In a surprising move, Cognition– the makers of autonomous coding tool Devin— acquired what was left of its rival Windsurf after the company’s cofounders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen and other staff members were poached by Google DeepMind for $2.

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The move is the culmination of a turbulent period for Windsurf, and indicates that agentic IDEs have become a new battleground.

Explore Cognition AI’s acquisition of Windsurf and its impact on AI, software development, and employee ownership in the tech industry.

Cognition CEO Scott Wu and interim Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang said they would start by integrating the AI-powered engineer Devin into Windsurf.

Sharing the same, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Nobel Laureate Demis Hassabis welcomed the duo and the rest of the engineers from Windsurf AI. He wrote, “ Excited to be working with them to turbocharge our Gemini efforts on coding agents, tool use, and much more .”

Cognition acquires Windsurf to integrate IDE with AI agent Devin, promoting synergy and innovation in AI-assisted coding.

For years, code-editing tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub’s Copilot have been the standard for AI-powered software development. But as agentic AI grows more powerful and vibe-coding takes off, a subtle shift has changed how AI systems are interacting with software.