Windsurf folds into Google.. just as Vibe Coding is about to break out.
All eyes on Kimi-K2, the latest open source model from China, which impresses with its creative writing and coding abilities
Windsurf folded just… as vibe coding is finally ready to break out.
For most of the past year vibe coding felt like more promise than payoff, but in the last few weeks something’s shifted. I believe the next billion-dollar boom of “vibe builders” is truly here.
I see myself as a good litmus test for whether vibe coding can reach the mainstream prosumer-builder crowd, i.e. the Figma, Bubble, and Make users. As a computational designer, I understand code - but i’m too way too slow at hand-coding to be effective at it.
Since last fall I’ve spun up coding agents every few weeks, and for months the results were stop-and-go: dazzling demos on X, sure, but followed by frustrating fits and stalls.
Last week, though, I shipped a full web app in just a few nights (I made Aura, a fun portrait generator!) complete with OAuth, account management, and third-party API hooks.
Yes, some debugging remained, but the agent fixed almost everything. I only cracked open docs for one or two stubborn quirks.
My stack: Cursor for vibe coding, Supabase for auth + data, Vercel to deploy.
The prosumer-builder ecosystem is about to become explosive, and the growth numbers already hint at it, with tools like Vercel, Supabase and Cursor doubling revenues in the last year.
Very soon, the “non-developer developer” gold rush will be in full swing.
Windsurf folded too early. There’s a ton of opportunity to build the picks and shovels for the next generation builders, especially with better UX / DX.
The Download —
Kimi-K2 is the next open source breakout from China after Deepseek (Moonshot AI)
Moonshot AI has launched Kimi-K2, a new open-weight LLM built as a mixture-of-experts model. Early pundits say it used a better training approach which optimized its loss curve. Interestingly, Kimi-K2 performs really well in creative writing (good in English, apparently even better in Mandarin). It’s said to have a distinct writing voice that’s absent of the quirks we have seen in AI-generated writing.
Google hires Windsurf execs in $2.4 billion deal to advance AI coding ambitions. (Reuters)
Google has struck a $2.4 billion deal to license AI coding technology from startup Windsurf and hired its CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and select R&D team members into DeepMind to work on agentic coding for the Gemini project
New research centre to explore how AI can help humans ‘speak’ with pets (Guardian)
The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the London School of Economics will explore AI to enable pet-human "conversation", while cautioning against misleading outputs that might harm animal welfare. The exploration into interspecies communication continues, with projects like Deepmind’s DolphinGemma, a large language model developed by Google, to help scientists study how dolphins communicate.
