The Doc ETL project mapped U.S. presidential debate transcripts to themes, extracted and deduplicated them, and loaded the results for further analysis.
They initially built a langraph with supervisor and sub-agents triggering JSON schemas, but prompt engineering complexity and reliance on frontier models proved impractical.
While building a real estate inspection app, the team pivoted from using complex AI reasoning to straightforward vector search on-device, simplifying the implementation.
A real-world agent challenge at work was more effectively solved with a straightforward vectorized RAG approach, drastically outperforming prior engineered solutions.
Cognition Labs accelerated earnouts and fully vested shares for the remaining Windsurf employees upon acquisition, demonstrating employee-centric M&A practices.
Aaron Levy recounted his experience during the first cloud wave, noting mixed CIO reactions, and contrasted that with unanimous enthusiasm for AI today.
Tom Spencer recounts that large research institutions often hold licenses for dozens of software tools but track minimal active usage, highlighting inefficiencies in enterprise license procurement.
Tom recounts that retaining and renewing existing enterprise customers is far more cost-effective than chasing entirely new prospects due to lengthy sales cycles and high travel/meeting costs.
Notable companies like Zoom and Elastic report CAC payback periods exceeding 100 months, exemplifying the unsustainability of current customer acquisition economics.
Cameron shares that building an elaborate agent hierarchy for mapping user intents to JSON schemas proved less effective and more resource-intensive than a simple retrieval-based approach.
Initially building complex reasoning pipelines for NL-to-JSON conversion, the team discovered a lightweight vector search approach solved their inspection schema mapping more effectively.
After a failed $3 billion deal with OpenAI, Google acquired key Windsurf researchers under a $2.4 billion licensing agreement while Cognition Labs later bought the remaining team and assets.
Tom recalls how the U.S. government allegedly spent excessively on ServiceNow licenses without actually using the software, prompting calls for reimbursements.
