OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google
320 comments
·July 11, 2025extr
IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there.
Let's review the current state of things:
- Terminal CLI agents are several orders of magnitude less $$$ to develop than forking an entire IDE.
- CC is dead simple to onboard (use whatever IDE you're using now, with a simple extension for some UX improvements).
- Anthropic is free to aggressively undercut their own API margins (and middlemen like Cursor) in exchange for more predictable subscription revenue + training data access.
What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?
- Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)
- Some UI niceties like "add selection to chat", and etc.
Personally I think this is a harbinger of where things are going. Cursor was fastest to $900M ARR and IMO will be fastest back down again.
adamoshadjivas
Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans.
I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the next 2 years. Then i can see a big push for UX if models are truly a commodity. But as long as claude is much better then yes they hold all the cards. (And don't have a bigger company to have a civil war with like openai)
teruakohatu
> CC at like a 500% loss
Do you have a citation for this?
It might be at a loss, but I don’t think it is that extravagant.
csomar
The way I am doing the math with my Max subscription and assuming DeepSeek API prices, it is still x5 times cheaper. So either DeepSeek is losing money (unlikely) or Anthropic is losing lots of money (more likely). Grok kinda confirms my suspicions. Assuming DeepSeek prices, I've probably spent north of $100 of Grok compute. I didn't pay Grok or Twitter a single cent. $100 is a lot of loss for a single user.
rolisz
Before they announced the Max plans, I could easily hit 10-15$ of API usage per day (without even being a heavy user).
Since they announced that you can use the Pro subscription with Claude Code, I've been using it much more and I've never ever been rate limited.
resonious
I'm also curious about this. Claude Code feels very expensive to me, but at the same time I don't have much perspective (nothing to compare it to, really, other than Codex or other agent editors I guess. And CC is way better so likely worth the extra money anyway)
virgildotcodes
Seems like the survival strategy for cursor would be to develop their own frontier coding model. Maybe they can leverage the data from their still somewhat significant lead in the space to make a solid effort.
libraryofbabel
I don’t think that’s a viable strategy. It is very very hard and not many people can do it. Just look at how much Meta is paying to poach the few people in the world capable of training a next gen frontier model.
raincole
> to develop their own frontier coding model
Uh, the irony is that this is exactly what Windsurf tried.
Aeolun
It probably doesn’t cost them all that much? Maybe they were offering the API at a 500% markup, and code is just breaking even.
davidclark
Is this $900M ARR a reliable number?
Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a sub to Cursor.
If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that would be 375K paid users.
There’s 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if everyone using Cursor were paying $200/month.
Seems impossibly high, especially given the number of other AI subscription options as well.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-d...
ashraymalhotra
Maybe the OP got confused with Cursor's $900mil raise? https://cursor.com/blog/series-c
Last disclosed revenue from Cursor was $500mil. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-05/anysphere...
npinsker
It’s probably due to the top comment citing that number
extr
Yeah that’s probably it!
smcleod
The $20/month cursor sub is heavily limited though, for basic casual usage that's fine but you VERY soon run into its limits when working at any speed.
helloericsf
The base plan limit is not hard to hit. Then you're on the usage based rocket.
HenriNext
- Forking VSCode is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.
- Anthropic doesn't use the inputs for training.
- Cursor doesn't have $900M ARR. That was the raise. Their ARR is ~$500m [1].
- Claude Code already support the niceties, including "add selection to chat", accessing IDE's realtime warnings and errors (built-in tool 'ideDiagnostics'), and using IDE's native diff viewer for reviewing the edits.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...
edoceo
The cost of the fork isn't creating it, it's maintaining it. But maybe AI could help :/
nikcub
Cursor see it coming - it's why they're moving to the web and mobile[0]
The bigger issue is the advantage Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have in developing and deploying their own models. It wasn't that long ago that Cursor was reading 50 lines of code at a time to save on token costs. Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to, and it blew everything else away.
Cursor could release a cli tomorrow but it wouldn't help them compete when Anthropic and Google can always be multiples cheaper
Aeolun
> Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to
I don’t think this is true at all. The reason CC is so good is that they’re very deliberate about what goes in the context. CC often spends ages reading 5 LOC snippets, but afterwards it only has relevant stuff in context.
ec109685
Background of how it works: https://kirshatrov.com/posts/claude-code-internals
Prompt: https://gist.github.com/transitive-bullshit/487c9cb52c75a970...
anon7000
I’ve definitely observed that CC is waaaay slower than cursor
nsonha
Heard a lot of this context bs parroted all over HN, don't buy it. If simply increasing context size can solve problem, Gemini would be the best model for everything.
extr
I think this is an interesting and cool direction for Cursor to be going in and I don't doubt something like this is the future. But I have my doubts whether it will save them in the short/medium term:
- AI is not good enough yet to abandon the traditional IDE experierence if you're doing anything non-trivial. Hard finding use cases for this right now.
- There's no moat here. There are already a dozen "Claude Code UI" OSS projects with similar basic functionality.
madeofpalk
I have a whole backlog of trivial tasks I never get around to because I’m working on less trivial things.
Abishek_Muthian
> - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)
My local ollama + continue + Qwen 2.5 coder gives good tab completion with minimal latency; how much better is Cursor’s tab completion model?
I’m still weary of letting LLM edit my code so my local setup gives me sufficient assistance with tab completion and occasional chat.
threecheese
Claude Code is just proving that coding agents can be successful. The interface isn’t magic, it just fits the model and integrates with a system in all the right ways. The Anthropic team for that product is very small comparatively (their most prolific contributor is Claude), and I think it’s more of a technology proof than a core competency - it’s a great API $ business lever, but there’s no reason for them to try and win the “agentic coding UI” market. Unless Generative AI flops everywhere else, these markets will continue to emerge and need focus. The Windsurf kerfuffle is further proof that OpenAI doesn’t see the market as must-win for a frontier model shop.
And so I’d say this isn’t a harbinger of the death of Cursor, instead proof that there’s a future in the market they were just recently winning.
libraryofbabel
Some excellent points. On “add selection to chat”, I just want to add that the Claude Code VS code extension automatically passes the current selection to the model. :)
I am genuinely curious if any Cursor or Windsurf users who have also tried Claude Code could speak to why they prefer the IDE-fork tools? I’ve only ever used Claude Code myself - what am I missing?
extr
Cursor's tab completion model is legitimately fantastic and for many people is worth the entire $20 subscription. Lint fixes or syntax-level refactors are guessed and executed instantly with TAB with close to 100% accuracy. This is their final moat IMO, if Copilot manages to bring their tab completion up to near parity, very little reason to use Cursor.
fipar
Just to offer a different perspective, I use Cursor at work and, coming from emacs (which I still use) with copilot completions only when I request them with a shortcut, Cursor’s behavior drives me crazy.
olejorgenb
Idk. When you're doing something it really gets it's super nice, but it's also off a lot of times and it's IMO super distracting when it constantly pop up. No way to explicitly request it instead - other than toggling, which seems to also turn off context/edit tracking, because after toggling on it does not suggest anything until you make some edits.
While Zed's model is not as good the UI is so much better IMO.
conradkay
<https://forum.cursor.com/t/i-made-59-699-lines-of-agent-edit...>
It's quite interesting how little the Cursor power users use tab. Majority of the posts are some insane number of agent edits and close to (or exactly) 0 tabs.
druskacik
I'd like to ask the opposite question: why do people prefer command line tools? I tried both and I prefer working in IDE. The main reason is that I don't trust the LLMs too much and I like to see and potentially quickly edit the changes they make. With an IDE, I can iterate much faster than with the command line tool.
I haven't tried Claude Code VS Code extension. Did anyone replaced Cursor with this setup?
rapind
You're looking at (coloured) diffs in your shell is all when it comes to coding. It's pretty easy to setup MCP and have claude be the director. Like I have zen MCP running with an OpenRouter API key, and will ask claude to consult with pro (gemini) or o3, or both to come up with an architecture review / plan.
I honestly don't know how great that is, because it just reiterates what I was planning anyways, and I can't tell if it's just glazing, or it's just drawing the same general conclusions. Seriously though, it does a decent job, and you can discuss / ruminate over approaches.
I assume you can do all the same things in an editor. I'm just comfortable with a shell is all, and as a hardcore Vi user, I don't really want to use Visual Studio.
sunnybeetroot
I can roll back to different checkpoints with Cursor easily. Maybe CC has it but the fact that I haven’t found it after using it daily is an example of Cursor having a better UX for me.
handfuloflight
Or Cursor just gave him a better deal?
alanmoraes
I never understood why those tools need to fork Visual Studio Code. Wouldn't an extension suffice?
efitz
Cline and Roo Code (my favorite Cline fork) are fantastic and run as normal VS Code extensions.
Occasionally they lose their connection to the terminal in VSCode, but I’ve got no other integration complaints.
And I really prefer the bring-your-own-key model as opposed to letting the IDE be my middleman.
extr
IIRC problem is that VS Code does not allow extensions to create custom UI in the panels areas except for WebViews(?). It makes for not a great experience. Plus Cursor does a lot with background indexing to make their tab completion model really good - more than would be possible with the extensions APIs available.
lozenge
When the Copilot extension needs a new VS Code feature it gets added, but it isn't available to third party extensions until months later... Err, years later... well, whenever Microsoft feels like it.
So an extension will never be able to compete with Copilot.
Maxious
As part of this whole drama, the APIs that Copilot uses are being opened up https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/06/30/openSourceAIE...
bn-l
It was so they could close source it.
metadat
It's another Character.ai situation [0]. Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company.
What a harsh time to work for an AI startup as a rank and file employee! I wonder how the founders justify going along with it inside their mind.
[0] Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer Returns to Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141112 - 11 months ago (87 comments)
Edit: Thank you @jonny_eh for the clarification. I can't imagine it feels awesome being a leftover but at least you vested out. "Take the money and leave" is still a bit raw when the founders and researchers are now getting the initial payout + generous Google RSU's.
jonny_eh
The “leftover” employees at Character were NOT screwed over. Options were converted to cash at the deal’s valuation.
Hopefully Windsurf employees are treated well here.
Note: I worked at Character until recently.
_jab
On the flipside, I’m pretty sure the investors got screwed.
jonas21
The investors made money too. The valuation at the last round was $1B, and Google paid them out at a valuation of $2.5B as part of the agreement [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/2/24212348/google-hires-char...
null
helloericsf
Honestly depends on when they got in. Seed investors? They're probably fine with their preferences. Series B and beyond? That's where it gets messy. What round you thinking?
LilBytes
Hopefully. The world is healing.
takklz
The rank and file equity pitch is quickly falling apart…
bravetraveler
Think it started that way... I'm currently in a vesting/allocation situation where the incentive is to drive the share price down.
takklz
Geeeeeze
bix6
Always has been
se4u
FYI, It wasn't taken the money and leave, a lot of them got absorbed into GDM.
Source: I was in GDM when character was acquired.
metadat
Do you mean Google Deep Mind? Curious what use deep mind had for the leftovers (kubernetes and web scraping experts, etc)?
Otherwise why not merge all of engineering into ElGoog?
cavisne
Just like with Character I'm assuming the employees get something. Whatever nonsense "licensing" fee Google is paying to not cause an antitrust investigation should be paid out straight to employees
Aurornis
> Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company.
Windsurf’s value didn’t go to $0 overnight. The company will continue and their equity is likely still worth a decent amount wherever the company ends up.
Obviously a disappointing outcome for the people who thought life changing money was right around the corner, but they didn’t lose everything.
ipsum2
Not really true, I believe the "acquiring" (i.e. Google) company buys some equity from the employees (windsurf).
Edit: the people downvoting this clearly can't read, I made the exact same point as jonny_eh.
pydry
This might be the beginning of the end of tech VC startups in general.
High interest rates make VC funding more expensive and now bigtech can swoop in, poach all the necessary staff and deprive investors of an exit.
What is the point any more?
lsllc
Isn't there not some contractual agreement between the VCs and the founders? (I understand that a non-compete might not apply [in CA], but taking VC money is a little different that simply getting hired).
Were I a Windsurf investor, I'd be pissed right now and calling my lawyer.
wadefletch
the founder is on a vesting schedule set with the vc. walking away forfeits his ownership in the company (not sure of the specifics of this weird deal, but this is true in 99% of situations) which returns his ownership to the VCs either directly or functionally.
the only reason he'd walk away is because he thinks other opportunities are higher EV. if he believes this, a) the investors investment is likely worth virtually 0 anyway and b) if it's not, removing a leader who doesn't want to be there probably increases P(success) for the company and further increases the value of the investment.
founder departure isn't good for the narrative, but it's a symptom of an investment going bad, not often a cause.
tlogan
The low level employees are screwed. Basically they lost their job. Not cool.
neilv
> Google will instead hire Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf’s R&D employees and bring them onto the Google DeepMind team, [...] Google will not have any control over nor a stake in Windsurf, but it will take a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s technology. [...] Google didn’t share how much it was paying to bring on the team. OpenAI was previously reported to be buying Windsurf for $3 billion.
Why not an acquisition?
How did Google get Windsurf and investors to agree to this maneuver that decapitated the leadership and key talent, without a big exit event for everyone?
My read of the article: "Here's x% of what OpenAI offered you, you waive legal challenges while we cherry-pick your people and license the tech in their heads, and you can keep the company, and everyone left behind can promote themselves to fill the vacancies."
taspeotis
If they acquire a company they might need approval due to anti-trust.
If the people instead just quit their jobs and start working at Google … nothing to see here.
dalemhurley
Cursor (and Garry Tan’s X post) has shown us that the VC money is propping up these companies astounding growth, the only way for them to become profitable is to increase the cost per a request, which means they need to innovate like crazy.
The moat is paper thin.
GitHub has open sourced copilot.
The open source community is working hard on their own projects.
No doubt Cursor is moving fast to create amazing innovations, but if the competition only focuses on thin wrappers they are not worth the billion dollar valuations.
I love watching this space as it is moving extremely fast.
woeirua
There is no moat. If you’re a true believer that strong agents are around the corner, then all of these add on companies will be obsolete in a few years. The first company to strong agents can trivially rebuild Cursor or Windsurf.
TechDebtDevin
Cursor just committed mass consumer fraud at worst, and at best pissed off all their best customers. I feel really sorry for those who invested at a 9bb valuation.
jen729w
> I feel really sorry for those who invested at a 9bb valuation.
Because they didn't do their jobs properly?
aeve890
>Cursor just committed mass consumer fraud at worst, and at best pissed off all their best customers.
What happened?
wadefletch
flip-flopping on pricing has led users to feel nickel-and-dimed
i like cursor fine, but check out the forum/subreddit to see people talking like addicts, pissed their fix is getting more expensive
i think this aggressive reaction is more pronounced for non-programmers who are making things for the first time. they tasted a new power and they don't want it taken away.
bmau5
What was Garry's post?
ec109685
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1941553682736439307
The thesis is that once you’re paying $200 a month, you’re beholden and won’t pay and compare it with anything else.
forrestthewoods
I have same question
tootie
I think the recent Grok release and considering xAI was relatively late to the game shows that the only moat to training giant models is how many GPUs you can buy. ChatGPT was earth-shattering and it took less than two years for multiple credible competitors to match or exceed them. Making these models profitable is proving extremely difficult in the face of so much competition and such unsustainable expectations being set. Google seems to be most likely to sustain themselves through this melee. Them and the Chinese companies.
parthdesai
Gary gives off a grifter vibe to me. Such a shame seeing how YC has fallen
sebmellen
He blocked me (a relative nobody) on X for remarking on the number of people I know who’ve made it to YC on completely fraudulent credentials.
asdev
I never knew anyone who used Windsurf. These AI acquisitions have been unbelievable(in a bad way). WIX acquired some garbage Lovable.dev clone for 80 million. I think many of us are waiting for this bubble to pop(economy will likely pop too)
sunaookami
It was barely better than Cursor and they got shafted by Anthropic because of the takeover announcement so nobody really used it anymore because let's face it - Claude Sonnet is just the best coding model. Design-wise the chat panel and autocomplete integration was a bit nicer than in Cursor but not by much. Subscription for Windsurf was/is also 5$ cheaper.
break_the_bank
i don't think it was better than or comparable to cursor at all. except for the month prior to the OpenAI Acquisition news where some minor influencers on X were calling it better.
if it was better it would have survived.
manquer
Everyone has a niche, Windsurf is the only large provider if you are a Jetbrains shop.
There are some alternatives like continue.dev or Jetbrains own AI offering but no Cursor or Claude Code ( Sonnet 3.7/4) you can get through Jetbrains plugin or others, but Anthropic does not provide support same with cursor.
agnokapathetic
claude code has a Jetbrains plugin which is delightful!
raincole
Well I use Windsurf. It's a good alternative to GitHub Copilot. The free tier is on par with Copilot's paid plan.
...which no one talks about anymore. Okay I guess you have a point.
cellis
Base44 is absolutely not garbage. I’ve tried it and can say it’s as good or better of a vibe-builder than Lovable or Bolt. Have you benchmarked it against the competition or can you otherwise substantiate the “garbage” claim? FWIW I do know one amazing engineer using Windsurf
asdev
all those projects are garbage and just create half bake prototypes that never see the light of day
cellis
Agree in principle, but when evaluated against the competition and likely acquisition targets of Wix, it's certainly not garbage. I've seen it vibe code an entire app that was -- admittedly mostly working -- and deploy it with a prompt of 5 words, in about 2 minutes.
nimchimpsky
[dead]
Ancalagon
So Google, Meta, and Microsoft will just hollow out the best AI startups of their talent instead of buying them - out of fear of monopoly lawsuits I'm assuming?
Nice plan I guess. Kind of obvious to spot though.
brianwawok
Likely cheaper too. Nothing to pay the original shareholders
bix6
Can shareholders sue? I presume the only avenue is IP since that belongs to the company? Or the non-exclusive license somehow negates that? Brutal.
Ancalagon
I actually don't know if there's much that can be done unless there's some non-competes in those employees' contracts which are usually not very enforceable outside of finance iirc.
bix6
Non competes aren’t enforceable in California but the company owns the IP so I’m curious about this license loophole they are using.
tlogan
I’m honestly just surprised that the CEO and co-founder decided to walk away from the company and leave behind all these employees he was leading. Especially considering many of them probably joined for lower pay, hoping for a big upside.
Maybe there’s more to the story.
quantified
When you want to make a big impact for a big payday, why would this surprise you?
Gentle reminder that more startups die by suicide than homicide, and that an early-stage startup is a total crapshoot.
tlogan
Yes, startups are always a bit of a gamble, but this feels like a captain abandoning ship while it’s still full of sailors (many of whom have families depending on them).
This really is a whole new level of getting screwed.
munificent
You're surprised that a CEO did something that massively financially benefitted them personally at the expense of rank and file employees?
You sweet summer child.
Kinrany
It's been working with software developers with no issues.
khazhoux
“Buying the startup” just means handing over megabucks to do-nothing investors. If Google isn’t buying any product or technology, why should investors get a talent fee?
bix6
Do nothing investors who enabled the company to reach this point? Employees who chose lower salaries in expectation of shares being worth something? Come on now.
DiscourseFan
There are many AI startups and we are just in the beginning of learning how to use them. There will be some stupid company like those you’ve listed that figures out a way to use AI that is far better than any other implementation, and Google, Meta, and Microsoft may go the way of Yahoo and AOL, but we’ll see
bix6
Doesn’t seem like it. Antitrust has no teeth so the mega corps are just buying all the talent with life changing cash.
DiscourseFan
The “talent” is not very talented, trust me. These are the short term whims of very large, increasingly bloated organizations. A leaner startup that knows what it has will not sell so quickly. At least, the odds will soon be in favor of whoever first decides to take that bet.
nrmitchi
This whole situation feels shockingly close to the Meta/Scale situation, where founders and specific employees were plucked out, and effectively gutted any future prospects for the company.
At least in the Scale case there seemed to be some form of payout to employees and equity holders, but this takes it a whole lot further by just throwing out all other employees.
There is supposed to be the concept that “all common stock is the same”. These fake-acquisitions completely undermine that.
wagwang
All of this game of thrones is going to create an amazing documentary if AI capabilities taper off and valuations vaporize.
tamersalama
Are the AI capabilities tapering-off, or commoditized? Building the next Windsurf (iteration 0) doesn't feel it's quite niche anymore.
wagwang
I think the current valuations imply at least 2 magnitudes of improvement over existing functionality.
h1fra
I know David Fincher is jumping on his seat
DiscourseFan
Obviously these things are difficult to tell from the outside
xyst
Apparently somebody missed crypto mania between 2019-2022
zer00eyz
> if AI capabilities taper off
AI growth has slowed to a crawl, and it's priced it self out vs cost of compute.
NVIDIA feels a lot like SUN.
> amazing documentary
Been there, done that: 2001, Startup Dot Com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP4PGjnZwJE
asdev
Gary-Marcus-eating-popcorn.gif
null
screye
Works out for Google and the C-suite. Horrible for the employees. These fake-acquisitions are effectively arbitrage against employees, who get left holding nothing. Should be illegal and regulated.
Not sure how the VCs get their cut. I'm guessing that Google can balance it out by participating in rounds for other startups in that VC's porfolio.
submeta
I went from Emacs to VS Code, then to Cursor, next to Claude Code, which is so good that I feel like I am having half a dozen junior devs at my fingertips, 24/7.
Since Claude Code is cli based, I reviewed my cli toolset: Migrated from iTerm2 to Ghostty and Tmux, from Cursor to NeoVim (my God is it good!).
Just had a 14h workday with this tooling. It’s so good that I complete the work of weeks and months within days! Absolutely beast.
At this point I am thinking IDEs do not reflect the changing reality of software development. They are designed for navigating project folders, writing / changing files. But I don’t review files that much anymore. I rather write prompts, watch Claude Code create a plan, implement it, even write meaningful commit messages.
Yes I can navigate the project with neovim, yes I can make commits in git and in lazygit, but my task is best spent in designing, planning, prompting, reviewing and testing.
imiric
I'm curious to see what you've built with all that extra productivity.
forrestthewoods
No one ever shares their great and shipped products. AI built slop is for generating hype not revenue or users.
shivenigma
> But I don’t review files that much anymore.
Say no more.
didibus
> I don’t review files that much anymore
You don't review the code? Just test it works?
yoz-y
At work we’re encouraged to use AI, so I do. For me the one thing that works well is using it to write one off scripts that do stuff and would be a chore to write.
Usually in 2-3 prompts I can get a python or shell script that reads some file list somewhere, reads some json/csv elsewhere. Combines it in various ways and spits out some output to be ingested by some other pipeline.
I just test this code if it works it’s good.
Never in my life would I put this in a critical system though. When I review these files they are full of tiny errors that would blow up in spectacular manner if the input was slightly off somewhere.
It’s good for what it is. But I’m honestly afraid of production code being vibe coded by these tools.
mr_toad
IDEs were a crutch, and now that crutch has been replaced by a semi-autonomous bot that can fetch and carry.
AJRF
Do you do all this switching during the workday?
apwell23
yes vibecoding is addicting like that. but if you are not reviewing any code and simply vibing then in my expreience you'll eventually get stuck in "its still not working" loops beause you have no other context or insight to provide it other than that. Then you have either accept what you have or throw the whole thing out and/or actually read the code . kind of rules out last option because code is now just too far gone with too many special cases hardcoded because AI sucks at abstraction or real software engineering.
rileymichael
> It’s so good that I complete the work of weeks and months within days
and yet you're pulling 14 hour workdays..
lbrito
So half a dozen junior devs plus 14h workday. That's a ton of surplus value right there. Hope he's getting a cut!
jen729w
Well you can't risk Claude quitting overnight. It forgets everything it did the day before and now you have to start over ... must ... finish ... tonight ... within ... context ... window.
nilslice
i get it... i find the productivity is extremely addictive
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rvnx
Windsurf and Cursor are in the business of reselling ChatGPT and Claude at a loss, but the tech itself is not impressive at all
cpursley
Those wrappers are gonna go away now that there's Claude Code and Googles CLI thing. They are that much better.
warmedcookie
Are they?
Cursor's Accept / Reject feature for each change it makes in each file is nice whereas I have to use a diff tool to review the changes in Claude Code.
Also, if I go down a prompt alley that's a dead end, Cursor has the Restore Checkpoint feature to get back to the original prompt and try a different path. With Claude Code, you had better have committed the code to git, otherwise you end up with a mess you didn't want.
My company pays for both, but I mostly use Cursor unless I know I am doing a new project or some proof of concept, which Claude Code might have an edge on with a more mature TODO list feature.
Unearned5161
I got burned too many times from that Restore Checkpoint thing not working right, maybe it's been fixed by now but seems silly to rely on something thats not a literal tool built for the job (version control), not a good shortcut.
taytus
I agree. I use claude desktop with MCP and Gemini CLI exclusively. I have 20+ years of writing code, and this is awesome!
https://web.archive.org/web/20250711213611/https://www.theve...