5 years ago if you said coding tools would be worth in the billions in value it would of been surprising to most people. Dev Tools were the thing you could never get a company to buy for you or were just free for most people. Interesting times.

Dev tools are still very hard to sell (I know, I have a dev tools company). Claude Code, Aider and Codex are given away for free. What people are buying is access to proprietary general purpose models.

Bubble or not, given the exit, Windsurf's (Codeium) focus on enterprise sales motion has been rewarded rather handsomely: https://research.contrary.com/company/windsurf / mirror: https://archive.vn/ThWNz

Yeah, in the recent Lightcone Podcast episode, Varun was talking about how they have a lean eng team but large sales org. I thought that was super interesting for a dev tool since I was expecting a dev tool to involve bottom-up sales to the dev instead of top-down sales to a leader like a CTO or VP of Eng

It will be super interesting to see how they do against the inverse: an engineering-focused company that wants to win devs from the bottom up

100%. You're referring to Cursor?

thats how you spend a lot of time making something great that no one pays for and everyone demonizes you if you even try

It's all about stocks