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Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

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Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#241

Post by jarredkenny »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #230
jarredkenny wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#242

Post by ttrmw »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #219
nikcub wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"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 li…

what're you finding better than cursor now?

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#243

Post by Forgeties79 »

jarredkenny wrote: post #241
Forgeties79 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 b…

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

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#244

Post by jfim »

acmj wrote: post #236
jarredkenny wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very productive minority.

Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to openai/claude are more productive?

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.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#246

Post by babyshake »

nikcub wrote: post #167
pm90 wrote: post #113

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#247

Post by oytis »

swat535 wrote: post #229
jrflowers wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

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.

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.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#248

Post by spongebobstoes »

cheriot wrote: post #191

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 reason…

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

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#249

Post by radley »

acmj wrote: post #236
jarredkenny wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very productive minority.

Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to openai/claude are more productive?

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.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#250

Post by rock_hard »

ttrmw wrote: post #242
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 li…

what're you finding better than cursor now?

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

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