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Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

cognition.ai

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Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#401

Post by walthamstow »

joshdavham wrote: post #288
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…

> It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" Please don't say stuff like that. As a 20-something who was in diapers during the dot-com boom, I really appreciate your insight. Thanks for sticking around on HN!

Seconded

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#402

Post by lizardking »

rickyhatespeas wrote: post #370
ForHackernews wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The value is the UX/DevX. Though, they are essentially just a fork of VS Code so it's hard to justify using instead of VS Code + Copilot or Continue which is almost the same UX now. That's the problem with most "AI" products/companies that still isn't being answered. Why do people use your tool/service if you don't own the LLM which is most of the underlying "engine"? And further, how do you stay competitive when you…

Cursor isn't my preferred environment for development, but for me, it yields much better results than Copilot. Continue and Cline bugged out on me so badly, and so frequently, that I didn't find them worth using. YMMV

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#403

Post by yourapostasy »

code51 wrote: post #366
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…

Anthropic is actually a good point to focus on since Claude is very good proof that it's not about the scaling. We are not quite there yet but we are "programming" through how we shape and filter the input data for training it seems. With time, we'll understand the methods to better represent. Current situation doesn't sound too good for "scaling hypothesis" itself.

> Current situation doesn't sound too good for "scaling hypothesis" itself.

But the “scaling hypothesis” is the easiest, fastest story to raise money. So it will be leveraged until conclusively broken by the next advancement.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#404

Post by alittletooraph2 »

bluelightning2k wrote: post #270

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 wa…

"If the founder/CEO and best engineers at Windsurf don't believe in that product/company, why should you?"

^ Any company that competes with them could say that and it would create some pause.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#405

Post by metalliqaz »

geor9e wrote: post #213
4dm1r4lg3n3r4l wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we get true AGI agents, anyone can also build a multi-billion dollar tech companies on the cheap. That's not how the economy works...

You're right - AGI would be unfathomable, it would be more productive than a quadrillion earths entirely populated by MIT valedictorians who just drank 2 espressos each. "Multi-billion dollar" would be a silly valuation.

I can't tell if you're joking or serious.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#406

Post by SJC_Hacker »

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.

Games are a big exception here, as is anything in the app store.

But productivity software in general, only a few large companies seem to be able to get away with it. The Office Suite, CRM such as SalesForce.

In the graphics world, Maya and 3DS Max. Adobe has been holding on.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#407

Post by SJC_Hacker »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #372
Keyframe wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, but then again - Nvidia $4T?! I can't shake the feeling though that with Nvidia we're looking at another Sun type of situation from _the bubble_. Remember the dot in dot com?

NVidia is being propped up by the US government. Huawei’s new chips are lower tech but would probably hit a good ‘practical sweet spot’ for AI data centers in many countries around the world but our current administration is threatening economic violence against any countries who choose to use more cost effective Huawei AI chips. I don’t want to descend into talking politics, but I want to say that geopolitics, the r…

Then why didn't DeepSeek use the Huawei chips, and as opposed to the H800s ?

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#408

Post by SJC_Hacker »

Yizahi wrote: post #168
yomismoaqui wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that the web also had a bubble that popped and look at where are we now with Google, Amazon, Meta... I think that there is a bubble but it's shaped more like the web bubble and less like the crypto bubble.

Yeah, only those evolved a lot from the initial products everyone hyped and products people hyped in 2000 are extinct or free. And I still don't understand where Facebook makes money. :) Regarding LLMs there are two concerns - current products don't have any killer feature to lock in customers, so people can easily jump ship. And diminishing returns, if there won't be a clear progress with models, then free/small, ma…

> And I still don't understand where Facebook makes money. :)

Its Meta now, and they own alot of "brands" besides Facebook. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Giphy, etc.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#409

Post by SJC_Hacker »

silentsea90 wrote: post #238
namesbc wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll choose the wheel over using a country's worth of electricity to parrot unusable AI slop to gullible fools.

Is AI not useful to you? I've sped up my SWE work significantly (10x). Not sure why the cynicism.

If you're just talking about SWE work, thats only one segment of an economy and is the "virtual world". But humans have to live in the real world.

I believe the true revolution is going to be when AI can start living / interacting with the physical world. Driverless cars might be the start here.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#410

Post by SJC_Hacker »

ar_lan wrote: post #138
rwyinuse wrote: post #126

I don't see a justification for high valuations of companies that aim to build an "AI Software engineer". If something like Devin really succeeds, then anyone can use their product to simply build their own competing AI engineer. There's no moat, it's just another LLM wrapper SaaS.

This is my exact takeaway too, and I'm always surprised it doesn't get mentioned often. If AI is truly groundbreaking, then shouldn't AI be able to re-implement itself? Which, to me, would imply that every AI company is not only full of software devs cannibalizing themselves, but the companies themselves also are.

This is my watershed for true AGI. It should be able to create a smarter version of itself.

Last I checked, feeding the output of an LLM back into its training data leads to a progressively worse LLM. (Note I'm not talking about distillation, which involves training a smaller model, by sacrificing accuracy. I'm referring to an equal or greater number of model parameters)

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