Welcome to the very first edition of AI Dev Tools Weekly, where we look at the latest news about AI, with a focus on how it is changing the software industry. The newsletter aims to be practical and pragmatic, and antidote to the vibe coding hype!

Cognition acquires Windsurf

COGNITION.AI

Probably the biggest news this week relates to the latest deal announced regarding Windsurf, which is the latest in a complicated series of events!

Just over a month ago OpenAI announced a bid to purchase Windsurf, however, one week ago the deal fell through with Google suddenly swooping in. Rather than buy the company outright, they skimmed off the CEO and the top-talent, together with certain rights to the company’s technology. This is a continuation of the current AI talent wars, where Meta is poaching talent from OpenAI, Google, Apple and Anthropic for eye-watering sums.

Cognition is the company behind Devin, one of the most well-known fully-autonomous coding agents. However, the suffered quite a bit of industry backlash a year ago when it turned out that some of their demos were not all that they seemed. Cognition have announced that they will acquire the rest of Windsurf’s talent, together with their core technology assets.

This feels like a pretty smart move. Windsurf is similar to the popular Cursor platform, but with a more enterprise-focussed offering. This gives Cognition the opportunity to create a more full-suite enterprise product offering and potentially address some of their earlier bad press.

The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What’s in your tech stack?

pragmaticengineer.com

In this post Gergely shares the results of his latest developer survey, which started last year as an AI focussed study. The results from this year’s survey (of 3,000 engineers) let us look at the trends in AI tooling adoption.

The survey results reveal that 85% of respondents are using AI tools, with GitHub Copilot being the most popular (by quite some margin). When it comes to conversational tools, ChatGPT is still leading, but rapidly losing ground to Anthropic’s Claude. This is no doubt fuelled by the reputation Claude Sonnet is growing as one of the most capable models for coding.

When looking at company size, GitHub Copilot has by far the most enterprise appeal, no doubt because many large organisations find it easier to procure from companies where they already have an existing contract.

Finally, this passage caught my eye:

Most respondents who mention vibe coding tools aren’t engineers. Around two thirds of those who mention Vercel v0, Bolt.new, and Lovable, are founders, director+ folks, or engineering leads. […] This suggests that vibe coding tools might be more helpful for less hands-on folks who want to prototype something, perhaps to show to their engineering team.

Highlighting the difference between vibe coding and AI-assisted software development.

AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they’re faster, study finds

theregister.com

Unfortunately, this headline was somewhat inevitable!

Last week an interesting paper was published that explored the impact of AI developer tools on the productivity of 16 highly experienced open source developers. They asked these engineers to estimate the boost in productivity that AI would give them ahead of undertaking a ‘real world’ task. However, despite making them faster (as these developers predicted), it made them on average 19% slower.

The paper itself is a really good read, they carefully consider the numerous factors that may have had an impact on productivity. They were also careful not to use their findings to declare “AI assisted software development is dead” or some other hyped conclusion. However, inevitably the some of the press has done that on their behalf.

Personally, I think that learning how to get the most of AI dev tools takes a lot more time than people expect. In this study more than half the participants hadn’t used Cursor before.

And finally

“Steve Jobs was a vibe coder, he just prompted Steve Wozniak.”