CodeSandbox Acquired by Together AI
codesandbox.ioThe blog post reads like AI buzzword bingo. They had a clear product vision helping developers collaborate, but now they're chasing the AI hype train with vague promises about "secure AI sandboxes". I've been using CodeSandbox for a year and this feels like watching a solid dev tools company get sacrificed on the altar of AI FOMO.
I wouldn’t doubt the team was looking for an exit and this was the best offer they got. Stackblitz has pretty much taken over their usecase so it seemed to me like CodeSandbox was going to slowly die.
Another company that built something awesome for the dev community everyone loved, but wouldn't pay for.
It’s very hard to sell to developers and make money, unless you are big tech
Codesandbox jumped the shark about 3 years ago when they pivoted from simple client side sandboxes to full featured devboxes running on their servers, and incidentally started charging people credits for sharing.
This had the effect of breaking thousands, if not millions, of demos around the web, which were the main source of their word of mouth customers.
I understand why they did it - I'm sure their short term profits went up massively.
But they had caught magic before then, with a perfect blend of features and simplicity, and they sacrificed it to the gods of profit.
AI enshitification is just the natural next step in this process.
"Together AI has quickly grown into the leading hosting platform for AI"
Lol. Definitely not. I went through pricing and large scale deployment of an AI system last week.
Together AI is at the bottom of the pile.
These are much better options in terms of both price / performance / models etc: https://cerebras.ai/ https://deepinfra.com/ https://hyperbolic.xyz/
Goes to show how frothy the market still is in AI. Large sums for free to buy up companies.
They're trying to do what Vercel and repl.it are doing and trying to become end to end automated code deployment platforms. All companies that started out as just useful dev tools.