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100 points fortenforge | 6 comments | | HN request time: 1.141s | source | bottom

At Codeium, we've been building AI-powered extensions for a while (we first launched our VSCode extension with autocomplete a little over 2 years ago!), but we've always thought there would come a day where we would hit the limits of what could be achieved within existing IDEs, so we decided to build our own: Windsurf (yes, it's yet another VSCode fork :)

We've stuffed a lot of cool features into Windsurf—a super fast autocomplete model, an inline diff generation experience that feels truly native, but we're most proud of Cascade, which is an evolution of the sidebar chat experience that many other extensions have. Cascade can perform deep reasoning on your existing codebase, access a vast array of tools that allow it to run terminal commands and find relevant files, and it's omniscient of all the actions that the user has taken independent of invoking the AI. (You can for example, start implementing a change manually and just ask Cascade to "continue").

We've been using Cascade internally at Codeium on our actual production codebase, and we're getting actual value from it. We hope everyone here does too! You can find a bunch of demos of Cascade on our website but I want to show one that I made myself using Cascade to solve an interesting cryptography challenge:

https://youtu.be/LbYepFmVB20

Cascade was able to explain the problem to me, install some libraries needed to interact with the challenge, give me some pointers towards a solution, and implement an attack that I described to it all by itself.

1. bberenberg ◴[] No.42142486[source]
I’ve been using it the past few days. It’s both magical and terrible. They do their own terminal management so you’re fighting env issues that make no sense. It somehow spawns a terminal that can’t find my installed version of node, so then it asks me to brew install one, but will this now screw up my system or no? It’s an uncanny valley moment where it’s close, but also not really there. Hopefully the team can quickly improve this UX and use the native terminal functionality as the foundation of how they interact with the system.
replies(2): >>42143399 #>>42143685 #
2. IAmGraydon ◴[] No.42143399[source]
I just got done with my first session in Windsurf. It's mostly magical, but the terminal implementation leaves something to be desired. That doesn't seem like it would take much to fix though. Setting that aside, this thing is insane. I spun up a Django project/app and was able to accomplish in about 5 minutes what would normally take over an hour. The way it seamlessly edits multiple files in unison is unbelievably powerful. You can create a URL route, a view, a model and a template all in one swipe and it gets it right time after time. I'm impressed.
replies(1): >>42148921 #
3. viraptor ◴[] No.42143685[source]
> somehow spawns a terminal that can’t find my installed version of node

That's weird. It just runs my usual zsh profile files. Have you got some very customised shell init?

replies(1): >>42146590 #
4. bberenberg ◴[] No.42146590[source]
Nope just the usual stuff shoved in there by every damn thing I install. But I don’t touch it myself. In fact I even stripped out ohmyzsh and whatnot a few years ago.
5. knowitnone ◴[] No.42148921[source]
Nevermind the fix. IMO, if you have to identify these basic issues for them, that's already a problem.
replies(1): >>42153745 #
6. IAmGraydon ◴[] No.42153745{3}[source]
Is minimum viable product not a thing anymore? The software seems amazingly well baked for a first release.