it’s the VS team, good luck to everyone involved
deburo · 1h ago
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.
pjmlp · 52m ago
VSCode is still miles behind for .NET and C++ tooling, have a bit of fate on VS team.
bn-l · 1h ago
Copilot owns the platform, had an amazing head start and yet still is the worst option available. I don’t mean to be harsh but this was a titanic fumble.
beardedwizard · 1h ago
GitHub has been failing upward for more than 5 years. They could have totally dominated software development and security - failed. Could have been the undisputed champion of code hosting - failed. Should have dominated development co-pilots - failed.
I actually find it a little reassuring that they can't seem to get out of their own way.
stevage · 1h ago
They're not the champion of code hosting?
MassiveQuasar · 1h ago
They were before they got acquired by Microsoft.
The fact that they are is not the results of the Microsoft takeover.
stevage · 51m ago
Then I don't understand the inclusion in the list above.
sofixa · 56m ago
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).
mdaniel · 7m ago
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
aravindputrevu · 1h ago
I still can't believe how they let Cursor (which is amazing until somepoint) take away all the shine.
This reminds me of "big companies moves slow.." line.
Szpadel · 1h ago
For someone that never used windsurf, what features does it have that GitHub copilot does not? Reading their webpages I didn't spot any "killer feature" that would convince me to switch.
I always felt that cursor and windsurf should be just extension to vscode instead of a fork. Was there some missing functionality is vscode that was missing? Is it still missing?
There are some extensions that work in this way and allow to use multiple implementations depending on task at hand without any long term commitment.
I feel like such fragmentation is by artificial just to lock users in single ecosystem.
jstummbillig · 1h ago
It can write a lot of code, that works, better than vscode can (right now).
It's in a lot of ways the OpenAI story itself: Can they keep an edge? Or is there at least something that will keep people from just switching product?
Who knows. People have opinions, of course. OpenAIs opinion (which should reasonably count for something, them being the current AI-as-a-product leader) is worth $3B as of today.
ZeroTalent · 1h ago
It's better at coding, but they are essentially paying for users.
I would also argue that the product could be built over two weekends with a small team. They offer some groundbreaking solutions, but since we know that they work and how, it's easy to replicate them. That also means they have significant talent there.
Hence, they are also buying the employees.
The code base itself is basically worth nothing, in my opinion.
koakuma-chan · 13m ago
> They offer some groundbreaking solutions
What groundbreaking solutions does Windsurf offer?
throwaway7783 · 18m ago
What groundbreaking solutions specifically?
ZeroTalent · 13m ago
AFAIK their Cascade coding flow implementation was the first done well and then copied than most.
oefrha · 1h ago
The differentiator of Cursor is it’s way smarter at basic code completion than GitHub Copilot. I pay for Cursor instead of GitHub Copilot even though I get the latter for free from open source contributions, and I made that decision after five minutes of usage after using Copilot for what, more than a year? I won’t even talk about how Cursor guesses where I’m going to edit next and makes the correct edit most of the time, just the fact that Copliot makes completions that result in unbalanced parentheses/braces all the time and Cursor doesn’t makes the switch a no-brainer; that’s not even a fucking AI problem, you just need to look around and see that function you just completed already has a closing curly brace, all it takes is some traditional AST analysis if your model is dumb. (Copilot made zero progress on that issue during my time using it, but I can’t say if that was fixed after I ditched it.)
bigbinary · 1h ago
These are investment plays a company makes when holding too much money, and not a smart move this early in the technology imo
Buying competition while everyone’s still fighting might straddle you with a lame horse
behnamoh · 49m ago
> At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.
Microsoft software quality has gone downhill recently, and I'm not going to bet on them delivering something more polished than WS and Cursor here.
Side: all images on Microsoft websites are low resolution! it's like they don't even check their own website.
timabdulla · 2h ago
I mean, the fact that OpenAI, at the bleeding edge of it all, has decided to buy an IDE is a rather strong hint that the future of agents handling entire engineering tickets might be further out than many believe.
If autonomous agents were just around the corner, then why wouldn't OpenAI bet on their own Codex product obviating (most) need for an IDE and save themselves the $3 billion?
bix6 · 1h ago
It sounds like the openAI team is overburdened (I guess they aren’t AI super users yet) so this may be their only option. Easy entry into a key segment, at least for now, and locks out competitors.
osigurdson · 1h ago
This is a good point. It is already the case that unless you deeply review every Windsurf change you will have zero understanding of your codebase. If it gets 1000X better in the next 3 years why would anyone look at code at all?
Of course, back to reality. Today, at least in my workflow, I use / like Windsurf but it is a small part of what I am doing. For any code I want to keep I mostly write it by hand (using vim for a very bare-bones / cognitive mode experience). For me, the real flow state occurs in vim while ChatGPT and Windsurf are great for exploration.
onlyrealcuzzo · 2h ago
> At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.
We've seen this before with Office.
We'll see it again.
blitzar · 2h ago
They don't even need to be good - just in the bundle you (your company) are already paying for and the competition can't compete.
CptanPanic · 1h ago
At the speed that AI programming is going, there will be something else that they are falling behind of that will exist in a year. Just like Agents now, they are adding them, but will always be a step behind progress.
rvz · 2h ago
...as done with Teams.
Microsoft Build is this month [0] and it will tell where they are going next (other than price cuts).
I'm expecting disappointment for now, but also expecting GitHub Copilot to be upgraded. Then we'll see if they are ahead or so far behind.
Cursor ($9 bil) has a higher valuation than JetBrains ($7 bil). Think about that.
mrweasel · 1h ago
Tells me that the markets ability to sensibly valuate companies is pretty messed up.
singularity2001 · 28m ago
or intellij is beyond its peak while cursor is just on the rise
cellis · 50m ago
I never did like JetBrains primary product, IntelliJ. It felt clunky even compared to Eclipse for Java, let alone VSCode for … everything. DataGrip is the lone standout imo, but as of the last update I paid for, it didn’t have even basic copilot
robinhood · 2h ago
"riddled with bugs". "incredibly poorly implemented". Man, what are you talking about? Your comment seems based on nothing but what you read online.
Have you used Cursor on a daily basis? I have. Every day for six months now. I haven't encountered a single bug that prevent me to work.
Moreover, while Microsoft tries to catch up lately, it's still very far behind, especially on the "tab autocompletion" front.
Androider · 1h ago
I use Cursor in anger every day. The core idea behind Cursor is genuinely smart. But the execution is like the classic "unfinished horse" meme [0].
Microsoft provides the editor base, foundation models provide the smarts, and Cursor provides some, in my experience, extremely buggy context management features. There is no moat.
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.
hobo_mark · 1h ago
Does not look like a bit moat, is that different from the reusable prompt files feature?
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.
arjunaaqa · 1h ago
Plus, cursor & windsurf excel in user experience which is an alien concept to Microsoft.
codyvoda · 1h ago
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!
hobo_mark · 1h ago
I have tried (stopped a couple months ago). The Python extensions broke all the time while they manually patched around the latest MS release a few days later. Syntax highlighting glitched every other day requiring a full reload. Remote dev via SSH or tunnels also randomly stopped working. Liveshare...
Essentially they do not own the platform their core product is built on.
Maybe it's fine if you only do local development in other languages (Javascript?), but I completely swore it off.
prawn · 1h ago
I've tried both Cursor and VS Code with AI in the agent/edit mode. They both seem similar enough. Is there another mode I haven't found where Cursor has a distinct advantage? If so, I'd like to try it.
I gave up on Cursor because my trial ran out, while VS Code with Copilot doesn't seem to charge me anything.
serjester · 1h ago
As a counterpoint, I also use cursor as my daily driver and I have been tempted to switch many times because of the endless bugs. Just take a look at their forum.
aravindputrevu · 1h ago
I completely disagree and feel MS would never do it. Not a MS Employee, but they have moved on from such battles.
They should have restricted the Marketplace several years ago, however, they are doing it now.
With C++, they are part of MFC's, they are the legal owners, not like Google vs Oracle in case of Java.
Lastly, with AI Code IDEs I think yes, there is a case, the need for IDE might be very less. Like a steering on a self driving car.
pjmlp · 50m ago
ISO C++ has nothing to do with MFC.
m3kw9 · 1h ago
Microsoft is slow af for a company that size. Maybe yeah, they are slow because of that size. Don’t bet on them out accelerating a startup, the evidence so far in the past year is that they will stay a year behind every year
bko · 2h ago
Incredible timeline to a $3B exit
> Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf.
> Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation.
> Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a $1.3 billion valuation.
> May 2025: $3 billion acquisition from OpenAI
I wonder how much of the value is really from the model or the tooling around it. They all use the same models (mostly Claude, others have been horrible and buggy in my experience). Even co-pilot agent mode now uses Claude. The editor has their own LLM (?) that does the apply since LLMs often return snippets. They work well enough on Cursor. And then you have the auto-complete, which I think is their own model as well.
But the main value from me is from the agent mode and 95% of the value is the underlying model. The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin. The other benefit is the fixed pricing. I have no idea how much 500 calls cost if I were to use the API, but I expect they're probably losing money.
bfeynman · 1h ago
talented and smart folks for sure but can't not notice how much luck it is especially because its like 100% just better models. Windsurf raised a ton of money and then said they pivoted which they had millions raised to just do something completely different that likely wouldn't have been easier to raise for. Even in an interview with the cursor founder he kind of dumbly rambles that they launched and then basically lost a ton of traction until GPT4 came out. They have some core features like autocomplete but I'm struggling to see vision other than getting training data for iterative dev is a partial moat compared to just seeing commits and final code bases.
dist-epoch · 1h ago
> I wonder how much of the value is really from the model
> The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin
The other stuff would take a team 6 months to implement. This is where the valuation comes from. Time to market, they are there TODAY.
ashvardanian · 28m ago
If I recall correctly from the recent YC interview, the Windsurf founder noted their team leans more toward GTM than engineering. That makes this less likely to be a classic acquihire (as with Rockset) and more plausibly a data play rather than a product integration.
My current read is that this is a frontier lab acquiring large-scale training data—cheaply—from a community of “vibe coders”, instead of paying professional annotators. In that light, it feels more like a “you are the product” scenario, which likely won’t sit well with Windsurf’s paying customers.
Interesting times.
crimsonnoodle58 · 2h ago
$3B for a fork of an IDE which Microsoft keeps crippling by the day by making it's best extensions not work with forks (eg. C++, Python, C#, Remote SSH, etc)..
whywhywhywhy · 1h ago
It's easy to downplay as a fork because it's such a young product but ultimately if people use Cursor or Windsurf instead of VSCode then it is VSCode that needs to worry about being upstream from them and Cursor or Windsurf making their extensions no longer work with VSCode.
sidcool · 2h ago
That's a oversimplified view. It doesn't matter if it's a fork. It has customers and paying ones. And it has a brand. That's more than enough. $3 billion would be peanuts for OpenAI
lolinder · 2h ago
If it acquired those customers in an environment where Microsoft was not enforcing their marketplace terms it very much does matter if they have a plan for supporting plugins in the future.
Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's? Will they rally jointly behind a single open store? They need to have an answer to Microsoft here, and for the good of the ecosystem I hope they do have an answer, but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.
whywhywhywhy · 1h ago
> 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.
Androider · 2h ago
VSCode must have over 100 times the user base of Windsurf and Cursor combined. All Microsoft needs to do is implement a halfway decent version of the context management features these forks added. That alone would be enough to halt user migration.
For users who've already switched to the forks, the cost of switching back is essentially zero, especially if Microsoft begins introducing changes that break fork compatibility. In that case, the migration direction would reverse almost overnight.
codyvoda · 2h ago
given that they lose >$4B/year I guess everything is peanuts
mrweasel · 2h ago
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.
dbbk · 2h ago
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.
owendarko · 50m ago
We're reaching a point where we don't need to switch to another IDE (from VS Code/IntelliJ/insert-your-IDE-here) for "AI/vibe coding"
IDEs can support "AI coding agents" on their own.
The entire workflow for "AI coding agents" boils down to:
1. You write a prompt
2. The "agent" wraps it in a system prompt and sends it to the LLM
3. The LLM sends back a response
4. The agent performs specific actions based on that response (editing files, creating new ones, etc.)
Microsoft already started doing that with Copilot. And they have a vibrant ecosystem of VS Code extensions (I maintain one of them [1])
"AI agents" should be a feature, not a separate piece of software (IDE) that's integral to software devs.
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.
ukuina · 11m ago
So soon after Gemini 2.5?
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 1h ago
I need someone to convince me this isn't one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition. If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion then what are they even doing? Windsurf can't have that high of a userbase that you feel the need to pay for it.
JumpCrisscross · 13m ago
We don’t know how OpenAI is paying. A lot of comments seem to be assuming this is an all-cash deal. We have no evidence for that.
singularity2001 · 22m ago
instinctively I agree but it's all about timing: if they try to build their own IDE and hired people it would probably still take a couple of years to get a decent product. I don't know about patents.
ashish01 · 1h ago
> one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition.
I think that was when intel acquired McAfee for 8B in 2010.
fazeirony · 1h ago
you mean the company that spent $9B to make $4B in 2024? that openai?
i agree with you on this - it seems that openai hallucinates reality as much as their products do :-/
bix6 · 2h ago
~$40M ARR makes this a 75x
Cursor yesterday was a 45X for comparison (9B, 200M)
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.
resters · 1h ago
- A $3B signal that OpenAI is unable to do product
- AI assisted coding is mostly about managing the context and knowing what to put in the context to avoid confusion and dumb mistakes, it's not about the UI.
- This signals that OpenAI believes that highly effective coding assistant LLMs will become a commodity / open source and so UI / tooling lock-in is a good investment.
34679 · 37m ago
I wanted to see what all the hype is about, but they can't even make a readable blog post. $3B seems expensive.
Windsurf is terrible, I always use AI just in a normal website and I tried this product a few days ago and it asks me if it can run a command to make a file, which I find extremely strange, then it fails to write valid commands even to do mkdir.
visarga · 24m ago
It worked allright for me when I was using it, a month ago. I cancelled because they somhow lost my paid credits and refused to refund me. No matter how great an AI tool, if the company is mismanaging user payments or usage tracking, it is useless.
incorrecthorse · 1h ago
It blows my mind OpenAI wouldn't be able to build a Windsurf alternative for orders of magnitude less than $3B.
michelb · 18m ago
They can, of course, but why would they waste time on it? They are buying a tool, talent, and a heap of paying enterprise customers. This is a steal.
mrweasel · 1h ago
Why didn't they just use ChatGPT to build it? Weird.
bayarearefugee · 15m ago
Sometimes it almost seems like the idea that LLMs are capable of instantly creating real, maintainable software is vastly overblown to inflate valuations...
singularity2001 · 20m ago
it would be only a few millions if they used cursor and Claude but their ego prevented it
brap · 2h ago
Recent announcements from OpenAI seem to indicate they know they're losing the race
dr_dshiv · 53m ago
You are referring to the nonprofit continuation?
They have certainly lost the monopoly.
xnx · 2h ago
"$3B" should be in heavy quotes if this is paid in OpenAI shares.
singularity2001 · 19m ago
probably paid in pro accounts
infecto · 2h ago
Windsurf probably sees this as a win. I still think they're behind in some areas, Cursor's Agent feels faster and more responsive but Windsurf nails the rest. The documentation is far better, and the overall developer experience is more solid. Cursor still feels like a hacked-on plug-in in a broken VS Code fork. Even small touches, like built-in Linux install instructions, show Windsurf's polish.
h8hawk · 2h ago
In my experience, Windsurf was significantly more effective when working with a big codebase.
whywhywhywhy · 1h ago
Windsurf goes looking into the codebase and learning context before attacking the problem in my experience. Often Cursor tries it's best to just guess the solution without context and only really resorts to going deeper when you tell it they fails.
I find if I tell Windsurf to look at something it will, Cursor I sometimes lay everything out for it and it just doesn't even read it.
Ultimately though once you run out of requests on Windsurf it's very weak without Claude though, and the top up requests are burnt through too quickly.
__jl__ · 1h ago
Here are my two cents on cursors versus windsurf approach:
CURSOR shifted to a more agentic approach even for chat requests to reduce input tokens.
Previously, they used the good old RAG pattern with code dumps: Request with user added files -> Retrieval (when Codebase enabled) -> LLM requests with combined context from user and retrieval.
Now they seem to be doing something like this:
Request -> LLM with tools to search code base and/or user-added files
I get constant search tool calls even for user-added files. Big reduction in input token but I think performance suffers as well.
WINDSURF is still willing to dump code into the context, which gives them an edge in some cases (presumably at a cost of input tokens).
Windsurf is willing to spent to acquire customers (lower subscription cost, higher expenses for llm calls). Cursor has a huge customer base and is working on making it sustainable by a) reducing costs (see above) and b) increasing revenue (e.g. "Pro" requests for 0.05 with more input and output token).
_fat_santa · 2h ago
> Its the little things like having baked in instructions to install Windsurf on linux.
When I went to download Cursor the other day I noticed that they do not offer any .deb/.rpm packages and just offer the FlatPak (could be a Snap I'm not sure). This just tells me they really dont understand the community and just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.
zero-g · 2h ago
Windsurf has plugins for Jetbrains products, for vim, for emacs, for Visual Studio (not code), XCode, and even eclipse. They try to get as much of the market as possible, while Cursor focuses on the core functionality.
Whenever I tried Windsurf Editor, or their plugin for vim, and Intellij, it didn't feel polished at all. The basic function of autocomplete felt much much snappier on Cursor, and even on GitHub Copilot for vim/intellij.
onlyrealcuzzo · 2h ago
There's a difference between understanding the community and prioritizing investments.
I'm sure Cursor has more than few devs that primarily use Linux...
Which makes a lot more sense to me than deb/rpm when it's just a single executable.
charcircuit · 2h ago
>just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.
This what all developers want for a platform. They can release their software and not have to worry about some "maintainer" switching out dependencies out from under them introducing bugs and crashes in what they shipped.
Cursor ships as an AppImage.
TiredOfLife · 1h ago
appimage is more Linux than .deb/.rpm.
dbbk · 1h ago
Of course it's a win, dude that cloned a GitHub repo is now personally a billionaire
robertclaus · 45m ago
A lot of this valuation must be aqui-hire and existing users, right? 6 months of development lead time can't be worth this much... can it?
istjohn · 45m ago
I wonder how much of this is a data play for OpenAI as they work to improve language model performance on longer time horizons.
whazor · 2h ago
From a customer point of view it makes sense to pay a fixed monthly price for both chat and coding, instead of having two separate subscriptions.
mrweasel · 1h ago
That makes a lot of sense, for the customers, but OpenAI is not profitable on even their $200 subscription. I doubt Windsurf is turning a profit either.
Buying a "bundle" should result in a lower price, as compared to buying both tools separately, making the loses worse. Unless they can reuse some of the same infrastructure and save a lot of money that way.
mark_l_watson · 1h ago
Question: has there been any announcements of bundling Windsurf with the ChatGPT $20/month package? (I could not access the linked article)
Oras · 1h ago
Good for them, always rooting for startups who win.
That said, I have tried Windsurf multiple times, and it wasn't a pleasant experience compared to Cursor, which I've been using for more than 6 months as a paid customer.
tom_y · 1h ago
Fortunately it is not the cursor. I am using the cursor and I don't want it to be sold.
JSR_FDED · 1h ago
What’s the equivalent in the Vim world?
seydor · 2h ago
This may end up saving openAI. their models have no moat
blitzar · 2h ago
The companies they are buying have even less moat than openAi
rvz · 2h ago
Very surprising outcome, since OpenAI went after Cursor (twice) [0] And I originally thought that Cursor would be bought instead a day before the rumour [1].
It was smart for Windsurf to take the offer and to get greedy in this hype cycle. Unless Cursor is thinking that Anthropic or someone else will buy them for a lot more, its going to get extremely competitive as the switching cost for Cursor is zero and that ARR can disappear very quickly.
Copilot will attempt to destroy Cursor on price and functionality for however long they want to.
Very risky for Cursor at $9B valuation (which I think is overvalued and based on VC FOMO).
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...
However, given that JetBrains also have their own AI offering[2], I'm not sure how long that will last too...
[0] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-windsurf-plugin-f...
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Codeium....
[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/
1) Cline (1.4mil downloads)
2) Roo Code (a fork of Cline, 450k downloads)
Still a drop in the bucket compared to Cursor in terms of # of users, but they're growing pretty fast.
Disclaimer: I maintain Kilo Code, which competes with 1) and 2) so I'm pretty familiar with this space/the growth patterns.
Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: embrace, extend, extinguish.
I agree with the first part, I'm much less optimistic about the second part. I suspect they will create something that is worse, but cheaper if you already pay for Github/Office 365/whatever. Then many large enterprises will switch to save money whilst the engineers complain, just like with Teams.
I actually find it a little reassuring that they can't seem to get out of their own way.
The fact that they are is not the results of the Microsoft takeover.
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
This reminds me of "big companies moves slow.." line.
I always felt that cursor and windsurf should be just extension to vscode instead of a fork. Was there some missing functionality is vscode that was missing? Is it still missing?
There are some extensions that work in this way and allow to use multiple implementations depending on task at hand without any long term commitment.
I feel like such fragmentation is by artificial just to lock users in single ecosystem.
It's in a lot of ways the OpenAI story itself: Can they keep an edge? Or is there at least something that will keep people from just switching product?
Who knows. People have opinions, of course. OpenAIs opinion (which should reasonably count for something, them being the current AI-as-a-product leader) is worth $3B as of today.
I would also argue that the product could be built over two weekends with a small team. They offer some groundbreaking solutions, but since we know that they work and how, it's easy to replicate them. That also means they have significant talent there.
Hence, they are also buying the employees.
The code base itself is basically worth nothing, in my opinion.
What groundbreaking solutions does Windsurf offer?
Buying competition while everyone’s still fighting might straddle you with a lame horse
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.
If autonomous agents were just around the corner, then why wouldn't OpenAI bet on their own Codex product obviating (most) need for an IDE and save themselves the $3 billion?
Of course, back to reality. Today, at least in my workflow, I use / like Windsurf but it is a small part of what I am doing. For any code I want to keep I mostly write it by hand (using vim for a very bare-bones / cognitive mode experience). For me, the real flow state occurs in vim while ChatGPT and Windsurf are great for exploration.
We've seen this before with Office.
We'll see it again.
Microsoft Build is this month [0] and it will tell where they are going next (other than price cuts).
I'm expecting disappointment for now, but also expecting GitHub Copilot to be upgraded. Then we'll see if they are ahead or so far behind.
[0] https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/home
Have you used Cursor on a daily basis? I have. Every day for six months now. I haven't encountered a single bug that prevent me to work.
Moreover, while Microsoft tries to catch up lately, it's still very far behind, especially on the "tab autocompletion" front.
Microsoft provides the editor base, foundation models provide the smarts, and Cursor provides some, in my experience, extremely buggy context management features. There is no moat.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/unfinished-horse-drawing-flam...
Meanwhile GitHub web integration is approaching seamless in vs code. To the point I often forget I’m in a browser instead of the app, until an extension I use doesn’t work.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/copilot-customiza...
Maybe it's fine if you only do local development in other languages (Javascript?), but I completely swore it off.
I gave up on Cursor because my trial ran out, while VS Code with Copilot doesn't seem to charge me anything.
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.
> Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf.
> Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation.
> Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a $1.3 billion valuation.
> May 2025: $3 billion acquisition from OpenAI
I wonder how much of the value is really from the model or the tooling around it. They all use the same models (mostly Claude, others have been horrible and buggy in my experience). Even co-pilot agent mode now uses Claude. The editor has their own LLM (?) that does the apply since LLMs often return snippets. They work well enough on Cursor. And then you have the auto-complete, which I think is their own model as well.
But the main value from me is from the agent mode and 95% of the value is the underlying model. The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin. The other benefit is the fixed pricing. I have no idea how much 500 calls cost if I were to use the API, but I expect they're probably losing money.
> The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin
The other stuff would take a team 6 months to implement. This is where the valuation comes from. Time to market, they are there TODAY.
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.
Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's? Will they rally jointly behind a single open store? They need to have an answer to Microsoft here, and for the good of the ecosystem I hope they do have an answer, but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.
They should and probably will soon, and if I were them I'd even consider giving plugin devs a cut of their paying customer subs if MS gets competitive about it.
> but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.
Agentic AI coding is more important to customers than VSCode's extension ecosystem. VSCode is who has to worry in this equation unless they ship the same tools in the next few months and heavily subsidize them.
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.
Is OpenAI worth the $260 billion valuation... No, of course not, they're losing >$4 billion a year.
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
I think that was when intel acquired McAfee for 8B in 2010.
i agree with you on this - it seems that openai hallucinates reality as much as their products do :-/
Cursor yesterday was a 45X for comparison (9B, 200M)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/openai-is-reportedly-in-ta...
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.
- 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.
https://windsurf.com/blog/update-to-free-plan
They have certainly lost the monopoly.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I'm sure Cursor has more than few devs that primarily use Linux...
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.
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.
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.
That said, I have tried Windsurf multiple times, and it wasn't a pleasant experience compared to Cursor, which I've been using for more than 6 months as a paid customer.
It 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