Cognition AI Buys Windsurf as AI Frenzy Escalates
- Reference: 0178376164
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/07/14/1820248/cognition-ai-buys-windsurf-as-ai-frenzy-escalates
- Source link:
> The move follows a $2.4 billion deal by Google to [3]acquire some of Windsurf's top executives and license the start-up's technology, which was revealed on Friday.
>
> Google's deal appeared to leave Windsurf in a difficult position as a stand-alone start-up. OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, had also been in talks to buy Windsurf before the Google deal. "We've long admired the Windsurf team and what they've built," said Scott Wu, a co-founder of Cognition, in an email to employees viewed by The New York Times. "Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together."
[1] https://x.com/cognition_labs/status/1944819486538023138
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/cognition-ai-windsurf.html
[3] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/07/11/2246210/openais-windsurf-deal-is-off-windsurfs-ceo-is-going-to-google
Acquisitions aren't growth (Score:3)
Acquisitions... They're what companies do when they hit a wall and can't innovate, at least sometimes. Mostly, they're what companies do when they have to create numbers that look positive growth at first glance. See? They increased their marketshare by 38%! Oh, by acquiring another company. Nothing new was created, only destroyed.
Primetime (Score:2)
A bunch of my colleagues are raving about windsurf, one even starting a company to 'vibe code' an AI app. I was curious to try it.
Fired up a really basic web app I'm testing - pointed it at a file with about 100 lines of html/js and asked it to describe the function on line 78 or whatever. It came back with a very reasonable-sounding answer, but it wasn't the function on line 78. It completely hallucinated something from somewhere else. When I said "no that's wrong" it replied "oh yes! sorry about that..."
Re: (Score:2)
No you didn't do anything wrong. This is the amazing AI we're all being replaced by.
Idiots trying to sound knowledgeable (Score:3)
> "Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together."
Scott Wu obviously doesn't know very much about what an engineer actually is or historically has done.
Re: (Score:3)
>> "Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together."
> Scott Wu obviously doesn't know very much about what an engineer actually is or historically has done.
I think the proper translation of his words are "This will hopefully allow us to lay off 90% of our software engineers within our lifetime".
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully your current and future 'software engineers' will learn, quickly, to refocus on systems design, business process design, and leave the head down coding to machines that will eventually automate the grunt work of this and that.
Of course, the transition w
The transition will be ugly. But ask any CPA how they feel the transition from paper ledgers to Excel spreadsheets to modern accounting software ruined their profession...
That's the model to aim for. Many a CPA I did work for offered value in interp