Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf (cognition.ai)
291 points by alazsengul 3h ago 229 comments
Replicube: 3D shader puzzle game, online demo (replicube.xyz)
50 points by inktype 3d ago 8 comments
Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf
291 alazsengul 229 7/14/2025, 6:07:15 PM cognition.ai ↗
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 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.
The challenge with the bubble/not bubble framing is the question of long term value.
If the labs stopped spending money today, they would recoup their costs. Quickly.
There are possible risks (could prices go to zero because of a loss leader?), but I think anthropic and OpenAI are both sufficiently differentiated that they would be profitable/extremely successful companies by all accounts if they stopped spending today.
So the question is: at what point does any of this stop being true?
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.
Nothing. Most people will not pay for a chat bot unless forced to by cramming it into software that they already have to use
This is _especially_ true for developers in general, which is very ironic considering how our livelihood is dependent on Software.
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.
[1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
[2] https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistake...
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.
In other words: it might be useful for people who don't understand the generated code well enough to know that it's incorrect or unmaintainable.
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.
I think that there is a bubble but it's shaped more like the web bubble and less like the crypto bubble.
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.
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...
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).
There are still massive gains to be had from scaling up - but frontier training runs have converged on "about the largest model that we can fit into our existing hardware for training and inference". Going bigger than that comes with non-linear cost increases. The next generations of AI hardware are expected to push that envelope.
The reason why major AI companies prioritize things like reasoning modes and RLVR over scaling the base models up is that reasoning and RLVR give real world performance gains cheaper and faster. Once scaling up becomes cheaper, or once the gains you can squeeze out of RLVR deplete, they'll get back to scaling up once again.
I think overstating their broad-ness is core to the hype-cycle going on. Everyone wants to believe—or wants a buyer to believe—that a machine which can grow documents about X is just as good (and reliable) as actually creating X.
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
> 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.
Similar to the invention of the web, AI is not a bubble. Real value has been created.
"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?
lol. Investors and VCs have no idea what they're doing
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
Delusional to apply this to top operators (and at the same breath complain about Rich getting Richer)
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Have used Cursor and I know that there is quite a bit of value between the model and the chat input box and it will be similar to Claude Code or Codex, it's what makes this agentic, it's just accessed through a different interface. So from that perspective, Cursor makes sense for folks that are already in the VSCode environment.
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.
Could you please avoid juicing a random comment this way?
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)
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.
That's not how the economy works...
Devin etc will give you let's say 10x more engineering power, but not necessarily elite one.
https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e3...
which I first saw here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44553257
So, Google will be paying $2.5B to Devin guys?
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.
Could there have been a clause that made this invalid in case of acquisition?
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.
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.
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.
Presumably the "payout" from Cognition is at a lower nominal value and in illiquid (and IMO overvalued) shares in Cognition rather than cash.
that's absolutely not the case. they ejected and the remaining executive team dealt with the sale over the weekend.
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.
Geez is the cognitive distortion field active again? Even Grok could figure this one out.
[API Error: got status: INTERNAL. {"error":{"code":500,"message":"An internal error has occurred. Please retry or report in https://developers.generativeai.google/guide/troubleshooting..."}}]```
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.
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 reasonable, but it's possible.
I haven't seen anything to indicate what was paid for what's left of Windsurf.
The fact that it doesn't make sense with those numbers almost surely indicates those numbers are misleading.
> Google paid a $2.4 billion licensing fee
This is the reported number for licensing and compensation, but who knows what the terms really were.
> Cognition’s valuation is $4 billion
Doubtful
Microsoft poached the talent, devin Co. Picks up the scraps
> 100% of Windsurf employees will have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date
> 100% of Windsurf employees will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date
This sounds like a happy ending for the employees of Windsurf and a good deal for Cognition
The employees were robbed from having a big cash exit. Illiquid stock options from Windsurf were converted to illiquid stock options of Devin.
What's worse is that the well is now poisoned. I would advise against joining startups from now on, because I think that there's no upside for employees anymore.
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Cognition being worth $4B with Devin being raced to zero by Claude Code also undercutting both Windsurf and Cursor have a very steep hill to climb.
Having both Devin and Windsurf will just make them raise more money as they burn through their operational costs.
This is unclear. $2.4B was for licensing and compensation. Why would Google have agreed to pay any significant amount to the Windsurf leftovers?
> This transaction is structured so that 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially. They will also have all vesting cliffs waived and will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date.
But with all this changing of hands, I'm not sure I can trust it going forward at all, so I guess it's back to looking for alternatives.
They had released their own model which was free and good enough a couple of weeks back.
Obviously will need to look for alternatives.
All right, cancelled.
No code or prompts are stored unless you opt-in. We also have on-prem deployment options but it's much more expensive.
For those brief 2 weeks, Windsurf felt like the SOTA tool. Crazy how the winds change.
Feels like a new SOTA tool every couple weeks. Heck, the post below this is about a new agentic IDE.
On the other hand, I can imagine the execs taking Google golden handcuffs while trying to close the Cognition deal so the employees are made whole or maybe even on better terms than if they all went to Google.
I wonder what the terms were there. Hard for me to imagine why Google would've included that in the deal.
First, OpenAI wanted to acquire Windsurf. Terrific move! Win-win for OpenAI (who needs more AI product) and Windsurf (for the deal price). But this fell apart because Windsurf didn't want the IP to go to Microsoft (which imo should not have been not a big deal, especially if you knew what would have happened next). Big loss for all parties for this to have fallen apart.
My biggest question still is why not continue on as an independent company? Perhaps losing access to Claude doomed signups; perhaps employees/investors had a taste of an exit and still wanted it; perhaps due to fiduciary duty to maximize returns; perhaps their growth stalled due to the announcement? In any case, the founders got a similarly equivalent deal from Google, and were arguably wise to pursue it.
But Google's Corp Dev team here is the most maddening. Why not fully acquire the entire company, instead of doing the same "acquihire and license" deal that was done to Character AI, Adept, Scale, etc.? Risk of FTC antitrust review is a thing, but Google's not even competitive in the coding market, so I doubt there is a review (though I do hear that all acquisitions by large tech companies these days are reviewed by default). If there's anyone to blame in this situation, it's the FTC and Google for pursuing this strategy, instead of a full acquisition. Win-win for Google (for the team) and Windsurf (for getting a similar acquisition price, but liquid!).
Imo, the founders did a good job ensuring that close to the $3B acquisition price was reflected in the $2.5B Google deal--all existing investors and vested employee/equity holders are paid out; the company also retained $100M which was suspiciously similar to the amount needed to pay out all unvested employee/equity holders [1]. So theoretically the remaining company could pay accelerate vesting, then pay out the cash to their remaining employees, and then shut down, to give everyone the same exit as an acquisition, or better. This might have been the best scenario, because the brand damage to Windsurf as an IDE that happened over the weekend was pretty close to unrecoverable for them as an independent company.
But instead, the company leadership decided to field acquisition offers for the remaining company and IP, and got one from Cognition. (I'm actually surprised this acquisition isn't under FTC review; it's more plainly an agentic coding company acquiring a competitor agentic coding company). In taking the offer, it reinforces that the Windsurf IDE will continue to exist, that they have a R&D team backing the IDE again, and can marry Windsurf's enterprise sales chops with Cognition's product [3]. Win-win for both Cognition and Windsurf.
So overall, win-win-win all around, except for OpenAI, Varun's public reputation (imo, undeserved), and startups hiring employees (who might think they might not get a proper exit) [2].
[1] https://x.com/haridigresses/status/1944406541064433848
[2] https://stratechery.com/2025/google-and-windsurf-stinky-deal...
[3] https://x.com/russelljkaplan/status/1944845868273709520
See, most closed source software really just pisses me off of ideological reasons, I just like to tinker with things and just having the possibility to do so by being provided the source code really helps my mind feel happy I guess.
So I "vibe coded" a game that I used to play and some projects that I was curious about and I just wanted to tinker too. sure the game and code have bugs.
Also with the help of AI, I feel like I can tinker about things that I don't know too much about and get a decent distance ahead. You might think that I am an AI advocate by reading this comment, but quite the contrary, I personally think that this is the only positive quality that AI helped in quite substantially.
But at what cost? The job market has sunk a large hole and nobody's hiring the junior devs because everybody feels better doing some AI deals than hiring junior devs.
My hunch is that senior devs are extremely in demand and are paid decently and so will retire on average early too. Then, there would be a huge gap b/w senior and juniors, because nobody's hiring the junior engineers now, so who will become the senior engineers if nobody got hired in the first place. I really hope that most companies actually realize that the AI game is quite a funny game really, most companies are too invested into it to realize that really, open source AI will catch up and there is just no moat with AI and building with AI or just doing stuff with AI isn't that meaningfully significant as they think it is as shown by recent studies.
Is this true? I am not seeing salaries rising, the demand seems to be met. But maybe I'm wrong.
Also maybe I felt this way because of 100 Million $ and the 30 Billion $ acquisition by Zuckerberg I guess
I might ask AI (Oh the irony) and here is the chat https://chatgpt.com/share/68756188-d374-8011-9f23-6860d6b1db... and here is one of the major source of this I suppose
https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/senior-hiring-is-surging-wil...
And I would like to quote a part from the hackerrank ie. Taken in isolation, this might suggest a cautious but healthy rebound. But viewed through a 2025 lens, a deeper pattern emerges: teams are leaning hard into experience, and leaving early-career talent behind.
Clearly.
My name is Devin; it has been for many decades now. I'm embarrassed to see you've named your product after me. It has already prompted uncomfortable jokes at my expense, and I'm sure there will be more. I now have newfound empathy for people named Alexa.
For instance, people have made jokes about my name in interviews, and it's embarrassing for me, and thus awkward for everyone, and awkward interactions make it objectively less likely that I will get job offers.
I don't think any product should be named after people. Please change the name of Devin.