If you can classify Minecraft as a toy, it has zero clean-up time

Filling in creeper holes and cutting down floating trees left by my children is a never ending job though.

I'm surprised how little attention this is getting on HN.

Dopamine is a primal reward system. It's useless in the evolved modern world that requires rational thought, discipline and hard work. You probably wouldn't get much done waiting for a dopamine reward.

They didn't even buy an IDE since windsurf is more like a VS code plugin.

So what was it exactly that was worth the 3B that they couldn't replicate themselves? Their prompts? Their training sets? Their users or user data?

Maybe time? OpenAI has access to basically infinite capital right now, if they believe this will be an importnat market and they could save a few months on launching this acquisition may be worth it for them.

I'd guess the prompts and employees.

I've found Windsurf more reliable/efficient than any other editors by leagues. How ever they have named the tools, crafted their prompts and generally how their internals reason is just on the money. I don't think that is easy to replicate, iterating on prompts over product releases whilst not pissing off your user base constantly is a feat in of itself.

Then perhaps it's about bringing in the human talent that wrote those prompts.

To be honest, Windsurf doesn't work like half of the time, so it's more likely their users, the data, and their branding/marketing potential.

Windsurf/Codeium plugin is at least 3 years old.

I came in expecting this was going to be a methodological article. Maybe better let the kids wait as opposed to the parents in their cars?

I would define fascism as:

"The pursuit of unity in its most extreme form, rejecting and eliminating alternative thoughts and ideas by any means necessary."

Thought-provoking but also pretty vague. It makes no distinction between hard auth-left and hard auth-right.

When asking about Taiwan and Russia I get pretty scripted responses. Deepseek even starts talking as "we". I'm fairly sure these responses are part of the model so they must have some way to prime the learning process with certain "facts".

Using some old tricks that used to work with gpt but don't anymore I was able to circumvent pretty much all censoring

https://i.imgur.com/NFFJxbO.png

So I'm finding it less censored than GPT, but I suspect this will be patched quickly.

And it got removed

> is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine.

This is actually the hardest part. I can write detailed requirements about the car I need. Create a PowerPoint presentation that shows a schema of the system and subsystems; the engine block, transmission and steering wheel etc. with lines how they are connected.

That's the easy part. Now you need the team of skilled engineers developing the actual car. And you need them to be experienced and good at it.

You need at least one guy who is able to load a complete mental map of everything that's needed to be engineered. Who understands the business requirements and is able to create a vision for the product and technical solution. He needs to understand databases, web services, authentication, authorization, security, performance, web standards back- and front-end solutions. Be smart about what logical components are needed and have an high level idea how they could be implemented technically. Ideally that guy can also open a repository and read what's going on.

Especially with larger corporations there's still so much potential for automation. Yet what we see is a big fragmented mess. Systems and subsystems that are poorly integrated. Exactly the car you'd expect that was designed in PowerPoint by non-engineers.

> This is actually the hardest part. I can write detailed requirements about the car I need. Create a PowerPoint presentation that shows a schema of the system and subsystems; the engine block, transmission and steering wheel etc. with lines how they are connected.

> That's the easy part. Now you need the team of skilled engineers developing the actual car. And you need them to be experienced and good at it.

In this analogy, the engineers who design the car are the equivalent of the systems analysts. The programmers are the machinists on the shop floor actually building the car.

> You need at least one guy who is able to load a complete mental map of everything that's needed to be engineered. Who understands the business requirements and is able to create a vision for the product and technical solution. He needs to understand databases, web services, authentication, authorization, security, performance, web standards back- and front-end solutions. Be smart about what logical components are needed and have an high level idea how they could be implemented technically. Ideally that guy can also open a repository and read what's going on.

Yes -- that's your systems analyst! More importantly, they need to understand the business and the information needs of the people involved. A high-level, 10,000-foot understanding of technical requirements is important, but the details should be left to the programmers. That's what programmers are good at. It's the big-picture, business-centric, people-oriented view that's missing in today's culture, and prevents us from "building the right thing right".

> The programmers are the machinists on the shop floor actually building the car.

No, because with software there's no human execution. It's the computers that execute the design. The developers design the blueprints of what the computers need to execute. They are the architects.

For an analogy you can probably best compare this with 3D printed houses.

> A high-level, 10,000-foot understanding of technical requirements is important, but the details should be left to the programmers.

But why leave the details to the programmers? Why doesn't the systems analyst produce a proper CAD-like blueprint that leaves no room for interpretation? His system design should produce the exact same result regardless which contractor implements it. Yet that's never the case.

The reason is because he can't. The systems analyst doesn't have a clue what he's designing. If he would be able to write a proper blueprint we could just hand it off to the computer and have it executed. No need for programmers. But now the systems analyst has become a developer.