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Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

cognition.ai

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Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#381

Post by lelanthran »

bananapub wrote: post #356
lelanthran wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> OP wanted a thing. in the past, they've been OK paying $10k for similar things.

Okay, then their costs should have come down similarly, no? OP said they were a business and that these weren't luxury hobby things but business needs. In which case, it must reflect on the bottom line.

I operate as a business myself (self-employed), and I can generally correlate purchases with the bottom line almost immediately for some things (Jetbrains, VPSes for self-hosted git, etc) and correlate it with other things in the near future (certifications, conferences, etc).

The idea that "here is something I recently started paying a non-trivial amount for but it does not reflect on the bottom line" is a new and alien concept to me.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#383

Post by komali2 »

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.

Don't they have their own model for the inline completions? For me I find it really nice to preserve some brain energy by doing one repetitive change and just tab spamming it to get it done everywhere. I could get it done maybe just as fast with a macro in vim, but, Cursor lets me preserve the brain energy for something harder.

Meanwhile other "wrappers" e.g. in nvim or whatever, don't have this feature, they just have slightly better autocomplete than bare LSP.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#384

Post by sgt »

bicx wrote: post #216
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

It's a generic chat LLM product, but ChatGPT now has over 20 million paid subscribers. https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...

So $415m revenue per month, annualized $5 billion / yr. Let's say we use a revenue multiple of 4x, that means OpenAI should be valued at $20 billion USD just based on this. Then one obviously has several other factors, given the nature of OpenAI and future potential. Maybe 10x more.

Which puts the current valuations I've heard pretty much in the right ballpark. Crazy, but it could make sense.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#385

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#386

Post by rtcoms »

vonnik wrote: post #255
benjaminwootton wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always dwelled over $5 a month subscriptions for iPhone apps due to subscription fatigue. I find myself signing up for $200 AI subscriptions without a moments hesitation.

I personally find gemini 2.5 pro and o4.1 mini to handle complexity better than claude code. i was a power user of claude code for a couple months but its bias to action repeatedly led me down the wrong path. what am i missing?

how do you integrate that with a code editor ?

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#387

Post by fortysixpercent »

badgersnake wrote: post #98
htrp wrote: post #10

so devin gets the leftover remains of windsurf to fix their agentic AI ide that wasn't working in the first place?

So some VCs got rinsed for Google’s leftovers.

VC's probably did fine. Their preferred shares get paid out on the dividend out of the Google 'license' fee. They might get some stock in Cognition as part of the acquisition of the remains of the company, but they've likely already been made whole and made a tidy profit on money invested in early rounds.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#388

Post by freejazz »

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.

Yeah, the difference between the "something there" and the $4b valuation is the bubble.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#389

Post by greggh »

ewoodrich wrote: post #283
v5v3 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is it costing you?

I use Roo Code (Cline fork) and spend roughly $15-30/mo by subscribing to Github Copilot Pro for $10/mo for unlimited use of GPT-4.1 via the VS Code LM API, and a handful of premium credits a month (I use Gemini 2.5 Pro for the most part). Once I max out the premium credits I pay-as-you-go for Gemini 2.5 Pro via OpenRouter, but always try to one shot with GPT 4.1 first for regular tasks, or if I am certain it's askin…

Looking at Cline, wondering what the real selling points for Roo Code are. Any chance you can say what exactly made you go with Roo Code instead of Cline?

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#390

Post by carimura »

jspann wrote: post #27

> 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 This sounds like a happy ending for the employees of Windsurf and a good deal for Cognition

"work to" is key.. sounds like they aren't fully accelerating, just accelerating the time they worked that hasn't vested. So if you were hired a week ago, you get a week's worth of participation.
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