Betting On AI Agents, Pivoting In 48 Hours, And The Future of Coding

Varun says the company began as Exafunction, helping customers run GPU workloads, and had reached a couple million dollars in revenue. In 2022, the team concluded that transformer models could make its infrastructure business easier to commoditize, so it pivoted to coding tools over a weekend. Eight people began building Codeium, which shipped within two months.

After growing its enterprise business, the team shifted toward agents as models improved, then built the Windsurf IDE because it felt VS Code limited the experience they wanted. Fewer than 25 engineers shipped it in under three months. Varun also describes supporting multiple IDEs and large company codebases as important for serving customers such as Dell and JPMorgan Chase.

Varun says Windsurf bet early on agents that could understand a codebase and make changes, rather than relying mainly on chat and autocomplete. For code retrieval, the team combines keyword search, vector search, syntax parsing, and GPU ranking to find relevant context. Its evaluations use code changes and tests to measure retrieval, intent understanding, and whether the resulting code passes.

Varun says developers at Windsurf increasingly give agents tasks before editing code themselves, including repetitive work and deployment workflows. He recommends committing frequently so agent changes can be reverted safely. He expects AI to reduce boilerplate and give engineers more time to test product ideas, while broadening software creation to include nontechnical builders.

Varun describes Windsurf’s opportunity as improving on what foundation models can do, while recognizing that the baseline keeps moving. He points to code migrations and automated bug and alert resolution as areas where specialized products could deliver value. His advice to founders is to change their minds quickly when evidence undermines their ideas.