Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf
419 comments
·July 14, 2025pm90
nikcub
> 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.
hn_throwaway_99
"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.
SJC_Hacker
> 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 as say Juicera, or outright frauds like Theranos. Overvalued and ill-timed, sure
joshdavham
> 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!
code51
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.
ForHackernews
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.
ttrmw
what're you finding better than cursor now?
infecto
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.
pqtyw
Not really much a of stuck bubble this time, though. Besides Nvidia and a handful of other HW companies, at least. Almost all of the very high valuations are for private companies and usually the amount of actual money involved in is relatively low.
benjaminwootton
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.
OtherShrezzing
What do you do with $200/mo subscription to Anthropic? I’d consider myself a power user and I’ve never come close to a rate limit on the $20 subscription.
vonnik
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?
smith7018
I hope both of you know that you're in the extreme minority, right?
bakugo
A fool and his money are soon parted.
hugs
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.) If this is a bubble, I just hope I can finish all the projects I want to finish before it pops (or before they raise their prices to $9K/month because they read this comment.)
roncesvalles
I have a feeling you'd have had better results if you actually paid $10k/month to a good dev or three in a LCoL geo.
You can actually hire a few excellent devs for very little money. You just can't hire 20k of them and convince them to move to a certain coastal peninsula with high rent and $20 shawarmas, for very little money each.
bakugo
> I'm easily getting $10K/month of value from my Anthropic subscription.
Are those things created by Claude actually making you that much in real money every month? Because the amount of money it would cost to pay someone to create something, and the value that something brings to you once it's made are largely unrelated.
fsndz
and people are still saying vibe coding is overrated? nonsense: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated
ironmagma
Or so you think..
[1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
[2] https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistake...
d3m0t3p
Your first link is (in my opinion) highly biased in the samples they choose, they hired maintainers from open-source repos (people with multi years of experience, on their specific repo).
So indeed, IF you are in that case: Many years on the same project with multiple years experience then it is not usefull, otherwise it might be. This means it might be usefull for junior and for experienced devs who are switching projects. It is a tool like any other, indeed if you have a workflow that you optimized through years of usage it won't help.
teruakohatu
> Or so you think.. > [1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
You are welcomed to your point of view, but for me while one agent is finding an obscure bug, I have another agent optimising or refactoring, while I am working on something else. Its hard to believe I am deluded in thinking I am spending more time on a task.
I think the research does highlight that training is important. I don't throws devs agents and expect them to be productive.
fsndz
I mean, hacker news is still the same aren't they using AI to completely make this website more of whatever it was before ????
rsynnott
Economic bubbles _usually_ aren't based on things which are entirely worthless; there's generally _something_ there (just not enough something to sustain the valuations). There are exceptions (NFTs, arguably cryptocurrency as a whole, and of course tulips), but those _are_ the exceptions.
logsr
growing ARR is easy when you are selling dollars for cents. people hyping ARR as an meaningful investment indicator are a dead giveaway that we are in fact in a bubble.
csomar
1. If you're maxing out your subscription, they're burning money on you.
2. They don't have a moat. DeepSeek and Kimi are already good enough to destroy any high margins they're hoping to generate from compute.
Just because something is highly useful doesn't mean it's highly profitable. Water is essential to life, but it's dirt cheap in most of the world. Same goes for food.
mark_l_watson
I agree. I was experimenting with tool use with Kimi K2 APIs yesterday - very effective, and so incredibly inexpensive. I am retired, now doing independent research, so my requirements are very different than most people here who are still in the job market or growing their own business.
I find a combination of local Ollama models, with very inexpensive APis like Moonshot’s Kimi with occasional Gemini 2.5 Pro use, and occasionally using gemini-cli provides extraordinary value. Am I missing out by not using one or more $200-$300 a month subscriptions? Probably but I don’t care.
Keyframe
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?
mark_l_watson
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 rising geopolitical ‘south’, etc., is fascinating stuff - much more interesting and entertaining than anything fictional on Netflicks or HBO!
yomismoaqui
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.
macNchz
As with any investing there's a risk appetite/timescale component to thinking about this stuff. Lots of companies went to zero in the dot-com bubble. Even Amazon was down over 90% between the end of 1999 and late 2001, and took until 2007 to recover to its high. NASDAQ overall took 15 years to return to its March 2000 high. Some incredible returns to be had if you waited it all out, to be sure, but it's hard to know what the interim looks like.
broast
It's taken Cisco 25 years to recover
Yizahi
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, maybe even local models will fill most of people needs.
People are speculating that even OAI is burning more money than they make, it's hard to say what will happen if customer churn will increase. Like for example me - I never paid for LLMs specifically, and didn't use them in any major way, but I used free Claude for testing how it works, maybe incorporating in the workflow. I may transitioned to the paid tier in the future. But recently someone noted that Google cloud storage includes "free" Gemini Pro and I've switched to it, because why not, I'm already paying for the storage part. And there was nothing keeping me with Anthropic. Actually that name alone is revolting imo. I wrote this as an example that when monsters like Google or Microsoft or Apple would start bundling their solutions (and advertise them properly, unlike Google), then specialized companies including OAI will feel very very bad, with their insane expenses and investments.
andruby
> And I still don't understand where Facebook makes money. :)
If that's a genuine question: Facebooks sells ads, information and influence (eg. to political parties). It's a very profitable enterprise. In 2024 Meta made $164B in revenue, and they're still growing at ~16% year-over-year.
[0] https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
SJC_Hacker
> 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.
jahewson
You don’t understand how the world’s 5th largest company by market cap makes money and this is evidence of… something?
theappsecguy
“Web” is such a broad category. Quite a leap from LLM wrappers.
joe_the_user
Well, LLMs are themselves very broad. They encompass everything from web search to everything that you could automate yourself but don't have the time.
I don't LLM capacities have to reach human-equivalent for their uses to multiply for years to come.
I don't LLM technology as it exists can reach AGI by the simple addition of more compute power and moreover, I don't think adding computer necessarily is going to provide proportionate benefit (indeed, someone pointed-out that the current talent race acknowledges that brute-force has likely had it's day and some other "magic" is needed. Unlike brute-force, technical advances can't be summoned at will).
meta_ai_x
The dot-com was a bubble because investors pulled money and belief at the first sign of trouble.
The landscape has changed dramatically now. Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the payoffs are massive.
We also have more automatic, retail and foreign money flowing into the market. Buy the dip is a phenomenon that didn't exist at the scale it is now.
Pre-2015 if Big Money pulled out, the market was guaranteed to fail, but now retailers sometimes have longer views and belief (on people like Musk, Altman) than institutions and they continue to prop it.
So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now. Yes, history repeats, but doesn't with the exact time or price points
qwytw
Also there are no early IPOs. Very few people can buy stocks in these companies which changes the dynamics significantly. Note sure what's the point of talking about the stock market this much when for almost everyone the only way to get any exposureis through Nvidia or other hardware companies and maybe MS/Google/AWS.
> Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the payoffs are massive.
Well... yes and no. 2021 wasn't that long ago.
> So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now
The stock market and other financial stuff is of course different. The fundamental trend not necessarily though. It took awhile for anyone to figure out how to directly build a highly profitable internet based business back then for AI it seems more or less the same so far.
cakeface
dot-com bubble companies were not good companies. They either built something that was not novel so it could be copied, or had insufficient value to monetize. We'll see the same with current AI.
Similar to the invention of the web, AI is not a bubble. Real value has been created.
NewLogic
> not novel so it could be copied
AI Agents can't be copied in a race to the bottom market to resell inference compute?
ACCount36
Cisco was the quintessential dot-com bubble company. Back then, it was what Nvidia is today: at the very spearhead of investors rallying behind the Internet.
"Good company" is subjective, but to argue that the company that built the backbone of modern web didn't make anything novel or monetizable is a bit short-sighted, don't you find?
asadotzler
It is foolish to compare to the dot com boom and bust. At least when that bubble burst we still had the global broadband internet that it built. When this bubble bursts, we'll have next to nothing to show for it.
ghc
Nothing except massive data centers full of GPU compute resources paid for by VC money. Wait, that's actually pretty similar...
silentsea90
We have AI, a marvel that might change the arc of humanity and an epoch in our timeline. Fire, wheel etc. and AI.
sealeck
We will have a mountain of GPUs!
alfalfasprout
OP didn't reference the dot-com bubble though...
shortrounddev2
> Investors and VCs have learnt
lol. Investors and VCs have no idea what they're doing
meta_ai_x
lol is a coping mechanism for the poor. If you really think top VCs / investors haven't learnt the long-term importance of staying the course, then you know nothing about the industry and mostly being influenced by popular social media posts shitting on the investor class.
There is a reason Anthropic/OpenAI and many startups are given much much longer ropes to be profitable than in the 2000 era when VCs pulled the rug the first opportunity of trouble
mark_l_watson
Of course we are in a massive bubble. At least in the US where I live, everything is about driving short term profits, with less than a little thought to what is good for the non-special interests/insider class.
I have lived and worked through two previous ‘AI winters’ and I expect the current bubble to eventually pop in a dramatic way. There will be good things produced by AI, but I am skeptical of the panic FOMO rush to AGI or super intelligence.
Look at the process of shifting manufacturing out of the USA: that was all about driving extreme wealth for special interest insiders. Sadly, most people look to their particular little political party for some form of relief - how is that working out?
bilater
The problem you don't know which innings we are on and it may very well be the 4th/5th. More often than not you lose more by not participating in the run up and waiting for the collapse. I'd rather ride the wave (as intelligently as I can) than be on the sidelines just so I can say I told ya so.
burnte
I've begun to think some bubbles are good for the economy overall. In the dotcom days anyone with an idea and a domain name could get funding. I myself worked for a company that nabbed 7x more funding than needed but still failed due to poor leadership. I had reservations about the founder but thought I could help drive things, but he was even more absent than I ever anticipated.
A lot of VCs and PEs lost a lot of money during the crash. This means a lot of capital was spent in the economy, generating a lot of good activity, and the companies that failed then also put a lot more capital back into the economy through bankruptcies. Other businesses can pick up talent, IP, and assets for cheap, and everyone can learn from the failures. While losing that money isn't great for VCs, what they got was a very valuable education to be better stewards of their investments, and pick better companies. The next rounds of companies have to hit metrics, milestones, have to prove their value, etc.
Never waste a perfectly good crisis: learn if nothing else.
NewLogic
Good point, it transfers capital from the investor class to the working class.
crowcroft
Bubble or not these kinds of deals could put a chill on the tech startup sector as well.
Things move fast in tech because there isn't nearly as much red tape and litigation as there are in other mature industries. This is because there's an agreed 'way of doing things'. Take funding, grow like crazy, sell/merge or IPO. Everyone wins or loses together (even if things are stacked in favour for some over others).
Once trust in this process is broken and founders or VCs start stacking the deck in their favour the game becomes rigged to the point where other people don't want to play anymore. Once that trust is gone red tape and litigation appears.
lowsong
> the possibility that we’re in a massive bubble thats quite divorced from any kind of fundamentals
I'm astounded that anyone still genuinely believes we're not in a massive bubble. Of course AI company CEOs are going to say we're not and that AGI is just around the corner, it's deeply in their financial interest to keep inflating the bubble as long as possible.
dang
Recent and related:
OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44536988 - July 2025 (679 comments))
Attended Windsurf's Build Night 18 hours before founders joined Google DeepMind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44539884 - July 2025 (1 comment)
kubb
Unpopular, controversial take: there should be an LSP extension that lets CLI agents, like Claude Code show diffs in the editor, and also one for completions, and sending snippets back to the CLI.
That, by itself, would obliterate the entire value of Windsurf or Cursor or whatever. The fact that Google has this kind of money and spends it on dubious "talent" (though none of these people are known in the community) is a testament to how overfunded tech companies are compared to the value that they provide.
d1egoaz
This already exists via MCP
> For other IDEs: The protocol is editor-agnostic. Any editor that can run a WebSocket server and implement the MCP tools can integrate with Claude Code.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1234 https://github.com/coder/claudecode.nvim/blob/da78309eaa2ca2...
Example in Emacs, this is how I use claude-code: https://github.com/manzaltu/claude-code-ide.el
kubb
This is great!
HenriNext
Claude Code can already show diffs in JetBrains IDEs and VSCode ('/ide' command connects the CLI/TUI to plugin/extension running in the IDE-side).
It can also access the IDEs' real-time errors and warnings, not just compile output ('ideDiagnostics' tool), see your active editor selection, cursor position, etc.
abletonlive
"overfunded" is a weird way to talk about a tech company that is incredibly profitable.
brulard
It is known there were many developers without really much work to do that were hired only to be denied to competitors. Maybe it was cleaned up in the meantime
cweld510
Big companies hired a lot, but I don’t think this specifically is true? In theory a high-value engineer would be productive, or else they aren’t worth stealing.
The simpler explanation seems more correct here — there was a lot of product fluff and a lot of headcount allocated to build that fluff.
kubb
It's fair to suggest a different word or phrasing, but you're coming off as hostile, not constructive.
null
margalabargala
Revenue is a funding source. Companies with too much money sometimes made really dumb decisions with that money.
The fact that one division of Google is wildly profitable does not exempt other parts of the company from criticism of their financially dubious choices.
abletonlive
Net profit can't be used as a measure of both "funding" and "value generation" while saying that a company is "overfunded" because it doesn't provide enough "value". Come back to your senses.
closeparen
There should be an LSP integration that lets Cursor look up symbols and definitions the same way I do, instead of trying and failing to use grep / its fuzzy vector index thing!
csomar
There is MCP-LSP and Context7.
I use Rust and found it's better to let the AI hallucinate function names, then let the compiler correct them. Rust's compiler is significantly better than TypeScript's at this, so it works well.
retinaros
Windsurf is the first company that moved from IDE to training and trained good models. Unfortunately in code good models are not enough to win against claude 4. Any wrapper constraining the model is also doomed to fail.
cbsmith
Except the Windsurf team is already moving in that direction...
bananapub
> there should be an LSP extension that lets CLI agents, like Claude Code show diffs in the editor, and also one for completions, and sending snippets back to the CLI.
aren't you reviewing diffs in whatever diff tool you like? I find magit to be superlative for this (and for correcting and committing things).
rwyinuse
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.
alfalfasprout
Yep. The reality is folks building these types of companies are trying to get acquired as quickly as possible before the house of cards fall. This has led to a huge speculative rush of acquisitions to avoid FOMO later.
The technology is nowhere close to what they're hoping for and incremental progress isn't getting us there.
If we get true AGI agents, anyone can also build a multi-billion dollar tech companies on the cheap.
4dm1r4lg3n3r4l
> 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...
geor9e
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.
adamoshadjivas
I don't see this. The ai software engineer that succeeds, maybe it's because of a mixture of very complicated architecture derived from novel research etc. You can't replicate that with just hiring more human engineers, it takes time and effort and elite hiring. Plus enterprise support etc.
Devin etc will give you let's say 10x more engineering power, but not necessarily elite one.
swyx
i advise you to not take marketing lines too literally and be so casually dismissive as a result. you will miss a lot of good investments and startups this way and (worse) be lulled into a false sense of comfort and security.
ar_lan
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.
SJC_Hacker
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)
fragmede
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.
taejavu
There are any number of tools that already make that promise. Turns out it’s still hard to complete projects and bring them to market.
UltraSane
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.
SJC_Hacker
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)
makin
I was a bit confused as to what "Cognition" was, but they're the makers of Devin (edit: that just got added to the title, for reference), so that makes sense. Just buying the competition, the only surprise is they had more money to spend than the big ones.
brentm
Well Google did also just pay $2.5B to license Windsurf in perpetuity. Cognition is probably spending a lot less than that for just whatever it left after that type of a deal. Remaining team members, etc.
physix
This looks to me like the smoking gun on a type of acquisition that circumvents regulatory oversight, primarily driven by the "need for speed":
https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e3...
which I first saw here
DebtDeflation
Circumvents regulatory oversight and also shafts 99% of the employees. Seems to be a backdoor way to acquire the key founders/leaders and IP (via a perpetual license) while leaving behind a desiccated husk of rank and file employees, customers, and obligations.
mkagenius
> The acquisition includes Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark and brand, and strong business.
So, Google will be paying $2.5B to Devin guys?
tedivm
No, as some portion of the $2.5b goes to Windsurf investors.
Basically, Google bought the top talent from the company. This cash was used (according to articles I read this morning) in part to pay directly out to shareholders, and in exchange Google got the top talent from the company and a license for the software (probably mostly so their new talent didn't have to worry about NDA, non-compete, and patent challenges).
Since this money went to shareholders, not to the company bank, and since top talent fleeing the company reduces the value of the company the overall value of Windsurf likely went down as part of the Google deal. This in turn likely made it cheap enough for the remainder to be purchased by Cognition.
xnx
> Google did also just pay $2.5B to license Windsurf in perpetuity
Could there have been a clause that made this invalid in case of acquisition?
wmf
IANAL but you'd have to be pretty dumb to include that clause.
bix6
Can the new buyers revoke that license?
Aurornis
> the only surprise is they had more money to spend than the big ones
The sale price for Windsurf was likely significantly lower than the original acquisition plans.
It didn't go to $0 like some predicted, but it was never going to be as valuable as it was before the executives bailed on it.
dgunay
kind of funny that no one seems to know them by name, only by the infamously panned reception of their main product
esafak
One benefit of separating your brands from your company is you can try again without the stigma of your failures :)
handfuloflight
As far as I recall they were first to market with the "AI software engineer" promise.
amenghra
“Had more money to spend” => it could be a little money and a large amount of stock.
handfuloflight
Had it been the reverse, they would have announced the purchase price.
_jab
Let this be a learning lesson in judging these deals based on partial information. Kudos to the Google, Windsurf, and Cognition teams for keeping all of these deals under wraps until announcement (OpenAI could learn something...), but even so it's likely that we the public will never learn every detail of what transpired. I've seen a lot of harsh, misguided takes over the past few days, like that the Windsurf founders screwed over their employees, or that OpenAI reneged on the deal. In this case, this seems like a happy ending for all parties involved: congrats to the Windsurf team!
objclxt
> I've seen a lot of harsh, misguided takes over the past few days, like that the Windsurf founders screwed over their employees [...] In this case, this seems like a happy ending for all parties involved
There is no evidence at all in the announcement that is the case. It just says "100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially in this deal". What "participate financially" looks like is not elaborated upon.
It is possible you're right. It's also equally possible that the founders have still screwed over their employees, we just don't know. Nothing in this post supports either position.
no_wizard
>It is possible you're right. It's also equally possible that the founders have still screwed over their employees, we just don't know. Nothing in this post supports either position.
In the lack of evidence, its okay to assume the most likely scenario, which is the executives & shareholders will make out like bandits and everyone else is likely to at best, get pennies.
mring33621
pizza party
null
akavi
If my understanding is correct, this is still a much worse deal for employees than if Windsurf's exec team had negotiated a "standard" "accelerated vesting, common conversion" acquisition with Google.
Presumably the "payout" from Cognition is at a lower nominal value and in illiquid (and IMO overvalued) shares in Cognition rather than cash.
BiggerChungus
You're talking like the founders orchestrated this deal to cognition all along.
that's absolutely not the case. they ejected and the remaining executive team dealt with the sale over the weekend.
t0mas88
I can't imagine this deal was done over just the weekend. It takes time to set this up, check the financials etc.
drew-y
> OpenAI could learn something...
Did OpenAI ever actually announce anything publicly regarding a potential windsurf acquisition?
AFAICT most of the reporting was based on rumors or leaks. But they never actually announced an acquisition. Seems like Bloomberg may have made an oopsie here.
stefan_
> Kudos to the Google, Windsurf, and Cognition teams for keeping all of these deals under wraps until announcement
Geez is the cognitive distortion field active again? Even Grok could figure this one out.
krat0sprakhar
Wait, so Google picks up the talent, and Devin picks up the brand/product? This is so confusing!
TIPSIO
I think it's safe to say don't use Windsurf. There are so many other options.
bicx
Unfortunately this seems to be true. I like Windsurf, but these days I just use it as a harness for running Claude Code while still retaining decent code completions.
OldfieldFund
Try Gemini CLI too. Free and I like it more than Claude Code.
oytis
The talent stays with Devin. Google has got the CEO. Not sure why they need a CEO, maybe Pichai wants to retire
akavi
Is this purely the rump company left over from the Google pseudo-acquistion? Or does this mean that deal fell through?
Does this represent confirmation that there was no pro-rata compensation to common share holders in the Google deal?
I just have so many questions.
lunarboy
Windsurf founding team is already at Google
xnx
And what is Google "paying $2.4 billion in license fees" to use Windsurf's technology for, and to who? Does Windsurf have any technology?
mattlondon
I suspect it is more a "licence" for the things in the staff's heads for those who were poached.
whamlastxmas
And this highlights why intellectual property is really gross to me
mritchie712
not sure of windsurf's ToS, but Google could be after the usage data (e.g. did the user accept the suggested edit? if not, what did they change it to? etc.)
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DannyBee
Windsurf is the soham parekh of acquisitions at this point. Is there anyone not acquiring windsurf?
htrp
so devin gets the leftover remains of windsurf to fix their agentic AI ide that wasn't working in the first place?
rvz
yes.
badgersnake
So some VCs got rinsed for Google’s leftovers.
fortysixpercent
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.
bananapub
ok so it's not all bad then
isodev
I’m really confused now. Also, is there really that much of a transformative difference between Windsurf and say OpenAI/Claude etc to warrant this crazy valuations?
guluarte
I'm also confused why Devin is worth billions
yoyohello13
For real. According to the marketing material. Couldn’t Devon just whip up a windsurf competitor in minutes?
iamleppert
They are hiring software engineers! Just look at the careers page! hahahaha
anticensor
Devin's whole business model is predicated upon replacing programmers with minimum wage AI agents.
citizenpaul
That the generally unspoken business model for all ai products. How can we get rid of these annoying humans.
Reminds me of of some quip where a doctor says to a resident. Yeah this job would be so cool if it wasn't for all these sick people.
guluarte
That'll be cool only if Devin actually worked.
codingwagie
the founder went to harvard, is basically the answer
koakuma-chan
Who decides for much a company is worth?
xnx
> crazy valuations
I haven't seen anything to indicate what was paid for what's left of Windsurf.
isodev
I was also referring to the $2.5B Google paid. I can’t imagine what could possibly be the value they’re hoping to get
xnx
I'd love to learn more about that arrangement. Maybe Google's terms indicated that the "licensing fees" portion of "$2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation" are void if Windsurf gets acquired.
brulard
They got the top talent from there with the technology and they can continue on that or be used for other AI projects, right?
CSMastermind
The worst AI coding tool I've tried aquiring the best is interesting.
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.