This issue features an interview with the founders at Codeium in their new office on December 14, conducted by Latent Space. The discussion covers the development history of Codeium AI, the background of the product Windsurf, the features and evaluation of Cascade, as well as their approaches to enterprise strategy and technology assessment.
Key Takeaways
- Development History of CodeiumCodeium has evolved from providing compatibility support for different IDEs to having over 800,000 developer users and numerous large enterprise clients. They started with a free model, later introduced various paid plans, and received the JPMorgan Chase Innovation Award. Recently, they launched the AI IDE Windsurf, designed to provide developers with the most powerful AI system.
- Background of Windsurf Launch
The Codeium team discovered limitations in building on the VS Code ecosystem, including API restrictions, difficulties in showcasing certain features, and an inability to fully leverage their research outcomes. To better understand developer behavior and provide more powerful features, they decided to launch their own IDE, Windsurf. - Features and Evaluation of Cascade
Cascade is the agent part of Codeium’s product that combines human and AI trajectories to propose changes and execute code for final output. The evaluation methods for Cascade include analyzing submissions of open-source code, breaking down complex problems into planning, retrieval, and multi-step execution issues, and testing the system’s performance in incomplete code states. - Retrieval Evaluation Methods
Codeium believes there are issues with existing software development evaluation benchmarks. They have established their own evaluation methods for retrieval functions. For instance, instead of looking for a single piece of information, they focus on obtaining code snippets from multiple parts and creating a golden set for evaluation by reviewing old submission records. - Enterprise Strategy
Codeium adopts a “slow start, fast growth” enterprise strategy, investing in enterprise-level infrastructure from the beginning, including building containerized systems, early investment in security and compliance, and maintaining core competitiveness in key areas. Additionally, the founders personally sold to 30-40 clients to understand market dynamics, where the sales process required deep technical understanding and support from deployment engineers.