On 6 August, Atlassian — the Sydney company that licenses Jira project tracking and Confluence documents by the user seat — closed the best year in its history and told investors the next one would be roughly half as good. Revenue for the year to June was $6.572bn, up 26%. Operating income came to $10.4m, a rounding error on that revenue but the first positive full year the company has ever reported. Cloud revenue in the final quarter rose 31% to $1.213bn, and remaining performance obligations were up 44%.

Then came the guide. Fiscal 2027 revenue growth of about 13%, as the self-managed Data Center line — whose end-of-life deadline pulled renewals forward — declines around 17%. Non-GAAP operating margin steps down to 25% from 36% in the June quarter, and roughly four points of that fiscal-2026 margin was Data Center timing. The shares rose 35.8% the following session.

One session, half a month

That single day is close to a quarter of the whole eight-company average for the past 30 sessions. Atlassian's +69.7% is about half of it. Remove each name's two best sessions and only Atlassian, at +6.8%, and GitLab, at +6.7%, are still positive; Figma is -13.7%, Adobe -11.2%, Cadence -8.3%, Autodesk -8.2%. The equal-weight average goes from +17.3% to -3.6%. A large part of what remains dates to 28 July, when money rotated out of semiconductors and into beaten-down software names — the best day of the window for Autodesk, Adobe and PTC alike.

The two that grew fastest are the two that fell

Cadence Design Systems sells the software chip engineers use to lay out silicon, plus emulation hardware and pre-verified circuit blocks. Second-quarter revenue rose 24.2% to $1.584bn at a 28.4% operating margin. Backlog hit a record $8.1bn, intellectual-property revenue grew over 40%, and management raised full-year guidance by the largest single-quarter increment it has ever made. Cadence is the only one of the eight down over 30 days, and down 6.5% over 90.

The reason has a date. On 17 July, Chinese lab Moonshot released a model that completed a chip design in about 48 hours using open-source tools and no proprietary electronic design automation (EDA) software. Cadence fell 9.5% that day and Synopsys 7.9%. Cadence's own answer, given ten days later, is that AI agents call the underlying tools more often, not less — its agent product is in 20-plus customer engagements and validates circuit logic more than 40 times faster.

Figma, the browser-based design tool with 1,886 employees, grew 48.2% to $370.1m — a third straight quarter of acceleration — with net dollar retention of 136% and a $40m raise to full-year guidance. It fell 14.9% the next day as operating expenses nearly doubled to $426.9m, turning a small profit into a $117.3m operating loss, and 77.7m shares came off lock-up days later.

Does the seat survive?

This is the group whose revenue unit is a job AI is meant to automate, and the disclosures point one way. Figma said one large technology customer added more than 25,000 seats, with more engineers on them than designers. Atlassian says core Jira and Confluence seat expansion is strong and that AI raises the need for coordination — though it disclosed its first enterprise seat decline earlier this year. PTC, which sells Creo design and Windchill product-lifecycle software to manufacturers, grew annual recurring revenue 9.1% in constant currency to $2.448bn, above its own guidance, and bought back $525m of stock in one quarter, citing the compressed share price. Autodesk, which sells AutoCAD and Revit into construction and manufacturing, expanded operating margin to 28.0% from 20.7% and agreed to buy maintenance-software firm MaintainX for about $3.6bn, its largest deal ever.

Two names contradict the recovery. Synopsys, Cadence's rival, grew 41.9% on the Ansys acquisition but watched operating margin collapse to 10.4% from 23.5%; it is the only one of the eight whose 50-day average sits well below its 200-day. GitLab, the per-developer DevOps platform, has not reported since 2 June, has guided this year to 15-17% growth from 26%, and rose 23.8% anyway.

Adobe is the outlier in the other direction. Creative Cloud revenue accelerated to 12.7% growth, AI-first recurring revenue tripled past $500m, and the stock trades at 14.5x trailing and 10.4x forward earnings with a 10.5% free-cash-flow yield. Its price against gross profit is 4.50x — exactly where it stood on 3 May, despite gross profit growing since.

What the prices now assume

Measured against those early-May levels, only the two EDA names are cheaper: Cadence at 17.24x gross profit from 19.14x, Synopsys at 12.41x from 14.03x. Atlassian has gone from 3.80x to 7.46x, a 96% expansion into halving guided growth, and now carries a 26.0x forward multiple on consensus earnings of $6.08. GitLab has gone from 4.57x to 7.85x with no new numbers in the interim.

One footnote worth correcting: the parallel decline in creative-software shares over the same month is not Adobe or Figma, both of which rose. It is Getty Images, down 46.9% after a going-concern disclosure, and Shutterstock, down 28.8% — balance sheets, not lost seats.

The setup

Where it stands — A month's gain in developer and design software is mostly one Atlassian earnings session, against businesses moving in opposite directions. Would confirm — Atlassian's fiscal 2027 first quarter showing cloud growth at or above the guided 25.5%. Would invalidate — Cadence trimming its raised $6.26-6.34bn full-year range, or backlog falling from $8.1bn. Watch next — GitLab's next quarterly report, its first since 2 June, and Adobe's fiscal third quarter in September. Valuation — Atlassian 7.46x trailing gross profit against 3.80x on 3 May; Adobe 4.50x, unchanged, at 10.4x forward earnings.