If these ai companies had 100x dev output, why would you acquire a company? Why not just show screenshots to your agent and get it to implement everything?

Is it market share? Because I don't know who has a bigger user base that cursor.

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Bridged7756 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The claims are clearly exaggerated or as you say, we'd have AI companies pumping out new AI focused IDEs left and right, crazy features, yet they all are Vs code forks that roughly do the same shit

A VSCode fork with AI, like 10 other competitors doing the same, including Microsoft and Copilot, MCPs, Vs code limitations, IDEs catching up. What do these AI VsCode forks have going for them? Why would I use one?

	▲	pizzafeelsright 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I am validating and testing these for the company and myself. Each has a personality with quirks and deficiencies. Sometimes the magic sauce is the prompting or at times it is the agentic undercurrent that changes the wave of code. More specific models with faster tools is the better shovel. We are not there yet.

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gen220 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Heyo, disclosure that I work for graphite, and opinions expressed are my own, etc.

Graphite is a really complicated suite of software with many moving pieces and a couple more levels of abstraction than your typical B2B SaaS.

It would be incredibly challenging for any group of people to build a peer-level Graphite replacement any faster than it took Graphite to build Graphite, no matter what AI assistance you have.

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manquer 3 days ago | parent [-]

It’s always faster and easier to copy than create(AI or not). There is lot of thought and effort in doing it first, which the second team(to an extent) can skip.

Much respect to what have you have achieved in a short time with graphite.

A lot of B2B SaaS is about tones of integrations to poorly designed and documented enterprise apps or security theatre, compliance, fine grained permissions, a11y, i18n, air gapped deployments or useless features to keep largest customers happy and so on and on.

Graphite (as yet) does not any of these problems - GitHub, Slack and Linear are easy as integrations go, and there is limited features for enterprises in graphite.

Enterprise SaaS is hard to do just for different type of complexity

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gen220 2 days ago | parent [-]

I think trivial GH integrations are easy.

If you've used Graphite as a customer for any reasonable period of time or as part of a bigger enterprise/org and still think our app's particular integration with GH is easy... I think that's more a testament to the work we've done to hide how hard it is :)

Most of the "hard" problems we're solving (which I'm referencing in my original comment) are not visually present in the CLI or web application. It's actually subtle failure-states or unavailability that you would only see if I'm doing my job poorly.

I'm not talking about just our CLI tool or stacking, to clarify. I'm talking about our whole suite, especially the review page and merge queue.

What kind of enterprise SaaS features do you wish you had in Graphite? (We have multiple orgs with 100s-1,000s of engineers using us today!)

	▲	gnutrino 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The Graphite review UI/UX is at least 3x better than GitHub, and also somehow loads faster. Same with the customizable PR inbox. Love it! Appreciate your work on the platform!

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pizzafeelsright 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My guess is the purchase captures the 'lessons learned' based upon production use and user feedback.

What I do not understand is that if a high level staff with capacity can produce an 80% replacement why not assign the required staff to complete that last 10% to bring it to production readiness? That last 10% is unnecessary features and excess outside of the requirements.

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Aurornis 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If these ai companies had 100x dev output,

I hate the unrealistic AI claims about 100X output as much as anyone, but to be fair Cursor hasn't been pushing these claims. It's mostly me-too players and LinkedIn superstars pushing the crazy claims because they know triggering people is an easy ticket to more engagement.

The claims I've seen out of the Cursor team have been more subtle and backed by actual research, like their analysis of PR count and acceptance rate: https://cursor.com/blog/productivity

So I don't think Cursor would have ever claimed they could duplicate a SaaS company like Graphite with their tools. I can think of a few other companies who would make that claim while their CEO was on their latest podcast tour, though.

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dbgrman 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Existing users, distribution, and brand are a big part of acquisition. Graphite is used mainly by larger orgs.

Also, graphite isn't just "screenshots"; it's a pretty complicated product.

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dcre 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Who has claimed to have 100x productivity?

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scotty79 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why build if you can buy? Money is not a scarce resource in AI economy. Time is.

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Angostura 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps the company you are acquiring has the product of 100x dev output?