Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf • Hacker News Board

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#151

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:19 PM UTC

abletonlive wrote: post #95

kubb wrote: post #91

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…

"overfunded" is a weird way to talk about a tech company that is incredibly profitable.

[deleted]

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#152

Post by asadotzler » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:19 PM UTC

barbazoo wrote: post #13

chews wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the hosed employees that actually built a great product while their leadership sings "go on take the money and run" on their mega yacht.

Presumably the employees were compensated fairly for their work while they worked there?

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.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#153

Post by annodomini2019 » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

k3nz0 wrote: post #114

annodomini2019 wrote: post #5

What does this actually mean for the product? Huge fan of the plugin on Jetbrains products...

Which plugin?

The Windsurf plugin!

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#154

Post by adamoshadjivas » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

rwyinuse wrote: post #126

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.

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.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#155

Post by UltraSane » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

rwyinuse wrote: post #126

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.

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.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#156

Post by alfalfasprout » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

rwyinuse wrote: post #126

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.

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.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#157

Post by fnord77 » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

ghc wrote: post #145

asadotzler wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing except massive data centers full of GPU compute resources paid for by VC money. Wait, that's actually pretty similar...

gpus go obsolete faster than fiber backbone equipment

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#158

Post by paxys » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:21 PM UTC

oytis wrote: post #148

So the nobility goes to Google and rank and file engineers are subject to consolidation, am I reading this right?

"Consolidation" aka "we got the IP we wanted, you are all now redundant"

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#159

Post by taejavu » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:22 PM UTC

rwyinuse wrote: post #126

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.

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.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#160

Post by swyx » Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 8:23 PM UTC

rwyinuse wrote: post #126

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.

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.