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Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

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Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#291

Post by margalabargala »

abletonlive wrote: post #286
margalabargala wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not misunderstanding anything. It's just that the idea of a massively profitable company being labeled "over-funded" when excess profit is used in a way that you find disagreeable is stupid. It doesn't matter how well they allocate their revenue. Stop looking at the entire world through the eyes of VC, because it doesn't work. You're not funding google by paying for youtube, you're buying a service. You didn't "o…

Gotcha, you're just being mean. You've got a bone to pick with VCs, I guess, so you've declared I listen to VC podcasts, see the world like one, and am using a stupid idiom.

That's fine. I'm going to continue referring to corporations that blow lots of money on random intra-industry dick measuring matches because they can as "overfunded", and you can continue expressing your opinion to anyone who will listen that this one person on the internet used an idiom that you think is dumb because it implies something other than "that person profited, therefore they did something right and therefore whatever they do with that money is correct and intelligent and never ever wasteful or dumb."

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#292

Post by infecto »

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…

Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.

Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#293

Post by infecto »

gruez wrote: post #287
xyzzy9563 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very well done wrapper that improves your coding productivity a lot.

The problem is that they have no moat and the underlying provider can easily cut them out.

I think you underestimate the difficulty in getting the tool chain running efficiently in the IDE. It's a significant moat and I suspect their spend is too attractive to cut them off from an API especially when most of the model providers are not exactly competing fully in this space yet or at least not with the same enthusiasm.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#294

Post by infecto »

ForHackernews wrote: post #275
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…

I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right? As far as I can tell there's like four actual AI firms in the world and everyone else is trying to whitelabel. It reminds me of the hosting industry in the early 2000s.

Amazing how folks make comments without even trying it and especially making a comment similar to how Dropbox is simply rsync, right?

It is a lot less trivial than people like yourself make it out to be to get an effective tool chain and especially do it efficiently.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#295

Post by acdha »

infecto wrote: post #292
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…

Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets. Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.

> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business

Ah, yes, companies like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, Expedia, and Google. Never heard of those losers again. Not to mention those crazy kids at Kozmo foolishly thinking that people would want to have stuff delivered same-day.

The two lessons you should learn from the .com bubble are that the right idea won’t save you from bad execution, and that boom markets–especially when investors are hungry for big returns–can stay inflated longer than you think. You can be early to market, have a big share, and still end up like Netscape because Microsoft decided to take the money from under the couch cushions and destroy your revenue stream. That seems especially relevant for AI as long as model costs are high and nobody has a moat: even if you’re right on the market, if someone else can train users to expect subsidized low prices long enough you’ll run out of runway.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#296

Post by lelanthran »

ForHackernews wrote: post #275
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…

I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right? As far as I can tell there's like four actual AI firms in the world and everyone else is trying to whitelabel. It reminds me of the hosting industry in the early 2000s.

> I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right? As far as I can tell there's like four actual AI firms in the world and everyone else is trying to whitelabel. It reminds me of the hosting industry in the early 2000s.

Yes, there's (maybe?) four, but they're at the very bottom of the value chain.

Things built on top of them will be higher up the value chain and (in theory anyway) command a larger margin, hence a VC rush into betting on which company actually makes it up the value chain.

I mean, the only successes we see now are with coding agents. Nothing else has made it up the value chain except coding agents. Everything else (such as art and literature generation) is still on the bottom rung of the value chain.

That, by definition alone, is where the smallest margins are!

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#298

Post by infecto »

acdha wrote: post #295
infecto wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets. Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.

> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business Ah, yes, companies like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, Expedia, and Google. Never heard of those losers again. Not to mention those crazy kids at Kozmo foolishly thinking that people would want to have stuff delivered same-day. The two lessons you should learn from the .com bubble are that the right idea won’t save you from bad execution, and that boom markets–espec…

You’re right that many .com companies lacked fundamentals but you’re cherry-picking survivors. For every Amazon, there were dozens of Pets.coms. The current AI wave does feel different in terms of revenue traction (e.g., Cursor’s $500M ARR), but the broader lesson still applies: hype cycles don’t discriminate between good and bad execution in the short term.

Cursor’s growth is impressive, but sustained dominance isn’t guaranteed. Distribution, margins, and defensibility still matter and we haven’t seen how durable any of that is once incentives tighten and infra costs stop being subsidized.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#299

Post by ivape »

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…

It’s more about not getting embarrassed ever again. The breakthrough papers for LLMs came from Google, but not the product. This was embarrassing. Even if you have to spend double on everything from now on you do it, because Google effectively got sucker punched by ChatGPT.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#300

Post by westoque »

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.

> They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend

Can you explain? I don't see how $200 makes that much difference than what I get from paying $20/month with OpenAI? What's the use case?

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