The value in the windsurf acquisition isn't the code they've written, it's the ability to see what people are coding and use that information to build better LLMs. -- Product development.

Indeed. But keep in mind they weren't just buying the tooling - they get the team, the brand, and the positional authority as well. OpenAI could have spun up a team to build an agent code IDE, and they would have been starting on the back foot with users, would have been compared to Cursor/Windsurf...

The price tag is hefty but I figure it'll work out for them on the backside because they won't have to fight so hard to capture TAM.