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Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

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Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#351

Post by Maxious »

Myrmornis wrote: post #306
brulard wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I symlinked my vscode settings into the cursor config directory and the transition was strictly additive; everything worked exactly the same as before, with two exceptions so far: a .NET extension wasn't supported, and Cursor recently forced a switch to their own version of Pyright (but that seemed like an improvement once the type checker diagnostics were tamed a little).

> Cursor recently forced a switch to their own version of Pyright

Microsoft forced Cursor to stop using their versions of various plugins https://forum.cursor.com/t/the-c-dev-kit-extension/76226/18

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#352

Post by ForHackernews »

infecto wrote: post #344
ForHackernews wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I thought the point was clear: Dropbox (file sync) is a feature, not a product. Cursor (AI in your IDE) likewise, is a feature, not a product. I am old and I remember when you could make a lot of money offering "Get Your Business On The Information Superhighway" (HTML on Apache) and we're in that stage of LLMadness today, but I suspect it will not last.

“It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right?” Don’t be sorry it shows your true colors. The point stands that you continue to step around. Cursor and other tools like it are more than a trivial wrapper but of course you have never used them so you have no idea. At least give yourself some exposure before projecting. Dropbox is still a $5+bn business. Cursor is still growing, will it work out, I don’t know but lots of f…

What "true colors"? I think I've been pretty consistent that I think Cursor is a commodity. You're surprisingly hostile and defensive about your preferred autocomplete plugin. You're right, I haven't used Cursor, but I've used similar tools like Copilot.

Your characterization of hosting as "a small biz website builder" is revealing. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GDDY/ is the one that made it and is now a $24B firm, but there were at least dozens of these companies floating around in the early 2000s.

Why are you so sure Cursor is the new GoDaddy and not the new Tripod? https://www.tripod.lycos.com/

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#353

Post by infecto »

ForHackernews wrote: post #352
infecto wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right?” Don’t be sorry it shows your true colors. The point stands that you continue to step around. Cursor and other tools like it are more than a trivial wrapper but of course you have never used them so you have no idea. At least give yourself some exposure before projecting. Dropbox is still a $5+bn business. Cursor is still growing, will it work out, I don’t know but lots of f…

What "true colors"? I think I've been pretty consistent that I think Cursor is a commodity. You're surprisingly hostile and defensive about your preferred autocomplete plugin. You're right, I haven't used Cursor, but I've used similar tools like Copilot. Your characterization of hosting as "a small biz website builder" is revealing. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GDDY/ is the one that made it and is now a $24B firm,…

You’ve been dismissive from the start without any real engagement with the product. I pointed out that you haven’t used Cursor, and rather than reflect on that, you’ve responded with sarcasm and condescension.

The only person being defensive here is you. My point was simple: tools like Cursor are more than just “wrappers.” Whether it becomes a massive business or not, revenue is growing, and clearly many users find enough value to justify the subscription. You don’t have to like it but writing it off without firsthand experience just weakens your argument.

At this point, you’re debating a product you haven’t tried, in a market you’re not tracking. Maybe sit this one out unless you have something constructive to say beyond “it’s just a wrapper”.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#354

Post by infecto »

acdha wrote: post #349
infecto wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

My point in listing survivors was simply to make the point that while there were plenty of doomed businesses, there were also many giants which were big at the time and could be told apart by looking at their fundamentals — they had real people paying them money for tangible things at a price which could be profitable. Amazon famously reported low numbers due to reinvestment but they were profitable in most business…

How does that refute the statement you quoted? I said the vast majority of companies during the bubble had no business, were run on hype dollars and had insane P/E ratios. That supports a handful of companies making it through the bloodbath, but also a cherry picked examples that neither refutes my claim or supports yours.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#355

Post by Forgeties79 »

nl wrote: post #324
Forgeties79 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

> As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet. As I note above, Anthropic probably is in the black. $4B ARR, and spending less than $100M on training models.

It looks like their revenue has indeed increased dramatically this year but I can’t find anything saying they’re profitable, which I assume they’d be loudly proclaiming if it had happened. That being said looking at the charts in some of these articles it looks like they might pull it off! I need to look more closely at their pricing model, I wonder what they’re doing differently

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#356

Post by bananapub »

lelanthran wrote: post #305
hugs wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.) I know it's hard to place a value on how much a utility saves a business, but honestly this math is like the piracy math and we didn't buy it back then either. Some teenager downloading 20k songs does not mean that they save…

that seems like a silly way to think about it.

OP wanted a thing. in the past, they've been OK paying $10k for similar things. now they're paying $200/month + a bunch of their time wrangling it and they're also OK with that.

seems reasonable to consider that "$10k of value" in very rough terms which is of course how all value is measured.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#357

Post by bananapub »

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…

> 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.

aren't you reviewing diffs in whatever diff tool you like? I find magit to be superlative for this (and for correcting and committing things).

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#358

Post by rsynnott »

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.

Economic bubbles _usually_ aren't based on things which are entirely worthless; there's generally _something_ there (just not enough something to sustain the valuations). There are exceptions (NFTs, arguably cryptocurrency as a whole, and of course tulips), but those _are_ the exceptions.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#359

Post by rsynnott »

ACCount36 wrote: post #206
cakeface wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

And if you'd invested in Cisco then, it would have gone very badly for you. It was _wildly_ overvalued; at peak it had a P/E ratio of ~200 (even Nvidia's only about 50).

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#360

Post by ghc »

fnord77 wrote: post #157
ghc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do they? I figured each speed increase requires new optical equipment, but I guess I was just making assumptions.
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