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Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

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Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#421

Post by namadaza »

freejazz wrote: post #394
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.

>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. I'm an attorney that got pitched the leading legal AI service and it was nothing but junk... so I'm not sure why you think that's different from what's going on right now.

Was the leading legal AI service Harvey.ai by any chance? I feel like big VC money goes to solving legal analysis, but I'm seeing a lot of wins with document drafting/templating.

Briefpoint.ai, casely.ai, eve.legal etc. I work with an attorney who trained his paralegals to use chatgpt + some of these drafting tools, says it's significantly faster than what they could've done previously.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#422

Post by williamzeng0 »

pplante wrote: post #121
827a wrote: post #102

Does anyone actually use Windsurf? I know a ton of people on Cursor, Cline, Roo, Claude Code... but zero people in my engineering circles have even mentioned trying Windsurf.

I was using Windsurf in Pycharm, until I switched to Claude Code / Gemini CLI last week. I am also finding that Copilot with Sonnet 4 is pretty on par to Windsurf.

https://sweep.dev/ is better than Copilot/Windsurf in PyCharm (disclaimer I am one of the founders)

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#423

Post by freejazz »

namadaza wrote: post #421
freejazz wrote: post #394

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. I'm an attorney that got pitched the leading legal AI service and it was nothing but junk... so I'm not sure why you think that's different from what's going on right now.

Was the leading legal AI service Harvey.ai by any chance? I feel like big VC money goes to solving legal analysis, but I'm seeing a lot of wins with document drafting/templating. Briefpoint.ai, casely.ai, eve.legal etc. I work with an attorney who trained his paralegals to use chatgpt + some of these drafting tools, says it's significantly faster than what they could've done previously.

It was Vincent.

> I feel like big VC money goes to solving legal analysis, but I'm seeing a lot of wins with document drafting/templating.

What do you mean "wins?" Like motions won with AI drafted papers? I'm skeptical.

>I work with an attorney who trained his paralegals to use chatgpt + some of these drafting tools, says it's significantly faster than what they could've done previously.

I'd be concerned about malpractice, personally. The case reviews I've seen from Vincent (which is ChatGPT + the entire federal docket) are shocking in how facially wrong they can be. It's one thing for an attorney to use ChatGPT when they do know the law and issues (hasn't seemed to help the various different partners getting sanctioned for filing AI drafted briefs) but to leave the filtering to a paralegal? That's insane, imo.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#424

Post by jfim »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #290
jfim wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I can take on and complete the side projects I've always wanted to do but didn't due to the large amounts of yak shaving or unfamiliarity with parts of the stack. It's the difference between "hey wouldn't it be cool to have a Monte Carlo simulator for retirement planning with multidimensional search for the safe withdrawal rate depending on savings rate, age of retirement, and other assumptions" and doin…

For curiosity, how complex are these side projects? My experience is that Claude Code can absolutely nail simple apps. But as the complexity increases it seems to lose its ability to work through things without having to burn tokens on constantly reminding it of the patterns it needs to follow. At the very least it diminishes the enjoyment of it.

It varies, but they're not necessarily very complex projects. The most complex project that I'm still working on is a Java swing UI to run multiple instances of Claude code in parallel with different chat histories and the ability to have them make progress in the background.

If you need to repeatedly remind it to do something though, you can store it in claude.md so that it is part of every chat. For example, in mine I have asked it to not invoke git commit but to review the git commit message with me before committing, since I usually need to change it.

There may be a maximum amount of complexity it can handle. I haven't reached that limit yet, but I can see how it could exist.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#425

Post by jfim »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #320
ido wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple apps are the majority of use-cases though - to me this feels like what programming/using a computer should have been all along: if I want to do something I’m curious about I just try with Claude whereas in the past I’d mostly be too lazy/tired to program after hours in my free time (even though my programming ability exceed Claude’s).

Well that's why I'm curious. I've been reading a lot of people talking about how the Max plan has 100x their productivity and they're getting a ton of value out of Claude Code. I too have had moments where Claude Code did amazing things for me. But I find myself in a bit of a valley of despair at the moment as I'm trying to force it to do things I'm finding out that it's not good at. I'm just worried that I'm doing i…

There are definitely things it can't do, and things it hilariously gets wrong.

I've found though that if you can steer it in the right direction it usually works out okay. It's not particularly good at design, but it's good at writing code, so one thing you can do is say write classes and some empty methods with // Todo Claude: implement, then ask it to implement the methods with Todo Claude in file foo. So this way you get the structure that you want, but without having to implement all the details.

What kind of things are you having issues with?

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#426

Post by osn9363739 »

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.

I know very little about this. But isn't the inference cost the big one. Not the training?

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#427

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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!

Thanks, that's very kind!

I probably mean it less as "I'm too old" and more of "Wow, time really flies".

To me, who started my career in the very late 90s, the .com boom doesn't really seem that long ago. But then I realize that there is about the same amount of time between now and the .com boom, and the .com boom and the Altair 8800, and I think "OK, that was a loooong time ago". It really is true what they say, that the perception of time speeds up the older you get, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Regarding AI, it's a bit fascinating to me to think that we really only had enough data to get generative AI to work in the very recent past, and nearly as soon as we had enough data, the tech appeared. In the past I would have probably guessed that the time between having enough data and the development of AI would have been a lot longer.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#428

Post by nl »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #355
nl wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Why would they want to be profitable? Genuine question.

Profit is for companies that don't have anything else to spend money on, not ones trying to grow.

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#429

Post by beefnugs »

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.

So how much is it worth? what if it balloons to 5x the amount? what if "they" just decide this is too powerful so only corporate accounts worth $xx,000 a month, and plebs get limited per month for $x,000?

Re: Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

#430

Post by d_sc »

g42gregory wrote: post #261
ttrmw wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what're you finding better than cursor now?

Claude Code with Pro, Max100, or Max200 subscriptions. Works with any IDE including none. For the time being, nothing comes close, at least for me.

Amp Code is also very good, they released about 2 weeks ago their Oracle feature which leverages o3 to do reviews (https://ampcode.com/news/oracle). Amp leans the closer to Claude Code more than other solutions I’ve seen so far, the team there is really leaning into the agentic approach.

I watch the changes on Kilo Code as well (https://github.com/Kilo-Org/kilocode). Their goal is to merge the best from Cline & Roo Code then sprinkle their own improvements on top.

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