Is your AI strategy built for speed or stability? | Qodo’s Itamar Friedman

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler. And today, we have a special guest with us, because my normal co-host, Ben, isn't joining us for today's new segment, but instead I brought along one of my close friends in the DevRel world. I'd like to introduce you to my pal, Rizel. Rizel, why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners?

**Rizel** (0:25)
Hey, y'all, like you said, my name is Rizel, and I'm a tech lead at Block, focused on open source, particularly focused on an AI agent slash MCP client called Goose. And I'm so happy you have me here.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:40)
Oh, we're excited to have you here. We talk a lot about Goose on Dev Interrupted. That's not the first time our listeners have heard. So definitely be sure to check out Rizel's work after you listen to this podcast. Rizel is publishing stuff constantly on Goose, and I'm learning from her all the time. But today, Rizel is locked in with me. We're doing the news segment together, so we're going to cover some of this week's news. We're going to go ahead and dive in, Rizel, okay?

**Rizel** (1:04)
I'm ready.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:05)
All right. So first up, we're talking about the acquisition of Windsurf. This is an interesting saga that hit the news in the last week about the next chapter of Windsurf. And this comes after Windsurf acquisition, as you might have recently heard, they were going to get purchased. But then there was like a second purchase. There was another agreement. And to be honest, Rizal, I had a hard time following this news story in terms of who got what from Windsurf, and what was left, and what's the deal. So what's your read on this?

**Rizel** (1:42)
Yeah. First of all, like you, I'm confused because... I didn't... First off, Windsurf is a hot commodity. First, I remember Microsoft or OpenAI wanted them. Then Microsoft came in and was like, nah, I don't know about that. And then we got Google.
I heard that they acquired them. And then this week, they're talking about Cognition got them. So I'm very confused on like who got what. And this is just not like the traditional type of acquisition. I'm wondering if more acquisitions would look like this in the future too.

**Andrew Zigler** (2:13)
Yeah, I kind of think it's becoming the norm of like you get this talent that's acquired. We're going to talk a little bit more about talent acquisition later. There's a new segment on that as well. But there's just something to be said here about the founders and these early product leaders getting acquired or more like an acquirer right from these larger companies who want their brains and how they organized and built this application. Some cases you see them immediately turn around and leave or then go to another organization. It becomes this new norm where people are kind of ping-ponging between these huge players and the tech world. And so this windsurf acquisition by Cognition, who you may recognize as creating Devon, that's going to be an interesting new chapter in terms of how they're going to combine. Devon itself is a loaded brand name in AI agents and AI code review in general. So I think that they're probably going to get a lot of mileage out of the windsurf name and IP. That was probably a huge part of the acquisition. But definitely go check out the LinkedIn video from the founders talking about together. We're going to make sure that gets linked for y'all. We'd love to hear what you think because I'm kind of left scratching my head a little bit.

**Rizel** (3:23)
Like we just said, I do think it will kind of impact Devon's brand because I think Devon's real enterprising right now and windsurf is less so.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:32)
Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how they kind of mold together. So diving into this next article, this is a note from a past guest on Dev Interrupted, someone that we know and love very much here, Brigida Boeckler at ThoughtWorks. And she has been covering how teams are working with agentic AI. There's another article from her on this topic, and it's called, I Still Care About the Code. And I loved this article, and that's why I'm definitely going to include it in our show notes and why we're talking about it now. Ever since coding assistant kind of came on the scene, there's a lot of people that have been saying like, oh, since AI can generate it for me, like, you know, I don't really care about the code anymore. But Brigida takes a really strong stance on why caring about that code matters more than ever, and what it really means to care about that code. What that means from beginning to end in creating it, but also understanding the purpose of it. This is like a really salient article. It's not even, it's not super long. It captures the idea perfectly. So I really recommend you check it out. Rizel, what do you think of this one?