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OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

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864 points rcchen | 5 comments | 11 Jul 25 21:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.824s | source
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submeta ◴[11 Jul 25 22:54 UTC] No.44537605[source]▶
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.

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imiric ◴[12 Jul 25 00:34 UTC] No.44538227[source]▶
I'm curious to see what you've built with all that extra productivity.
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forrestthewoods ◴[12 Jul 25 02:57 UTC] No.44538925[source]▶
No one ever shares their great and shipped products. AI built slop is for generating hype not revenue or users.
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mesmertech ◴[12 Jul 25 08:17 UTC] No.44540255[source]▶
Not the OP but this is smth I've vibecoded using cursor: https://bestphoto.ai/ MRR ~$150. It basically started as a clone of my other site: https://aieasypic.com (MRR 2.5k, 5-8k/mo rev) since I was having trouble keeping code context in mind and claude was pretty bad at doing full features with the tech stack I used for that site(Django BE, NextJS FE) making adding new features a pain, so I completely switched to a stack that claude is very good at NextJS fullstack(trpc BE) and now it can basically one-shot a feature request.

Just putting this here because a lot of times AI coding seems to be dismissed as smth that can't do actual work ie generate revenue, while its more like making money as a solo dev is already pretty rare and if you're working in a corp. instead you're not going to just post your company name when asked for examples on what you're using AI for.

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1. imiric ◴[12 Jul 25 10:22 UTC] No.44540920[source]▶
Those are exactly the kind of AI slop products I would expect to be vibe coded. You've created yet another wrapper around LLM APIs where the business model is charging a premium over existing services. Your revenue depends on the ignorance of customers to not realize they can get the same or better service for cheaper from companies that actually do the hard work. I bet SEO hacking is really important to you.

It's irrefutable that AI tools can be used to create software that generates revenue. What's more difficult is using them to create something that brings actual value into the world.

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2. mesmertech ◴[12 Jul 25 13:10 UTC] No.44541831[source]▶
Sure man, any product you don't like is just "another wrapper". I guess every website is just a wrapper over postgres or wordpress too. I run my own serverless GPU containers on runpod with a combination of comfy and my own fastapi servers using diffusers, not that it'd even matter if I just used some third party APIs. It originally even started as smth that was hacked together using 4x 4070ti supers in my basement that I then moved to runpod. Indiehacking is mostly marketing, nobody cares if you built some technically beautiful thing.

Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do you have products that you made by yourself that are used by hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites, 2 of which I named above

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3. TrackerFF ◴[12 Jul 25 15:46 UTC] No.44542873[source]▶
Eh, it is more like an extended/better UI. Plenty of people are willing to pay for just that.

There are lots of people that only use LLMs in whatever UI the model companies are providing. I have colleagues that will never venture outside the ChatGPT website, even though with some effort they could make their tooling richer by using the API and building some wrapper or UI for it.

4. imiric ◴[12 Jul 25 17:07 UTC] No.44543375[source]▶
Hey, don't blame me for the fact that your sites are indistinguishable from hundreds of others that offer the same service. Everything I said is logical to assume, since all these sites look the same.

Good on you for learning how AI tools work, but there's no way for anyone to tell whether your backend is self-managed or not, and practically it doesn't really matter. I reckon your users would get better results from proprietary models that expose an API than self-hosted open source ones, but then your revenue would probably be lower.

> Also its easy to criticize from the sidelines but, do you have products that you made by yourself that are used by hundreds of thousands of people? I have 5 such sites, 2 of which I named above

That's a lazy defense considering anyone is free to criticize anyone else's work, especially if they're familiar with the industry. Just like food and film critics don't need to be chefs and movie producers.

But I'll give you credit for actually building and launching something that generates revenue. I admit that that is more than I have managed with my personal projects.

5. senko ◴[12 Jul 25 17:21 UTC] No.44543475[source]▶
> yet another wrapper around LLM APIs

Patio11 famously built, ran for a number of years (profitably) and then sold a "wrapper for a random number generator" (bingocardcreator.com)

Value is in the eye of the beholder, and only tangentially related to the technical complexity or ingenuity.