If you wanted to start an online business at the turn of the century, you would have had to shell out $100,000 on developers, servers, and data storage.
Ten years later, that same online business might have cost you 1/10th the amount as the cloud allowed us to pay subscription fees for necessary software-as-a-service.
Fast forward to today, and those costs continue to drop.
In fact, anyone with an idea can now use artificial intelligence to design, develop and implement any business idea that comes to mind.
The benefit of this: it will unlock a wave of economic productivity as technology makes it easier to bring new ideas to market.
And OpenAI may have just changed the game for entrepreneurs entirely.
In April, OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round, the largest on record for a private tech company.
Last week, it spent $3 billion of that windfall to buy Windsurf, a tool that helps people write software.
Although it was OpenAI’s biggest acquisition yet, I wouldn’t call it a flashy move. A robotics or quantum computing deal would’ve made bigger headlines.
But it was a revealing move. Because it shows us exactly where OpenAI believes AI is going next.
Specifically, I see this as a major step toward the commodification of software development.
In other words, it tells us that AI is about to make software creation something anyone can do.
Windsurfing to Dominance
Windsurf — which used to be called Codeium — is an AI coding assistant designed to help developers work faster and smarter.
Like better-known tools such as Cursor and Replit, Windsurf is part of a growing trend in software called “vibe coding.”
That’s the term used by former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy to describe a new way of building software.
Instead of planning every line of code in advance, ‘vibe coding’ means working alongside AI to quickly test ideas and build on them. It turns programming into more of a creative process than a strict engineering task.
And this promise is built into Windsurf’s tagline:
Obviously, the ability to “vibe code” means this AI software goes far beyond simple autocomplete.
Windsurf includes tools like Cascade, an “agentic IDE” that can write and refactor multi-file projects, run terminal commands, search the web for help and even delete dead code on its own.
It also has visual input capabilities.
You can upload an image like a hand-drawn sketch or a design mockup, and Windsurf can turn it into working code. And you don’t even need to know HTML or CSS to get started.
That mirrors what OpenAI is building into its latest models, like GPT-4o and its smaller sibling, GPT-4o-mini.
These models are designed to “think with images.” That means they can understand, reason through and respond to visual inputs like diagrams or rough wireframes, even if they’re messy or incomplete.
And that’s exciting because it tells me we’re entering a world where designing software is about to become more democratized.
If you have a good idea for a piece of software, you’ll just be able to describe what you want, and the code will get written for you.
Think about what ChatGPT has already done for writing. It took a skill that used to require years of practice and turned it into a game of prompt engineering.
Now imagine the same thing, but for building a mobile app, a website, a trading algorithm or an internal tool for your business.
This represents a massive change from the way software is created today.
I’m convinced coding is on the fast track to commodification, where you’ll be able to prompt your own software idea without ever needing to know or see the underlying code that supports it.
Windsurf’s AI memory system keeps track of a project’s context, while inline editing makes real-time changes seamless. Together, they help make it possible to build software without ever touching the raw code.
Combine this with GPT-4o’s reasoning capabilities and real-time interactivity, and you can see where OpenAI is headed:
A future where you don’t hire a developer to solve a problem.
You just describe it, and your AI handles the rest.
Here’s My Take
If you’re not convinced yet, just take a look at what OpenAI’s competition is doing in this space.
Microsoft has already made major moves in AI-assisted coding with GitHub Copilot, which is tightly integrated into Visual Studio Code (VS Code).
VS Code is free, and it’s used by millions of developers around the world. It’s probably the most popular code editor on the planet.
In contrast to Microsoft’s strategy, Replit lets users write code directly in their browsers.
It can run that code instantly without any complicated setup or build systems, which positions Replit as a simple, speedy and accessible alternative…
Especially for newer or non-traditional coders.
But neither company has OpenAI’s existing model strength advantages.
The acquisition of Windsurf proves to me that OpenAI wants to own the entire process for AI-native software development.
The company can now build a tight, vertically integrated stack with:
- GPT-4o as the brain…
- Windsurf as the hands…
- And ChatGPT as the voice.
It’s not hard to imagine a world where this stack becomes the default toolkit for creators of all kinds…
Especially those who’ve never written a single line of code.
The only question left is whether OpenAI will cut its competition out of this process.
You see, Windsurf currently supports multiple language models, including Claude from Anthropic. But I imagine they’ll phase out support for these non-OpenAI models over time.
Whatever the company chooses to do, this acquisition gives OpenAI a major edge in a new AI arms race.
It signals a shift from passive AI tools to collaborative AI agents that understand you and act on your behalf.
Like the railroad tycoons of the 19th century, OpenAI is set on owning the rails of how modern software is built.
And if OpenAI controls the rails of software creation…
It controls who gets to ride.
Regards,
Ian King
Chief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing
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