In case you missed it, there’s been a major shift in the AI tool landscape.

On Friday, OpenAI’s $3 billion offer to acquire AI coding tool Windsurf expired. Windsurf is the Pepsi to Cursor's Coke. They're both IDEs, the programming desktop application that software developers use to code. Think of them as supercharged text editors but with AI built in.

On Friday evening, Google announced that it had hired Windsurf's CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and several key researchers for $2.4 billion.

On Monday, Cognition, the company behind Devin, the self-described “AI engineer” announced that it had acquired Windsurf for an undisclosed sum, but noting that its remaining 250 employees will “participate financially in this deal.”

Why does this matter to designers?

The AI tools market is changing very rapidly. With AI helping to write these applications, their numbers and features are always increasing—or in this case, maybe consolidating. Choose wisely before investing too deeply into one particular tool. The one piece of advice I would give here is to avoid lock-in. Don’t get tied to a vendor. Ensure that your tool of choice can export your work—the code.

Jason Lemkin has more on the business side of things and how it affects VC-backed startups.