[timabdulla]

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?

[slt2021]

why OpenAI purchased windsurf instead of prompting openai to create something like windsurf?

this is the question i am still asking...

[rafram]

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

[startupsfail]

They did. They’ve just released codex (CLI client).

They don’t have access to copilot users in general, Microsoft and Google does. And perhaps they are realizing that Microsoft is hedging them over multiple LLM providers and maybe no longer feeding them juicy copilot data, with humans in a tight loop, correcting LLMs.

[pchristensen]

Controlling demand (developer workflow and mindshare) is a good position if you're trying to build scale on supply.

[rhizome]

Maybe to avoid the Second System Effect.

[osigurdson]

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.

[bix6]

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.

[htrp]

so much for ai turning everyone at openai into 1000x coders

[conartist6]

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.

[macrolime]

They might just want a way to quickly collect data needed for fine-tuning the next generation of programming agents.