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Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf

(cognition.ai)
502 points alazsengul | 9 comments | 14 Jul 25 18:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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pm90 ◴[14 Jul 25 19:38 UTC] No.44564397[source]▶
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.
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nikcub ◴[14 Jul 25 20:26 UTC] No.44564871[source]▶
> 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.

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hn_throwaway_99 ◴[14 Jul 25 21:18 UTC] No.44565447[source]▶
"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 like Google and Amazon. It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company".

You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included) who have cancelled their subscription because there are now better options.

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ForHackernews ◴[15 Jul 25 00:17 UTC] No.44566666[source]▶
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.
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1. xyzzy9563 ◴[15 Jul 25 00:42 UTC] No.44566793[source]▶
It's a very well done wrapper that improves your coding productivity a lot.
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2. gruez ◴[15 Jul 25 01:28 UTC] No.44567025[source]▶
The problem is that they have no moat and the underlying provider can easily cut them out.
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3. infecto ◴[15 Jul 25 01:52 UTC] No.44567141[source]▶
I think you underestimate the difficulty in getting the tool chain running efficiently in the IDE. It's a significant moat and I suspect their spend is too attractive to cut them off from an API especially when most of the model providers are not exactly competing fully in this space yet or at least not with the same enthusiasm.
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4. xyzzy9563 ◴[15 Jul 25 02:53 UTC] No.44567442[source]▶
Not really, it's pretty hard to get the editor and code editing via AI working as well as they did.
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5. yunwal ◴[15 Jul 25 04:41 UTC] No.44567882[source]▶
> and the underlying provider can easily cut them out

what? Do you think providers (or their other customers) don’t care about the business implications of a decision like this? All so that cursor can bring their significant customer base to a nearly-indistinguishable competitor?

6. macrolime ◴[15 Jul 25 08:04 UTC] No.44569002{3}[source]▶
If it's so hard, then why are there multiple open source projects that are just as good?
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7. dboreham ◴[15 Jul 25 13:21 UTC] No.44570868{3}[source]▶
Interesting to see multiple posts here saying this. Pretty clearly it isn't true. The IDE is owned by Microsoft. The model is owned by Anthropic or Google or whoever. A business can't be made from a thin sandwich filling between the two.
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8. infecto ◴[15 Jul 25 13:31 UTC] No.44570961{4}[source]▶
Hey guys we have a guy here stating pretty clearly it isn’t true. He clearly is the authority on the topic because he said so.

The shell of the IDE is open source. It’s true there is some risk on the supply of models and compute but again none of those, except MSFT which does not even own any of the SOTA models, have any direct competition. OpenAI has codex but it’s half baked and being bundled in ChatGPT. It is in nobodies interest to cut off Cursor as at this point they are a fairly sustained and large customer. The risk exists but feels pretty far fetched until someone is actively competing or Cursor gets bought out by a OpenAI.

Again, what proof do you have that there is zero complexity or most being driven by the sandwich filling. Most of OpenAIs valuation is being driven by the wrapper ChatGPT not API usage. I have written a number of integrations with LLM APIs and while some of it just works, there is a lot of nuance to doing it effectively and efficiently at scale. If it was so simple why would we not see many other active competitors in this space with massive MAUs?

9. xyzzy9563 ◴[15 Jul 25 14:34 UTC] No.44571571{4}[source]▶
They're not just as good unless you are willing to spend huge amounts in API credits.