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IMO: Copilot (and Devin) has always missed the mark. Its always been a lazy, bad product that feels like it was made by a team that doesn't even want to use it
by 827a 2y ago
IMO: Copilot (and Devin) has always missed the mark. Its always been a lazy, bad product that feels like it was made by a team that doesn't even want to use it themselves. Going more agentic is only going to make it worse; Copilot's product leadership appears obsessed with more comprehensive replacement of their customer workflows, but ideal customers want deeper and more fluid integration into the workflows.
Its one of those facts that seems so obvious once you realize it, but no one at Github clearly does. Who is buying and using these things? Seriously, anyone at Github, answer that, not who you think is buying them, but who is actually buying them. The answer isn't CEOs or CTOs; its Software Engineers (or CTOs, for their Software Engineers). Github's leadership needs the answer to be CEOs or CTOs, because the scale of investment (to produce such a shit product) is so large that only per-customer revenue commensurate to the replacement of SE salaries justifies it.
I know of four companies (including my own) that had a corporate Copilot subscription for their devs, and over the past quarter/this quarter are replacing it with a Cursor subscription, at the request of their devs. I'm super bullish on Cursor and Supermaven.
- I think they understand their ICP way better.
- I think their ICP is actually excited to spend money with them.
- I think these new companies have demonstrated that they are more willing to build more than just a panel in VSCode; whereas Github is bogged down by legacy interests.
- I think this deeper level of integration into existing workflows is what pushes AI past the hump of "oh i want to use that". Speeding up existing workflows by 30% feels insanely good. It grows the pie. Smaller & smarter, not larger & derivative.
- I think, from a business perspective, MS/Github has and continues to royally screw up by literally subsidizing the cost basis of their competitors by building VSCode and hosting billions of lines of open source code competitor models train on. I love it as a user. But it costs them millions of dollars, and every dollar of that spend makes their competitors stronger.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoGitHub is way to established to course correct. Their entire sales channel is enterprise. They structurally can’t see what makes cursor and stuff so much better. Plus I think they have to much money sloshing around to care. Unlike the scrappy startups they have beefy enterprise accounts as cash cows. It’s a tail as old as time, really.