Windsurf, the company behind the agentic IDE of the same name, has just been acquired by Cognition, the company behind the autonomous software engineering agent, Devin. With the merger, the two companies will combine Cognition’s autonomous agents with Windsurf’s interactive development environment for a new “human-AI” collaboration model.
The announcement comes just days after the former CEO Varun Mohan and other senior R&D employees left for Google for $2.4 billion. This deal also gave Google a non-exclusive license to Windsurf’s technology.
For those not familiar, Windsurf already contains agentic AI called SWE-1 and SWE-1-Lite which let you ask them anything and they will turn it into code. This drastically lowers the barriers to entry for coding as you no longer need to know how to code, you can just ask the AI and it does it for you.
Explaining how Windsurf and Cognition products can be used together, the new Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang said that you might use a team of Devins to do chunks of your coding projects while using Windsurf, with features like Tab and Cascade, to do the hardest parts yourself. They plan to stitch all this work together within the same environment.
Windsurf says that it’s all for human-AI amplification, rather than automation. So while these technologies may not totally replace programmers, they could end up leading to fewer jobs as fewer people can get more done with AI.
The integration of the two companies will be very interesting as it will allow for deep codebase understanding, delegation of work chunks, and integrated stitching of code. What will be a big concern for Windsurf users, though, is what will happen to the company’s free tier which essentially gives you unlimited use of SWE-1-Lite to write your code. It’s not too easy to find an AI coding assistant that’s this generous or as tightly baked into the IDE.
Cognition for its part doesn’t offer a free tier with Devin, and this might end up being the case for Windsurf. The free tier may have just been there to attract users and attention to justify a high valuation in an effort to get sold for a hefty price tag.
You’d be forgiven for not having heard of Cognition as the company is also a startup with a valuation not much larger than Windsurf’s at $4 billion. Its main product is Devin and it’s already deployed in production-grade codebases. Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang said that Cognition had the only team they were scared of, so partnering with them was the “obvious right choice”.
Hopefully, this deal will not see the end of Windsurf’s generous free tier but it’ll be understandable if they do have to start charging as the compute power is not cheap.