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Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

cognition.ai

411–420 of 447 posts

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#411

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 true for LLMs themselves. If a new LLM is really better than all the other ones then it can be used to help improve other LLMs.

Is it? Last I checked when you trained an LLM on another's output, at best you got the same performance as the original, and it was more likely you significantly degraded usefulness. (I'm not talking about distillation, where that tradeoff is known in return for a smaller, more efficient parameter set)

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#412

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 also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company". The irony with Webvan, they had the right idea about 15 years too early. Now we have InstaCart, DoorDash, etc. You really needed the mobile revolution circa 2010 for it to work. Pets.com is essentially Chewy (successful pet focused online retailer) So, neither of those ideas were really terrible in the same vain…

Don't forget that Amazon's market cap was higher in 1999 than 2009!

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#413

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…

I don't think its just SDEs they're targeting.

Basically anyone that inputs and outputs goods which can be digitized. So writers, graphic artists, accountants, legal work, etc.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#414
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

If the LLM is given the code for its training and is able to improve that, does that count? Because it seems like a safe bet that we're already there, the only problem is latency of training runs.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#415
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope both of you know that you're in the extreme minority, right?

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.

Perceived productivity or actual productivity?

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#416
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we seen any examples of any of these companies turning a profit yet even at $200+/mo? My understanding is that most, if not all, are still deeply in the red. Please feel free to correct me (not sarcastic - being genuine). If that is the case at some point the music is going to stop and they will either perish or they will have to crank up their subscription costs.

It's possible Anthropic is cash-flow positive now. Claude 3.7 Sonnet supposedly cost "a few tens of millions of dollars"[1], and they recently hit $4B ARR[2]. Those numbers seem to give a fair bit of room for salaries, and it would be surprising if there wasn't a sustainable business in there. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/25/anthropics-latest-flagship... [2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-rev…

Cost to train and cost to operate are two very different things

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#417

I have been testing Devin for a long time, early access and all. I'm not impressed by it at all, a decent developer with their LLM of choice does a far better job.

I mean isn't that amazing for an 1 year old product? If it's already better than a terrible dev with an LLM, or better than a decent dev without an LLM, it's not hard to imagine in 2-3-5 years Devin is better and cheaper than most hires you could do. Without having to do HR, equity etc.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#418
post #167
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.

It's so funny to see people in this industry get super excited about revenue while never mentioning costs.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you're interested, I recommend checking out Kiro from Amazon.

Every time I've tried Copilot or Cursor, it's happily gone off and written or rewritten code into a state it seemed very proud of, and which didn't even work, let alone solve the problem I put to it.

Meanwhile, Kiro:

1. Created a requirements document, with user stories and acceptance criteria, so that we could be on the same page about the goals

2. Once I signed off on that, it then created a design document, with code examples, error handling cases, and an architecture diagram, for me to review

3. After that looked good, it set about creating an itemized task list for each step of the implementation, broken down into specific tasks and sub-tasks and including which of the acceptance criteria from step 1 that task addressed

4. I could go through the document task by task, ask it to work on it, and then review the results

At one point, it noticed that the compiler had reported a minor issue with the code it had written, but correctly identified that resolving that issue would involve implementing something that was slated for a future task, so it opted to ignore the issue until the appropriate time.

For once, I found myself using an AI tool that handled the part of the job I hate the most, and am the worst at: planning, diagramming, and breaking down tasks. Even if it hadn't been able to write any working code at all, it already created something useful for me that I could have built off of, but it did end up writing something that worked great.

In case anyone is curious about the files it created, you can see them here: https://github.com/danudey/rust-downloader/pull/4

Note that I'm not really familiar with Rust (as most of the code will demonstrate), so it would probably have been far faster for an experienced Rust programmer to implement this. In my case, though, I just let it do its thing in the background and checked in occasionally to validate it was doing what I expected.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you're interested, I recommend checking out Kiro from Amazon. Every time I've tried Copilot or Cursor, it's happily gone off and written or rewritten code into a state it seemed very proud of, and which didn't even work, let alone solve the problem I put to it. Meanwhile, Kiro: 1. Created a requirements document, with user stories and acceptance criteria, so that we could be on the same page about the goals 2. Onc…

Wow, that sounds like it might be useful!
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