Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of Codeium, now Windsurf, shares the company's story, discusses two key pivots, hiring philosophy, the impact of AI on the engineering profession, corporate market entry strategy, and demonstrates Windsurf capabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z0RCxDZdrE
First pivot (2022): With the emergence of ChatGPT, the team shifted its focus to AI-powered coding, creating a free plugin for code autocompletion (supporting VSCode, JetBrains, etc.). Second pivot → Windsurf: VSCode API limitations forced them to fork the IDE and create an AI-native environment with advanced features (e.g., visual editing).
New paradigm: AI writes >90% of the code → the developer focuses on review and architecture. For non-developers: creating simple applications without deep knowledge.
AI model usage strategy - hybrid approach: Frontier models (e.g., Sonnet) for high-level tasks. Own models for code retrieval and editing.
The conversation highlights how quickly the development landscape is changing thanks to AI. Windsurf is actively shaping this future, not afraid of radical pivots and betting on a deep understanding of code and "agentic" AI capabilities, not just autocompletion.
The possibility of OpenAI acquiring Windsurf is currently being actively discussed in the news.