[HN Gopher] Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf
___________________________________________________________________
Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf
Author : alazsengul
Score : 310 points
Date : 2025-07-14 18:07 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cognition.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (cognition.ai)
| samyok wrote:
| Important context from the tweet:
|
| > This transaction is structured so that 100% of Windsurf
| employees will participate financially. They will also have all
| vesting cliffs waived and will receive fully accelerated vesting
| for their work to date.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Not important, marketing speak unless it comes with numbers.
| "We'll split 100% of $10 across every employee" is just as much
| a possibility as the windfall their PR team has convinced you
| of.
| oytis wrote:
| So they will get stocks of a company that ceases to exist
| basically
| akavi wrote:
| Is this purely the rump company left over from the Google pseudo-
| acquistion? Or does this mean that deal fell through?
|
| Does this represent confirmation that there was no pro-rata
| compensation to common share holders in the Google deal?
|
| I just have _so many questions_.
| xnx wrote:
| And what is Google "paying $2.4 billion in license fees" to use
| Windsurf's technology for, and to who? Does Windsurf have any
| technology?
| mattlondon wrote:
| I suspect it is more a "licence" for the things in the
| staff's heads for those who were poached.
| lunarboy wrote:
| Windsurf founding team is already at Google
| neural_thing wrote:
| Galaxy brain move by cognition
| annodomini2019 wrote:
| What does this actually mean for the product? Huge fan of the
| plugin on Jetbrains products...
| k3nz0 wrote:
| Which plugin?
| annodomini2019 wrote:
| The Windsurf plugin!
| williamzeng0 wrote:
| Transparently I'm a founder building a plugin that's like
| "Cursor for JetBrains IDEs", if you're an windsurf user you
| might like us:
| https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/26860-sweep-ai
| annodomini2019 wrote:
| How would you describe your stance towards security? I'm an
| enterprise user so it'd have to clear a high bar with our
| security team
| williamzeng0 wrote:
| I think the two big things are privacy mode on by default
| and zero data retention by default.
|
| No code or prompts are stored unless you opt-in. We also
| have on-prem deployment options but it's much more
| expensive.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| What's left ???.
| chews wrote:
| the hosed employees that actually built a great product while
| their leadership sings "go on take the money and run" on their
| mega yacht.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Presumably the employees were compensated fairly for their
| work while they worked there?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| And they're also now compensated by the purchase by
| Cognition as post says
| asadotzler wrote:
| Why? Why presume that? These employees got screwed. They
| were left with a shell of a company that got bought for
| pennies on the dollar while their executives and executive
| pets all got massive payouts moving to Google. It was a
| total dick move and the result will be a flight from
| startups because who wants to bust their asses for an
| executive team that will leave them behind when the payout
| arrives.
| kevindamm wrote:
| The company was intact after key employees moved to Alphabet,
| and importantly there was a service contract to use Windsurf,
| so apparently Google will be paying Cognition, ultimately, now.
| xnx wrote:
| > there was a service contract to use Windsurf
|
| I wonder what the terms were there. Hard for me to imagine
| why Google would've included that in the deal.
| kevindamm wrote:
| I'm just speculating but you'd get to use the IP without
| needing to negotiate overmuch about it, if they're using
| GCP or can be retrofitted to then you could set prices at a
| discount but claim a market rate when discussing growth of
| usage, which is great at quarterly earnings report time..
| or even just as an ease-of-transition to expand into
| Windsurf's existing user base? There are plenty of reasons,
| including negotiation leverage, optics, or even just
| appeasment to the founders or board that the original
| project doesn't get immediately destroyed.
| _--__--__ wrote:
| The Devin name/branding is so toxic that nobody will try their
| current product offerings, so the hollowed out shell of a
| respected company is actually fine for their needs.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Users and enterprise contracts?
| jeanlucas wrote:
| This is so confusing
| makin wrote:
| I was a bit confused as to what "Cognition" was, but they're the
| makers of Devin (edit: that just got added to the title, for
| reference), so that makes sense. Just buying the competition, the
| only surprise is they had more money to spend than the big ones.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| As far as I recall they were first to market with the "AI
| software engineer" promise.
| brentm wrote:
| Well Google did also just pay $2.5B to license Windsurf in
| perpetuity. Cognition is probably spending a lot less than that
| for just whatever it left after that type of a deal. Remaining
| team members, etc.
| mkagenius wrote:
| > The acquisition includes Windsurf's IP, product, trademark
| and brand, and strong business.
|
| So, Google will be paying $2.5B to Devin guys?
| tedivm wrote:
| No, as some portion of the $2.5b goes to Windsurf
| investors.
|
| Basically, Google bought the top talent from the company.
| This cash was used (according to articles I read this
| morning) in part to pay directly out to shareholders, and
| in exchange Google got the top talent from the company and
| a license for the software (probably mostly so their new
| talent didn't have to worry about NDA, non-compete, and
| patent challenges).
|
| Since this money went to shareholders, not to the company
| bank, and since top talent fleeing the company reduces the
| value of the company the overall value of Windsurf likely
| went down as part of the Google deal. This in turn likely
| made it cheap enough for the remainder to be purchased by
| Cognition.
| xnx wrote:
| > Google did also just pay $2.5B to license Windsurf in
| perpetuity
|
| Could there have been a clause that made this invalid in case
| of acquisition?
| wmf wrote:
| IANAL but you'd have to be pretty dumb to include that
| clause.
| physix wrote:
| This looks to me like the smoking gun on a type of
| acquisition that circumvents regulatory oversight, primarily
| driven by the "need for speed":
|
| https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-
| acquisition-e3...
|
| which I first saw here
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44553257
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Circumvents regulatory oversight and also shafts 99% of the
| employees. Seems to be a backdoor way to acquire the key
| founders/leaders and IP (via a perpetual license) while
| leaving behind a desiccated husk of rank and file
| employees, customers, and obligations.
| bix6 wrote:
| Can the new buyers revoke that license?
| amenghra wrote:
| "Had more money to spend" => it could be a little money and a
| large amount of stock.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Had it been the reverse, they would have announced the
| purchase price.
| dgunay wrote:
| kind of funny that no one seems to know them by name, only by
| the infamously panned reception of their main product
| esafak wrote:
| One benefit of separating your brands from your company is
| you can try again without the stigma of your failures :)
| Aurornis wrote:
| > the only surprise is they had more money to spend than the
| big ones
|
| The sale price for Windsurf was likely significantly lower than
| the original acquisition plans.
|
| It didn't go to $0 like some predicted, but it was never going
| to be as valuable as it was before the executives bailed on it.
| htrp wrote:
| so devin gets the leftover remains of windsurf to fix their
| agentic AI ide that wasn't working in the first place?
| rvz wrote:
| yes.
| badgersnake wrote:
| So some VCs got rinsed for Google's leftovers.
| krat0sprakhar wrote:
| Wait, so Google picks up the talent, and Devin picks up the
| brand/product? This is so confusing!
| TIPSIO wrote:
| I think it's safe to say don't use Windsurf. There are so many
| other options.
| bicx wrote:
| Unfortunately this seems to be true. I like Windsurf, but
| these days I just use it as a harness for running Claude Code
| while still retaining decent code completions.
| OldfieldFund wrote:
| Try Gemini CLI too. Free and I like it more than Claude
| Code.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| How do you do the nice line-by-line (or section-by-
| section) before/after handling in a CLI tool?
| hobs wrote:
| It has an external editor option (which I havent tried)
| the cli interface by default is pretty bad for medium to
| large code changes.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| This is the final fix. I'm confident this will resolve
| all the errors.
|
| [API Error: got status: INTERNAL.
| {"error":{"code":500,"message":"An internal error has
| occurred. Please retry or report in https://developers.ge
| nerativeai.google/guide/troubleshooting..."}}]```
| oytis wrote:
| The talent stays with Devin. Google has got the CEO. Not sure
| why they need a CEO, maybe Pichai wants to retire
| rvz wrote:
| Must have been acquired for an extreme discount far from the $3B
| offer from OpenAI and Windsurf's (alleged) valuation of $1.3BN.
|
| Cognition being worth $4B with Devin being raced to zero by
| Claude Code also undercutting both Windsurf and Cursor have a
| very steep hill to climb.
|
| Having both Devin and Windsurf will just make them raise more
| money as they burn through their operational costs.
| seatac76 wrote:
| Google already paid $2.4B out of the $3B OpenAI deal, to what I
| imagine is Cognition now. Cognition must have spent low 100s of
| Millions max.
| xnx wrote:
| > Google already paid $2.4B
|
| This is unclear. $2.4B was for licensing and compensation.
| Why would Google have agreed to pay any significant amount to
| the Windsurf leftovers?
| klohto wrote:
| Having been acquired by Google, there is always a leeway for the
| execs to take the employees with them. Google is a weak
| negotiator when they NEED something.
|
| On the other hand, I can imagine the execs taking Google golden
| handcuffs while trying to close the Cognition deal so the
| employees are made whole or maybe even on better terms than if
| they all went to Google.
| isodev wrote:
| I'm really confused now. Also, is there really that much of a
| transformative difference between Windsurf and say OpenAI/Claude
| etc to warrant this crazy valuations?
| xnx wrote:
| > crazy valuations
|
| I haven't seen anything to indicate what was paid for what's
| left of Windsurf.
| isodev wrote:
| I was also referring to the $2.5B Google paid. I can't
| imagine what could possibly be the value they're hoping to
| get
| xnx wrote:
| I'd love to learn more about that arrangement. Maybe
| Google's terms indicated that the "licensing fees" portion
| of "$2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation"
| are void if Windsurf gets acquired.
| brulard wrote:
| They got the top talent from there with the technology and
| they can continue on that or be used for other AI projects,
| right?
| guluarte wrote:
| I'm also confused why Devin is worth billions
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| For real. According to the marketing material. Couldn't Devon
| just whip up a windsurf competitor in minutes?
| codingwagie wrote:
| the founder went to harvard, is basically the answer
| anticensor wrote:
| Devin's whole business model is predicated upon replacing
| programmers with minimum wage AI agents.
| guluarte wrote:
| That'll be cool only if Devin actually worked.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Who decides for much a company is worth?
| alwinaugustin wrote:
| I use cursor
| seatac76 wrote:
| I hope Windsurf employees made some money in this whole
| kerfuffle. Would be terrible if they got left out of the payday.
| xnx wrote:
| The ones that went to Google did! I don't know if the remaining
| employees are getting anything out of this acquisition.
| bradly wrote:
| Very clearly called out in the article: > To
| that end, Jeff and I worked together to ensure that every
| single employee is treated with respect and well taken care of
| in this transaction. Specifically: > 100% of Windsurf
| employees will participate financially in this deal >
| 100% of Windsurf employees will have vesting cliffs waived for
| their work to date > 100% of Windsurf employees will
| receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date
| asadotzler wrote:
| Not clearly called out. That call out is as clear as mud. We
| have no idea how much if any money the left behind employees
| will get and it's almost certainly far less than they would
| have got if their execs had held out for a deal that
| benefited everyone instead of their selfish and damaging to
| the entire startup ecosystem deal with Google.
| jspann wrote:
| > 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially in this
| deal
|
| > 100% of Windsurf employees will have vesting cliffs waived for
| their work to date
|
| > 100% of Windsurf employees will receive fully accelerated
| vesting for their work to date
|
| This sounds like a happy ending for the employees of Windsurf and
| a good deal for Cognition
| xnx wrote:
| I'm not so sure. No telling what the purchase price was.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Or how much of it is in Cognition stock.
| krasin wrote:
| > This sounds like a happy ending for the employees of Windsurf
| and a good deal for Cognition
|
| The employees were robbed from having a big cash exit. Illiquid
| stock options from Windsurf were converted to illiquid stock
| options of Devin.
|
| What's worse is that the well is now poisoned. I would advise
| against joining startups from now on, because I think that
| there's no upside for employees anymore.
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| I don't think so. If your shares dropped 90% overnight you
| wouldn't be excited to have your vesting cliff waived
| bravetraveler wrote:
| _" Devin's on first"_ just doesn't work the same
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I wonder if we'll ever stop to ask ourselves if faster and faster
| output of software is actually a good thing for the world. Or
| will we just continue because it's just what we do nowadays in
| civilization to get ahead?
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| ahead of what? ahead of generating ugly and mostly usable masks
| over the same data. I'm in favor of AI but it seems to me that
| no one really stopped asking himself what real problems people
| have and how to actually fix them
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I think so but not for the reason that you think.
|
| See, most closed source software really just pisses me off of
| ideological reasons, I just like to tinker with things and just
| having the _possibility_ to do so by being provided the source
| code really helps my mind feel happy I guess.
|
| So I "vibe coded" a game that I used to play and some projects
| that I was curious about and I just wanted to tinker too. sure
| the game and code have bugs.
|
| Also with the help of AI, I feel like I can tinker about things
| that I don't know too much about and get a decent distance
| ahead. You might think that I am an AI advocate by reading this
| comment, but quite the contrary, I personally think that this
| is the only positive quality that AI helped in quite
| substantially.
|
| But at what cost? The job market has sunk a large hole and
| nobody's hiring the junior devs because everybody feels better
| doing some AI deals than hiring junior devs.
|
| My hunch is that senior devs are extremely in demand and are
| paid decently and so will retire on average early too. Then,
| there would be a huge gap b/w senior and juniors, because
| nobody's hiring the junior engineers now, so who will become
| the senior engineers if nobody got hired in the first place. I
| really hope that most companies actually realize that the AI
| game is quite a funny game really, most companies are too
| invested into it to realize that really, open source AI will
| catch up and there is just no moat with AI and building with AI
| or just doing stuff with AI isn't that meaningfully significant
| as they think it is as shown by recent studies.
| gtsop wrote:
| > that senior devs are extremely in demand
|
| Is this true? I am not seeing salaries rising, the demand
| seems to be met. But maybe I'm wrong.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Sorry I guess, I may have been incorrect in that regards. I
| actually just meant as in comparison to juniors really. And
| I personally felt that way from what I've heard from all
| the people, I am not sure too about salary rising but still
| I always thought that seniors are getting on with more and
| more responsibility since juniors aren't getting hired and
| so I thought that they were more compensated and I am
| pretty sure that I heard it somewhere and I think I just
| repeated that.
|
| Also maybe I felt this way because of 100 Million $ and the
| 30 Billion $ acquisition by Zuckerberg I guess
|
| I might ask AI (Oh the irony) and here is the chat https://
| chatgpt.com/share/68756188-d374-8011-9f23-6860d6b1db... and
| here is one of the major source of this I suppose
|
| https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/senior-hiring-is-surging-
| wil...
|
| And I would like to quote a part from the hackerrank ie.
| Taken in isolation, this might suggest a cautious but
| healthy rebound. But viewed through a 2025 lens, a deeper
| pattern emerges: teams are leaning hard into experience,
| and leaving early-career talent behind.
| ecto wrote:
| A lot of people are asking that question, and the answer is
| emphatically yes. All improvements to the human condition are
| rooted in technology, and software is technology. Who's to say
| the latest advancements aren't some tech tree precursor to cure
| an ailment impacting millions - how could you argue against
| that? The genie is out of the bottle.
| xnx wrote:
| Sounds like one of those "Two turkeys don't make an eagle."
| situations.
| agigao wrote:
| Devin/Cognition?
|
| All right, cancelled.
| markbao wrote:
| Edit: nvm, see replies
| TZubiri wrote:
| I think google is buying windsurf, they are leaving 100% of
| assets and some employees, and windsurf is buying that 100m in
| assets + taking the leftover employee liability.
|
| Microsoft poached the talent, devin Co. Picks up the scraps
| hadlock wrote:
| "Acquiring" is often synonymous with "merger". Technically the
| surviving company acquires the other, but effectively it's a
| merger. Not always, but it's not uncommon to see two weaker
| companies merge in a competitive landscape to survive. It also
| counts as a liquidity event allowing employees some financial
| levers.
| muzz wrote:
| But these seem to be two well-funded companies? I.e. both
| with $100M+ funding within the last 12 months
| xnx wrote:
| > How does this transaction make sense?
|
| The fact that it doesn't make sense with those numbers almost
| surely indicates those numbers are misleading.
|
| > Google paid a $2.4 billion licensing fee
|
| This is the reported number for licensing and compensation, but
| who knows what the terms really were.
|
| > Cognition's valuation is $4 billion
|
| Doubtful
| john_moscow wrote:
| They probably got what got left of it in a cashless deal.
| Basically, the shareholders got to exchange X shares in a
| fatally wounded company into Y shares in a still-alive startup.
| The economic sense depends on the ratio between X and Y, but if
| the board was close to panicking due to recent events,
| Cognition probably got a good deal.
| aiCodeMonkey wrote:
| Uhh so where does the 2.4B go to? For the "licensing" rights but
| without equity to Windsurf? Does the whole 2.4B get distributed
| amongst the talent that Google acquired or is it shared amongst
| all Windsurf employees?
| asadotzler wrote:
| Windsurf employees left behind by their executives get none of
| that Google money. It went to the selfish exec team and a few
| top employees that abandoned their teams and projects for
| Google's cash, and what didn't go to those selfish jerks went
| to Windsurf's investors. The rank and file that were abandoned
| by their leadership got totally screwed. Startup executives
| will never again be trusted to deal fairly with the people who
| spend their opportunity trying to make that particular startup
| work rather than some other, or simply going to work for an
| incumbent. This deal probably did more damage to the tech
| startup ecosystem than anything I've seen in my 25 years in
| Silicon Valley.
| aiCodeMonkey wrote:
| did the team that joined deepmind forfeit their equity or
| will the cognition acquisition basically allow them to get a
| double payout from their equity?
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _OpenAI's Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf's CEO is going to
| Google_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44536988 - July
| 2025 (679 comments))
|
| _Attended Windsurf 's Build Night 18 hours before founders
| joined Google DeepMind_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44539884 - July 2025 (1
| comment)
| jsemrau wrote:
| Cognition also works with Goldman Sachs now.
| amanleenp wrote:
| Wait, is this final? Has Cursor or Augment Code or the next big
| Coding Assistant made their offer already?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I totally missed the puck with this one. There was a time where
| Cursor did not have the agent feel of a true AI pair-programming
| buddy. Windsurf had that magical aspect, and I totally thought
| they would destroy Cursor. But it took Cursor about 2 weeks by my
| recollection to add agent mode, and ultimately I went back to
| Cursor because of their better WSL2 integration.
|
| For those brief 2 weeks, Windsurf felt like the SOTA tool. Crazy
| how the winds change.
| servercobra wrote:
| Same experience. I was using Windsurf for a couple of weeks,
| but felt like the editor wasn't as nice to use as Cursor, so
| features an agent could handle went to Windsurf and pair coding
| was more with Cursor. Once Cursor got agent mode, I haven't
| really touched Windsurf.
|
| Feels like a new SOTA tool every couple weeks. Heck, the post
| below this is about a new agentic IDE.
| _jab wrote:
| Let this be a learning lesson in judging these deals based on
| partial information. Kudos to the Google, Windsurf, and Cognition
| teams for keeping all of these deals under wraps until
| announcement (OpenAI could learn something...), but even so it's
| likely that we the public will never learn every detail of what
| transpired. I've seen a lot of harsh, misguided takes over the
| past few days, like that the Windsurf founders screwed over their
| employees, or that OpenAI reneged on the deal. In this case, this
| seems like a happy ending for all parties involved: congrats to
| the Windsurf team!
| objclxt wrote:
| > I've seen a lot of harsh, misguided takes over the past few
| days, like that the Windsurf founders screwed over their
| employees [...] In this case, this seems like a happy ending
| for all parties involved
|
| There is no evidence at all in the announcement that is the
| case. It just says "100% of Windsurf employees will participate
| financially in this deal". What "participate financially" looks
| like is not elaborated upon.
|
| It is possible you're right. It's also equally possible that
| the founders have still screwed over their employees, we just
| don't know. Nothing in this post supports either position.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >It is possible you're right. It's also equally possible that
| the founders have still screwed over their employees, we just
| don't know. Nothing in this post supports either position.
|
| In the lack of evidence, its okay to assume the most likely
| scenario, which is the executives & shareholders will make
| out like bandits and everyone else is likely to at best, get
| pennies.
| mring33621 wrote:
| pizza party
| akavi wrote:
| If my understanding is correct, this is still a much worse deal
| for employees than if Windsurf's exec team had negotiated a
| "standard" "accelerated vesting, common conversion" acquisition
| with Google.
|
| Presumably the "payout" from Cognition is at a lower nominal
| value and in illiquid (and IMO overvalued) shares in Cognition
| rather than cash.
| drew-y wrote:
| > OpenAI could learn something...
|
| Did OpenAI ever actually announce anything publicly regarding a
| potential windsurf acquisition?
|
| AFAICT most of the reporting was based on rumors or leaks. But
| they never actually announced an acquisition. Seems like
| Bloomberg may have made an oopsie here.
| BiggerChungus wrote:
| You're talking like the founders orchestrated this deal to
| cognition all along.
|
| that's absolutely not the case. they ejected and the remaining
| executive team dealt with the sale over the weekend.
| stefan_ wrote:
| > Kudos to the Google, Windsurf, and Cognition teams for
| keeping all of these deals under wraps until announcement
|
| Geez is the cognitive distortion field active again? Even Grok
| could figure this one out.
| conartist6 wrote:
| I hit myself in the head as hard as I could without causing
| permanent damage
| gtsop wrote:
| Care to explain? I am honestly clueless
| gsibble wrote:
| This is fantastic news. Especially the way they are structuring
| the equity payout.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Will the remaining employees not bought out and brought over to
| Microsoft get a windfall in this deal even if they're stakes
| haven't vested?
| ls_stats wrote:
| Isn't Devin AI basically a scam, selling an "AI Software
| Engineer" when no such thing exists.
| servercobra wrote:
| We're using it consistently to put out (albeit smaller)
| features.
| mindwok wrote:
| Any examples? Curious what you let it rip on and what it can
| actually do.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Hello Cognition AI,
|
| My name is Devin; it has been for many decades now. I'm
| embarrassed to see you've named your product after me. It has
| already prompted uncomfortable jokes at my expense, and I'm sure
| there will be more. I now have newfound empathy for people named
| Alexa.
|
| For instance, people have made jokes about my name in interviews,
| and it's embarrassing for me, and thus awkward for everyone, and
| awkward interactions make it objectively less likely that I will
| get job offers.
|
| I don't think any product should be named after people. Please
| change the name of Devin.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Plenty of men would love to have their name be a euphemism for
| eroticism.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Meanwhile, Claudes are getting ahead!
| kubb wrote:
| Unpopular, controversial take: there should be an LSP extension
| that lets CLI agents, like Claude Code show diffs in the editor,
| and also one for completions, and sending snippets back to the
| CLI.
|
| That, by itself, would obliterate the entire value of Windsurf or
| Cursor or whatever. The fact that Google has this kind of money
| and spends it on dubious "talent" (though none of these people
| are known in the community) is a testament to how overfunded tech
| companies are compared to the value that they provide.
| abletonlive wrote:
| "overfunded" is a weird way to talk about a tech company that
| is incredibly profitable.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Revenue is a funding source. Companies with too much money
| sometimes made really dumb decisions with that money.
|
| The fact that one division of Google is wildly profitable
| does not exempt other parts of the company from criticism of
| their financially dubious choices.
| abletonlive wrote:
| Net profit can't be used as a measure of both "funding" and
| "value generation" while saying that a company is
| "overfunded" because it doesn't provide enough "value".
| Come back to your senses.
| brulard wrote:
| It is known there were many developers without really much
| work to do that were hired only to be denied to competitors.
| Maybe it was cleaned up in the meantime
| kubb wrote:
| It's fair to suggest a different word or phrasing, but you're
| coming off as hostile, not constructive.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > That, by itself, would obliterate the entire value of
| Windsurf or Cursor or whatever.
|
| Have used Cursor and I know that there is quite a bit of value
| between the model and the chat input box and it will be similar
| to Claude Code or Codex, it's what makes this agentic, it's
| just accessed through a different interface. So from that
| perspective, Cursor makes sense for folks that are already in
| the VSCode environment.
| brulard wrote:
| On the contrary, I'm already in the VSCode environment and I
| would hate to have to switch to Cursor. Doesn't matter that
| it is a fork, I don't want a fork for every extension of my
| workflow. I used Cline and now Claude code integrated to
| VSCode, and I don't think I'm missing much by not switching
| to Cursor.
| retinaros wrote:
| Windsurf is the first company that moved from IDE to training
| and trained good models. Unfortunately in code good models are
| not enough to win against claude 4. Any wrapper constraining
| the model is also doomed to fail.
| d1egoaz wrote:
| This already exists via MCP
|
| > For other IDEs: The protocol is editor-agnostic. Any editor
| that can run a WebSocket server and implement the MCP tools can
| integrate with Claude Code.
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1234
| https://github.com/coder/claudecode.nvim/blob/da78309eaa2ca2...
|
| Example in Emacs, this is how I use claude-code:
| https://github.com/manzaltu/claude-code-ide.el
| kubb wrote:
| This is great!
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Unpopular, controversial take..._
|
| Could you please avoid juicing a random comment this way?
| HenriNext wrote:
| Claude Code can already show diffs in JetBrains IDEs and VSCode
| ('/ide' command connects the CLI/TUI to plugin/extension
| running in the IDE-side).
|
| It can also access the IDEs' real-time errors and warnings, not
| just compile output ('ideDiagnostics' tool), see your active
| editor selection, cursor position, etc.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Except the Windsurf team is already moving in that direction...
| 827a wrote:
| Does anyone actually use Windsurf? I know a ton of people on
| Cursor, Cline, Roo, Claude Code... but zero people in my
| engineering circles have even mentioned trying Windsurf.
| herval wrote:
| For me it was substantially better than Cursor. Their RAG/code
| indexing/whatever implementation is better (Cursor seems to
| completely fall apart on larger codebases, unless you keep a
| very detailed cursorrules file). The cmd+tab was also
| substantially better. Plus it's cheaper than using Cline.
|
| But with all this changing of hands, I'm not sure I can trust
| it going forward at all, so I guess it's back to looking for
| alternatives.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| It has been my go to IDE over all others.
|
| They had released their own model which was free and good
| enough a couple of weeks back.
|
| Obviously will need to look for alternatives.
| lqstuart wrote:
| I tried it once and couldn't understand why it exists. Neither
| windsurf nor cursor seem to offer anything Cline doesn't, and
| the real Microsoft developed tools like Pylance are also broken
| and can't be replaced with shitty AI.
| pplante wrote:
| I was using Windsurf in Pycharm, until I switched to Claude
| Code / Gemini CLI last week. I am also finding that Copilot
| with Sonnet 4 is pretty on par to Windsurf.
| lqstuart wrote:
| Windsurf already had sold their code and most of their devs to
| DeepMind. The company is worthless, idk what Devin thinks they're
| buying.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Clearly you are more informed wrt to remaining IP and talent
| than the CEO of Devin.
|
| Clearly.
| kamhh94 wrote:
| What a thoughtfully written letter. You have to respect great
| leaders when they communicate in this eloquent, respectful
| manner.
| pm90 wrote:
| I think the amount of turmoil around these deals is giving more
| weight to the possibility that we're in a massive bubble thats
| quite divorced from any kind of fundamentals. Sooner or later the
| bubbles gonna burst.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yeah, I wonder if there are parallels to server-less tools of a
| few years ago.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Remember that the web also had a bubble that popped and look at
| where are we now with Google, Amazon, Meta...
|
| I think that there is a bubble but it's shaped more like the
| web bubble and less like the crypto bubble.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| "Web" is such a broad category. Quite a leap from LLM
| wrappers.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Well, LLMs are themselves very broad. They encompass
| everything from web search to everything that you could
| automate yourself but don't have the time.
|
| I don't LLM capacities have to reach human-equivalent for
| their uses to multiply for years to come.
|
| I don't LLM technology as it exists can reach AGI by the
| simple addition of more compute power and moreover, I don't
| think adding computer necessarily is going to provide
| proportionate benefit (indeed, someone pointed-out that the
| current talent race acknowledges that brute-force has
| likely had it's day and some other "magic" is needed.
| Unlike brute-force, technical advances can't be summoned at
| will).
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Well, LLMs are themselves very broad.
|
| I think overstating their broad-ness is core to the hype-
| cycle going on. Everyone wants to believe--or wants a
| _buyer_ to believe--that a machine which can _grow
| documents about_ X is just as good (and reliable) as
| actually creating X.
| ACCount36 wrote:
| "Brute force" is only held back by economics and hardware
| limitations.
|
| There are still massive gains to be had from scaling up -
| but frontier training runs have converged on "about the
| largest model that we can fit into our existing hardware
| for training and inference". Going bigger than that comes
| with non-linear cost increases. The next generations of
| AI hardware are expected to push that envelope.
|
| The reason why major AI companies prioritize things like
| reasoning modes and RLVR over scaling the base models up
| is that reasoning and RLVR give real world performance
| gains cheaper and faster. Once scaling up becomes
| cheaper, or once the gains you can squeeze out of RLVR
| deplete, they'll get back to scaling up once again.
| macNchz wrote:
| As with any investing there's a risk appetite/timescale
| component to thinking about this stuff. Lots of companies
| went to zero in the dot-com bubble. Even Amazon was down over
| 90% between the end of 1999 and late 2001, and took until
| 2007 to recover to its high. NASDAQ overall took 15 years to
| return to its March 2000 high. Some incredible returns to be
| had if you waited it all out, to be sure, but it's hard to
| know what the interim looks like.
| broast wrote:
| It's taken Cisco 25 years to recover
| pqtyw wrote:
| Intel never recovered. Well they did if you count
| dividends but still..
| Yizahi wrote:
| Yeah, only those evolved a lot from the initial products
| everyone hyped and products people hyped in 2000 are extinct
| or free. And I still don't understand where Facebook makes
| money. :)
|
| Regarding LLMs there are two concerns - current products
| don't have any killer feature to lock in customers, so people
| can easily jump ship. And diminishing returns, if there won't
| be a clear progress with models, then free/small, maybe even
| local models will fill most of people needs.
|
| People are speculating that even OAI is burning more money
| than they make, it's hard to say what will happen if customer
| churn will increase. Like for example me - I never paid for
| LLMs specifically, and didn't use them in any major way, but
| I used free Claude for testing how it works, maybe
| incorporating in the workflow. I may transitioned to the paid
| tier in the future. But recently someone noted that Google
| cloud storage includes "free" Gemini Pro and I've switched to
| it, because why not, I'm already paying for the storage part.
| And there was nothing keeping me with Anthropic. Actually
| that name alone is revolting imo. I wrote this as an example
| that when monsters like Google or Microsoft or Apple would
| start bundling their solutions (and advertise them properly,
| unlike Google), then specialized companies including OAI will
| feel very very bad, with their insane expenses and
| investments.
| jahewson wrote:
| You don't understand how the world's 5th largest company by
| market cap makes money and this is evidence of...
| something?
| Yizahi wrote:
| That was a joke, mostly unrelated to the main point -
| about LLM corporations' finances.
| andruby wrote:
| > And I still don't understand where Facebook makes money.
| :)
|
| If that's a genuine question: Facebooks sells ads,
| information and influence (eg. to political parties). It's
| a very profitable enterprise. In 2024 Meta made $164B in
| revenue, and they're still growing at ~16% year-over-year.
|
| [0] https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-
| release-deta...
| meta_ai_x wrote:
| The dot-com was a bubble because investors pulled money and
| belief at the first sign of trouble.
|
| The landscape has changed dramatically now. Investors and VCs
| have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the
| payoffs are massive.
|
| We also have more automatic, retail and foreign money flowing
| into the market. Buy the dip is a phenomenon that didn't exist
| at the scale it is now.
|
| Pre-2015 if Big Money pulled out, the market was guaranteed to
| fail, but now retailers sometimes have longer views and belief
| (on people like Musk, Altman) than institutions and they
| continue to prop it.
|
| So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now. Yes, history
| repeats, but doesn't with the exact time or price points
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| > Investors and VCs have learnt
|
| lol. Investors and VCs have no idea what they're doing
| meta_ai_x wrote:
| lol is a coping mechanism for the poor. If you really think
| top VCs / investors haven't learnt the long-term importance
| of staying the course, then you know nothing about the
| industry and mostly being influenced by popular social
| media posts shitting on the investor class.
|
| There is a reason Anthropic/OpenAI and many startups are
| given much much longer ropes to be profitable than in the
| 2000 era when VCs pulled the rug the first opportunity of
| trouble
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| If VCs knew what they were doing, they'd have real jobs
| meta_ai_x wrote:
| There are always shitty 20% operators in every industry.
| They won't make money and get weeded out.
|
| Delusional to apply this to top operators (and at the
| same breath complain about Rich getting Richer)
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I have yet to be pleasantly surprised by the alleged
| collective wisdom of Wallstreet. I would hope that you
| are right, and that our corporate masters are smarter
| than I give them credit for, but I'm not going to hold my
| breath
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Allocating capital might be the "realest" job in
| capital...ism.
| sealeck wrote:
| The thing that was most disillusioning for me here was
| SVB -- failure to apply basic principles of banking (i.e.
| they never really had a plan for central bank interest
| rates to change more than +-1%). Not just that the VC
| types running a bank weren't able to do so, but that such
| a large number of tech companies held all their cash on
| hand in a bank account (and didn't deposit anything in
| another bank, or a money-market fund/t-bills).
| asadotzler wrote:
| It is foolish to compare to the dot com boom and bust. At
| least when that bubble burst we still had the global
| broadband internet that it built. When this bubble bursts,
| we'll have next to nothing to show for it.
| sealeck wrote:
| We will have a mountain of GPUs!
| ghc wrote:
| Nothing except massive data centers full of GPU compute
| resources paid for by VC money. Wait, that's actually
| pretty similar...
| fnord77 wrote:
| gpus go obsolete faster than fiber backbone equipment
| threetonesun wrote:
| I'm starting to think that making a bunch of tech
| companies the most valuable companies on Earth, and tying
| their value to everyone's ability to retire so the number
| must always go up was perhaps not the wisest thing to
| have done.
| rightbyte wrote:
| They could close shop and you could print the money and
| give to the retirements fonds and everyone would be
| better off. Maybe Apple would be missed.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| We have AI, a marvel that might change the arc of humanity
| and an epoch in our timeline. Fire, wheel etc. and AI.
| namesbc wrote:
| I'll choose the wheel over using a country's worth of
| electricity to parrot unusable AI slop to gullible fools.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Is AI not useful to you? I've sped up my SWE work
| significantly (10x). Not sure why the cynicism.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| OP didn't reference the dot-com bubble though...
| cakeface wrote:
| dot-com bubble companies were not good companies. They either
| built something that was not novel so it could be copied, or
| had insufficient value to monetize. We'll see the same with
| current AI.
|
| Similar to the invention of the web, AI is not a bubble. Real
| value has been created.
| ACCount36 wrote:
| Cisco was the quintessential dot-com bubble company. Back
| then, it was what Nvidia is today: at the very spearhead of
| investors rallying behind the Internet.
|
| "Good company" is subjective, but to argue that the company
| that built the backbone of modern web didn't make anything
| novel or monetizable is a bit short-sighted, don't you
| find?
| qwytw wrote:
| Also there are no early IPOs. Very few people can buy stocks
| in these companies which changes the dynamics significantly.
| Note sure what's the point of talking about the stock market
| this much when for almost everyone the only way to get any
| exposureis through Nvidia or other hardware companies and
| maybe MS/Google/AWS.
|
| > Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and
| growth companies, the payoffs are massive.
|
| Well... yes and no. 2021 wasn't that long ago.
|
| > So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now
|
| The stock market and other financial stuff is of course
| different. The fundamental trend not necessarily though. It
| took awhile for anyone to figure out how to directly build a
| highly profitable internet based business back then for AI it
| seems more or less the same so far.
| wmf wrote:
| How about that Anthropic revenue though.
| burnte wrote:
| I've begun to think some bubbles are good for the economy
| overall. In the dotcom days anyone with an idea and a domain
| name could get funding. I myself worked for a company that
| nabbed 7x more funding than needed but still failed due to poor
| leadership. I had reservations about the founder but thought I
| could help drive things, but he was even more absent than I
| ever anticipated.
|
| A lot of VCs and PEs lost a lot of money during the crash. This
| means a lot of capital was spent in the economy, generating a
| lot of good activity, and the companies that failed then also
| put a lot more capital back into the economy through
| bankruptcies. Other businesses can pick up talent, IP, and
| assets for cheap, and everyone can learn from the failures.
| While losing that money isn't great for VCs, what they got was
| a very valuable education to be better stewards of their
| investments, and pick better companies. The next rounds of
| companies have to hit metrics, milestones, have to prove their
| value, etc.
|
| Never waste a perfectly good crisis: learn if nothing else.
| nikcub wrote:
| > divorced from any kind of fundamentals
|
| Anthropic ARR went $1B -> $4B in the first half of this year.
| They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money
| I spend. There's definitely something there.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I've always dwelled over $5 a month subscriptions for iPhone
| apps due to subscription fatigue. I find myself signing up
| for $200 AI subscriptions without a moments hesitation.
| smith7018 wrote:
| I hope both of you know that you're in the extreme
| minority, right?
| jarredkenny wrote:
| A very productive minority.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Have we seen any examples of any of these companies
| turning a profit yet even at $200+/mo? My understanding
| is that most, if not all, are still deeply in the red.
| Please feel free to correct me (not sarcastic - being
| genuine).
|
| If that is the case at some point the music is going to
| stop and they will either perish or they will have to
| crank up their subscription costs.
| jarredkenny wrote:
| I am absolutely benefitting from them subsidizing my
| usage to give me Claude Code at $200/month. However, even
| if they 10x the price its still going to be worth it for
| me personally.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I totally get that but that's not really what I asked/am
| driving at. Though I certainly question how many people
| are willing to spend $2k/mo on this. I think it's pretty
| hard for most folks to justify basically a mortgage for
| an AI tool.
| jarredkenny wrote:
| My napkin math is that I can now accomplish 10x more in a
| day than I could even one year ago, which means I don't
| need to hire nearly as many engineers, and I still come
| out ahead.
|
| I use claude code exclusively for the initial version of
| all new features, then I review and iterate. With the Max
| plan I can have many of these loops going concurrently in
| git worktrees. I even built a little script to make the
| workflow better: http://github.com/jarredkenny/cf
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Again I understand and I don't doubt you're getting
| insane value out of it but if they believed people would
| spend $2000 a month for it they would be charging $2000 a
| month, not 1/10th of that, which is undoubtedly not
| generating a profit.
|
| As I said above, I don't think a single AI company is
| remotely in the black yet. They are driven by speculation
| and investment and they need to figure out real quick how
| they're going to survive when that money dries up. People
| are not going to fork out 24k a year for these tools. I
| don't think they'll spend even $10k. People scoff at
| paying $70+ for internet, a thing we all use basically
| all the time.
|
| I have found it rather odd that they have targeted
| individual consumers for the most part. These all seem
| like enterprise solutions that need to charge large sums
| and target large companies tbh. My guess is a lot of them
| think it will get cheaper and easier to provide the same
| level of service and that they won't have to make such
| dramatic increases in their pricing. Time will tell, but
| I'm skeptical
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I'm curious, how are you accounting this? Does the
| productivity improvement from Claude's product let you
| get your work done faster, which buys you more free time?
| Does it earn you additional income, presumably to the
| tune of somewhere north of $2k/month?
| acmj wrote:
| Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to
| openai/claude are more productive?
| jfim wrote:
| Anecdotally, I can take on and complete the side projects
| I've always wanted to do but didn't due to the large
| amounts of yak shaving or unfamiliarity with parts of the
| stack. It's the difference between "hey wouldn't it be
| cool to have a Monte Carlo simulator for retirement
| planning with multidimensional search for the safe
| withdrawal rate depending on savings rate, age of
| retirement, and other assumptions" and doing it in an
| afternoon with some prompts.
| radley wrote:
| It's subjective, but the high monthly fee would suggest
| so. At the very least, they're getting an experience that
| those without are not.
| christina97 wrote:
| The point is that if a minority is prepared to pay $200
| per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay? I
| also don't think this is _such_ an extreme priority, I
| also know multiple people in real life with these kinds
| of selections.
| jrflowers wrote:
| >if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then
| what is the majority prepared to pay?
|
| Nothing. Most people will not pay for a chat bot unless
| forced to by cramming it into software that they already
| have to use
| bicx wrote:
| It's a generic chat LLM product, but ChatGPT now has over
| 20 million paid subscribers.
| https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-
| hit-20-mi...
| swat535 wrote:
| Forget chat bots, most people will not pay for Software,
| period.
|
| This is _especially_ true for developers in general,
| which is very ironic considering how our livelihood is
| dependent on Software.
| oytis wrote:
| Yeah, cause we want to be in control of software,
| understandably. It's hard to charge for software users
| have full control of - except for donations. That's #1
| reason for me to not use any gen AI at the moment - I'm
| keeping an eye on when (if) open-weight models become
| useful on consumer hardware though.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| Yes, but that doesn't mean they aren't finding real value
|
| The challenge with the bubble/not bubble framing is the
| question of long term value.
|
| If the labs stopped spending money today, they would
| recoup their costs. Quickly.
|
| There are possible risks (could prices go to zero because
| of a loss leader?), but I think anthropic and OpenAI are
| both sufficiently differentiated that they would be
| profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts
| if they stopped spending today.
|
| So the question is: at what point does any of this stop
| being true?
| Graphon1 wrote:
| > I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently
| differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely
| successful companies by all accounts if they stopped
| spending today.
|
| Maybe. But that would probably be temporary. The market
| is sufficiently dynamic that any advantages they have
| right now, probably isn't stable defensible longer term.
| Hence the need to keep spending. But what do I know? I'm
| not a VC.
| bicx wrote:
| Are there available numbers to support this? Software
| engineering in the U.S. is well-compensated. $200/mo is a
| small amount to pay if it makes a big difference in
| productivity.
| benburleson wrote:
| Which raises the question: If the productivity gains are
| realized by the employer, is the employer not paying this
| subscription?
| bakugo wrote:
| A fool and his money are soon parted.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| What do you do with $200/mo subscription to Anthropic? I'd
| consider myself a power user and I've never come close to a
| rate limit on the $20 subscription.
| Implicated wrote:
| If you're using Claude Code with any regularity then the
| $200/m plan is better than a Costco membership in value.
| lumost wrote:
| Anecdotally, usage rises precipitously when you are
| building a system from scratch with unlimited ai access.
| vonnik wrote:
| I personally find gemini 2.5 pro and o4.1 mini to handle
| complexity better than claude code. i was a power user of
| claude code for a couple months but its bias to action
| repeatedly led me down the wrong path. what am i missing?
| ironmagma wrote:
| Or so you think..
|
| [1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-
| experienced-o...
|
| [2] https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-
| mistake...
| d3m0t3p wrote:
| Your first link is (in my opinion) highly biased in the
| samples they choose, they hired maintainers from open-
| source repos (people with multi years of experience, on
| their specific repo).
|
| So indeed, IF you are in that case: Many years on the same
| project with multiple years experience then it is not
| usefull, otherwise it might be. This means it might be
| usefull for junior and for experienced devs who are
| switching projects. It is a tool like any other, indeed if
| you have a workflow that you optimized through years of
| usage it won't help.
| fsndz wrote:
| Exactly. I think the study is a good reminder that we
| really have to be careful about the productivity gains
| attributed to AI. Main takeaway imo, despite limitations
| from the study, is AI is not a panacea, it can increase
| productivity, but only if used 'well' and with the good
| workflows in place, and in the right context.
| bakugo wrote:
| > This means it might be usefull for junior and for
| experienced devs who are switching projects.
|
| In other words: it might be useful for people who don't
| understand the generated code well enough to know that
| it's incorrect or unmaintainable.
| fsndz wrote:
| I mean, hacker news is still the same aren't they using AI
| to completely make this website more of whatever it was
| before ????
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > Or so you think.. > [1]
| https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-
| experienced-o...
|
| You are welcomed to your point of view, but for me while
| one agent is finding an obscure bug, I have another agent
| optimising or refactoring, while I am working on something
| else. Its hard to believe I am deluded in thinking I am
| spending more time on a task.
|
| I think the research does highlight that training is
| important. I don't throws devs agents and expect them to be
| productive.
| hugs wrote:
| I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic
| subscription. (Rough estimate of how much I would have paid
| someone else to create the things I've (co)created with
| Claude Code so far.) If this is a bubble, I just hope I can
| finish all the projects I want to finish before it pops (or
| before they raise their prices to $9K/month because they read
| this comment.)
| fsndz wrote:
| and people are still saying vibe coding is overrated?
| nonsense: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-
| overrated
| bakugo wrote:
| > I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic
| subscription.
|
| Are those things created by Claude actually making you that
| much in real money every month? Because the amount of money
| it would cost to pay someone to create something, and the
| value that something brings to you once it's made are
| largely unrelated.
| hugs wrote:
| They are tools I want/need for my business (like creating
| software libraries for various things). My $10K number is
| how much I would have paid a contractor in the past to
| code it for me.
| alecco wrote:
| Agree. But I think Anthropic is the outlier. Maybe
| ElevenLabs, too.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| They're still gonna be an estimated $3 billion in the hole
| though. Jury still out of there is really "something there".
| logsr wrote:
| growing ARR is easy when you are selling dollars for cents.
| people hyping ARR as an meaningful investment indicator are a
| dead giveaway that we are in fact in a bubble.
| Keyframe wrote:
| For sure, but then again - Nvidia $4T?! I can't shake the
| feeling though that with Nvidia we're looking at another Sun
| type of situation from _the bubble_. Remember the dot in dot
| com?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| "Sooner or later the bubble's gonna burst" and "There's
| definitely something there" aren't mutually exclusive - in
| fact they often go together.
|
| It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my
| age" by bringing up the .com boom/bust, but this feels
| exactly the same. The late 90s/early 00s were the dawn of the
| consumer Internet, and all of that tech vastly changed global
| society and brought you companies like Google and Amazon. It
| also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other
| companies chronicled in "Fucked Company".
|
| You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position
| as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced
| about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first
| moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included)
| who have cancelled their subscription because there are now
| better options.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Not really much a of stuck bubble this time, though.
| Besides Nvidia and a handful of other HW companies, at
| least. Almost all of the very high valuations are for
| private companies and usually the amount of actual money
| involved in is relatively low.
| ttrmw wrote:
| what're you finding better than cursor now?
| rock_hard wrote:
| Devin is light years ahead of Cursor. It's not even the
| same category!
|
| I stopped writing code by hand almost entirely and my
| output (measured in landed PRs) has been 10x
|
| And when I write code myself then it's gnarly stuff and I
| want AI to get out of my way...so I just use Webstorm
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Cline is absolutely fantastic when you combine it with
| Sonnet 4. Always use plan mode first and always have it
| write tests first (have it do TDD). It changed me from a
| skeptic to a believer and now I use it full time.
| dom96 wrote:
| I pay $0 and that's already enough for me. Genuinely, what
| are you getting for your $200? I cannot fathom paying that
| much for what seems like I get basically for free anyway.
| tekawade wrote:
| Genuinely curious for the value add with Claude code here.
| Some perspective and/or data is appreciated.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| Why are you paying for that? Are you employed as a dev and
| paying out of your pocket or are you a hobbyist or ?
| babyshake wrote:
| The big question is to what extent they hit a plateau and are
| commoditized. What happens when there is a fully open stack
| that gets Claude Code level results but at a fraction of the
| cost? Not saying that will happen, but that seems to be the
| scenario for a bubble bursting.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Not in a bubble yet. Wait till your aunt takes out a second
| mortgage to chase NVDA stock to the moon. My guess is this will
| continue until later this decade with some bumps in between.
| That said, it's absurd these guys are paying people so much
| money for what I think amounts to being context management off
| of some markdowns.
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| Two products that nobody uses, together at last
| rwyinuse wrote:
| I don't see a justification for high valuations of companies that
| aim to build an "AI Software engineer". If something like Devin
| really succeeds, then anyone can use their product to simply
| build their own competing AI engineer. There's no moat, it's just
| another LLM wrapper SaaS.
| ar_lan wrote:
| This is my exact takeaway too, and I'm always surprised it
| doesn't get mentioned often. If AI is truly groundbreaking,
| then shouldn't AI be able to re-implement itself? Which, to me,
| would imply that every AI company is not only full of software
| devs cannibalizing themselves, but the companies themselves
| also are.
| adamoshadjivas wrote:
| I don't see this. The ai software engineer that succeeds, maybe
| it's because of a mixture of very complicated architecture
| derived from novel research etc. You can't replicate that with
| just hiring more human engineers, it takes time and effort and
| elite hiring. Plus enterprise support etc.
|
| Devin etc will give you let's say 10x more engineering power,
| but not necessarily elite one.
| UltraSane wrote:
| This is true for LLMs themselves. If a new LLM is really better
| than all the other ones then it can be used to help improve
| other LLMs.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Yep. The reality is folks building these types of companies are
| trying to get acquired as quickly as possible before the house
| of cards fall. This has led to a huge speculative rush of
| acquisitions to avoid FOMO later.
|
| The technology is nowhere close to what they're hoping for and
| incremental progress isn't getting us there.
|
| If we get true AGI agents, anyone can also build a multi-
| billion dollar tech companies on the cheap.
| 4dm1r4lg3n3r4l wrote:
| > If we get true AGI agents, anyone can also build a multi-
| billion dollar tech companies on the cheap.
|
| That's not how the economy works...
| geor9e wrote:
| You're right - AGI would be unfathomable, it would be more
| productive than a quadrillion earths entirely populated by
| MIT valedictorians who just drank 2 espressos each. "Multi-
| billion dollar" would be a silly valuation.
| taejavu wrote:
| There are any number of tools that already make that promise.
| Turns out it's still hard to complete projects and bring them
| to market.
| swyx wrote:
| i advise you to not take marketing lines too literally and be
| so casually dismissive as a result. you will miss a lot of good
| investments and startups this way and (worse) be lulled into a
| false sense of comfort and security.
| Hansenq wrote:
| This is the logical, satisfying, and probably best conclusion to
| an un-ideal and optically terrible situation all parties were
| placed in.
|
| First, OpenAI wanted to acquire Windsurf. Terrific move! Win-win
| for OpenAI (who needs more AI product) and Windsurf (for the deal
| price). But this fell apart because Windsurf didn't want the IP
| to go to Microsoft (which imo should not have been not a big
| deal, especially if you knew what would have happened next). Big
| loss for all parties for this to have fallen apart.
|
| My biggest question still is why not continue on as an
| independent company? Perhaps losing access to Claude doomed
| signups; perhaps employees/investors had a taste of an exit and
| still wanted it; perhaps due to fiduciary duty to maximize
| returns; perhaps their growth stalled due to the announcement? In
| any case, the founders got a similarly equivalent deal from
| Google, and were arguably wise to pursue it.
|
| But Google's Corp Dev team here is the most maddening. Why not
| fully acquire the entire company, instead of doing the same
| "acquihire and license" deal that was done to Character AI,
| Adept, Scale, etc.? Risk of FTC antitrust review is a thing, but
| Google's not even competitive in the coding market, so I doubt
| there is a review (though I do hear that all acquisitions by
| large tech companies these days are reviewed by default). If
| there's anyone to blame in this situation, it's the FTC and
| Google for pursuing this strategy, instead of a full acquisition.
| Win-win for Google (for the team) and Windsurf (for getting a
| similar acquisition price, but liquid!).
|
| Imo, the founders did a good job ensuring that close to the $3B
| acquisition price was reflected in the $2.5B Google deal--all
| existing investors and vested employee/equity holders are paid
| out; the company also retained $100M which was suspiciously
| similar to the amount needed to pay out all unvested
| employee/equity holders [1]. So theoretically the remaining
| company could pay accelerate vesting, then pay out the cash to
| their remaining employees, and then shut down, to give everyone
| the same exit as an acquisition, or better. This might have been
| the best scenario, because the brand damage to Windsurf as an IDE
| that happened over the weekend was pretty close to unrecoverable
| for them as an independent company.
|
| But instead, the company leadership decided to field acquisition
| offers for the remaining company and IP, and got one from
| Cognition. (I'm actually surprised this acquisition isn't under
| FTC review; it's more plainly an agentic coding company acquiring
| a competitor agentic coding company). In taking the offer, it
| reinforces that the Windsurf IDE will continue to exist, that
| they have a R&D team backing the IDE again, and can marry
| Windsurf's enterprise sales chops with Cognition's product [3].
| Win-win for both Cognition and Windsurf.
|
| So overall, win-win-win all around, except for OpenAI, Varun's
| public reputation (imo, undeserved), and startups hiring
| employees (who might think they might not get a proper exit) [2].
|
| [1] https://x.com/haridigresses/status/1944406541064433848
|
| [2] https://stratechery.com/2025/google-and-windsurf-stinky-
| deal...
|
| [3] https://x.com/russelljkaplan/status/1944845868273709520
| oytis wrote:
| So the nobility goes to Google and rank and file engineers are
| subject to consolidation, am I reading this right?
| paxys wrote:
| "Consolidation" aka "we got the IP we wanted, you are all now
| redundant"
| cheriot wrote:
| Very curious how we'll look back on Google spending 2 billion
| dollars to "license IP" and hire a handful of people.
|
| If there's 47m software engineers in the world, at $200/month,
| and 50% gross profit that's a $56 billion TAM. Not crazy to think
| it's more if we include the adjacent space of analyst roles that
| write software (sql, advanced excel, etc).
|
| They'll have to crush it to make a $2 billion acquihire look
| reasonable, but it's possible.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| that's not the market they're thinking of, they're thinking of
| the total amount of money spent on developers per year,
| globally, and capturing a percentage of that
| prakashn27 wrote:
| I writing this just after the night end llm cannot even replace
| to using Trans i18n react component if it is not in context of
| the file. We are still far from agi
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I've never heard of Cognition (not a slight on them, its just me
| being disconnected). How much was the deal for and how do they
| have this type of money? Wasn't there just an article out
| yesterday or so saying that Windsurf's leadership was going to
| google?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| The worst AI coding tool I've tried aquiring the best is
| interesting.
| g42gregory wrote:
| I thought OpenAI already acquired Windsurf for $3BN? And
| Anthropic refused to give them discounted version of Claude 4
| because of that?
| xyst wrote:
| "Devin" is making itself fatter and prepping itself for another
| acquisition. Google or MS? Maybe Apple?
|
| The "world-class GTM" is a joke.
| vonnik wrote:
| that the founders went one way and the engineers went another
| suggests a failure of leadership IMHO.
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