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Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

cognition.ai

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Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#261

Post by g42gregory »

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?

Claude Code with Pro, Max100, or Max200 subscriptions. Works with any IDE including none.

For the time being, nothing comes close, at least for me.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#262

Post by Hansenq »

Graphon1 wrote: post #260
Hansenq wrote: post #144

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 kn…

> -all existing investors and vested employee/equity holders are paid out; But the statement from Cognition was: > 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 The details matter. "vesting cliffs waived" meaning what? Win…

Historically, when a company gets acquired, the terms of the acquisition vary wildly. Many acquisitions over the past few years have led to a payout of all equity holders, pennies for employees, and layoffs for much of the existing team. This outcome is no worse than an existing acquisition--people just want details because of the new structure. My point is that this is financially no worse than an existing acquisition. It just _feels_ worse because of how it's structured.

And to your last paragraph, read reference [1]. The distribution of that 2.5B is in accordance to the existing cap table; it will make sense once you read that tweet. You must allocate money according to the cap table, and so that allocation is already determined in a company's previous funding rounds.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#263

Post by dustingetz »

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.

it’s not bubble so much as urgency, the trillion dollar club are pricing in the risk of losing their position

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#264

Post by v5v3 »

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.

Unless they are paying annually, the next big thing could see those $200 a month premium users gone.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#265

Post by v5v3 »

andrewmutz wrote: post #259
ttrmw wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what're you finding better than cursor now?

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.

How much is it costing you?

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#266

Post by cheriot »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #248
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

Will require a lot of barriers to entry to charge %. Not disagreeing with your statement of their thinking, but will be v surprised if that pans out.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#267

Post by margalabargala »

abletonlive wrote: post #143
margalabargala wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I'm genuinely not sure if you're not understanding, or deliberately ignoring my point.

I'll assume the former and try again. Maybe you didn't realize I'm not the person you originally replied to?

If a company is profitable, they have funds. The funds generated by the profits, can be used to fund additional internal projects. If the bucket of funds from profits gets ridiculously large, then it may begin to be used for vanity projects, like gutting an AI company, or building a gold statue of the founder. It seems reasonable to call companies spending on mostly-useless excesses "overfunded".

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#268

Post by jjmarr »

v5v3 wrote: post #265
andrewmutz wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much is it costing you?

As much as you theoretically want to spend, since it's pay-per-use.

I spend $200/month by using Sonnet 4. Could be higher if you want to use Opus.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#269

Post by unshavedyak »

benburleson wrote: post #253
bicx wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which raises the question: If the productivity gains are realized by the employer, is the employer not paying this subscription?

My day job in talks to do that. I'm partly responsible for that decision, and i'm using my personal $200/m plan to test the idea.

My assessment so far is that it is well worth it, but only if you're invested in using the tool correctly. It can cause as much harm as it can increase productivity and i'm quite fearful of how we'll handle this at day-job.

I also think it's worth saying that imo, this is a very different fear than what drives "butts in seats" arguments. Ie i'm not worried that $Company will not get their value out of the Engineer and instead the bot will do the work for them. I'm concerned that Engineer will use the tool poorly and cause more work for reviewers having to deal with high LOC.

Reviews are difficult and "AI" provides a quick path to slop. I've found my $200 well worth it, but the #1 difficulty i've had is not getting features to work, but in getting the output to be scalable and maintainable code.

Sidenote, one of the things i've found most productive is deterministic tooling wrapping the LLM. Eg robust linters like Rust Clippy set to automatically run after Claude Code (via hooks) helps bend the LLM away from many bad patterns. It's far from perfect of course, but it's the thing i think we need most atm. Determinism around the spaghetti-chaos-monkeys.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#270

Post by bluelightning2k »

It's weird being a Windsurf fan on HN. You get the feeling that you're in the minority or doing it wrong because the dialog is dominated by Cursor and (more recently) Claude Code.

It's also been a lot of random stuff recently with their 3 separate Ross and Rachel acquisition storylines.

Some takeaways:

1. Devin/Cognition definitely have a legit AI dev agent now

2. It's crazy what Google passed on. The fact that it was worth it to them without the traditional best assets is wild. Guess that's what happens when you play on ultra hard mode with an infinite money glitch.

3. I am worried/pre-emptively sad that Windsurf will likely go away or get nerfed, more expensive etc.

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