870: Windsurf forked VS Code to compete with Cursor. Talking the future of AI + Coding

Wes and Scott talk with Kevin Hou and Varun Mohan from Windsurf about the evolving landscape of AI in coding, and the future of software development. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:50 The origins of Windsurf and Codeium Windsurf Codeium Vs Code Cursor 03:14 Rethinking IDE UX 05:45 Will Microsoft eventually implement these AI features in VS Code? 09:27 The "agentic" editor concept 17:58 The future of software development with AI 24:37 AI in large codebases 28:22 Brought to you by Sentry.io 28:46 How does AI stay current with frequent language/library updates? 33:07 Behind Windsurf's fresh design 35:23 Challenges with forking VS Code 38:47 AI and future innovations 43:04 How Windsurf approaches AI experimentation 45:11 Pricing and user segments 48:38 Will Windsurf ever run in the browser? 50:58 Sick Pick + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Kevin: Ricoh GR IIIx Varun: Di2 Shifter Shameless Plugs Windsurf Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we have Kevin and Varun on from Windsurf. We're here to talk today about AI encoding. There's a lot going on in this space right now. Is it going to replace developers entirely? Is this a tool that you should be using? Can you trust the code that it's cranking out? There's just so much going on. And we thought, like, let's have them on to just talk about. Obviously, we're going to talk about Windsurf and the editor. They forked VS Code, right? And we're going to talk about that and how it compares to Copilot and Cursor and all that. But also, I'm more interested in just like talking about like, what does the state of web development look like with all these crazy AI advancements in the last couple of years?

• 0:44Wes Bos?

  Even feels like the last six months, everything is really cranked up as well. So, welcome, Kevin and Varun. Thanks for coming on.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Thanks for having us. Good to be, I guess, this is my second time on the podcast. So, thank you for having me back. And then, yeah, the debut.

• 0:59Wes Bos?

  Yep. Do you want to give us a quick rundown of who you are and what you do? And kind of place what Windsurf is in relation to Codium?

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, happy to do that. So, I'm Varun. I'm the CEO and co-founder of the company. If we go really, really back, so close to four years ago, the company actually started as a GPU virtualization company. So, we built software to make GPU infrastructure really, really efficient. We even built compiler software for that. The middle of 2022 rolled around and we saw that generative AI was going to be huge for deep learning. Right? We thought all the deep learning workloads were fundamentally going to be generative AI workloads. And in that world, we were early adopters of GitHub Copilot. And we thought building an application would be really exciting for us to take our infrastructure and go out and build an application. And we built out Codium for that reason. And Codium started out as purely an AI autocomplete tool. We provided it for free. Codium, the product, is still entirely for free.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  But the trade off we made was we were an extension in every single ID. That means VS Code, IntelliJ, PyCharm, Eclipse, Visual Studio, you name it. We had support in there. And we worked with some of the largest companies out there to not only deploy the product internally in their Firewall, but also personalize the results to the private data inside the company. Our goal here was, hey, like, look, these models can generate sort of generic suggestions. But what happens if we could sort of do it in a way that was more personalized? And we actually trained and ran our own models to actually go out and do that. And just to skip to where we are now, what we felt was a couple of months ago is that we felt that, hey, we could build a premier experience and we were getting limited by what the ID fundamentally had by being a VS Code extension.

• 2:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  And potentially a Jefrens extension. We wanted to make a premier sort of experience, especially given where we think AI is going. And how the the way IDs are going to get used are going to fundamentally change. And happy to talk about that a little bit more. And that's why we launched Windsurf actually in the last two months.

• 2:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know what I've always appreciated about Codium in the past was just how fast it was. And it had like a definite eye towards general user experience. So when Windsurf was announced, it's not surprising that the focus is maybe on rethinking user experience a bit more in this space. Has that always been like forethought for you guys to say user experience in these tools needs rethinking? Because, you know, sometimes they can just feel slapped on or we're either adapting our coding tools towards how the LLMs work or we're just shoving them into the editors, right?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely. I think that's one of the primary motivations for doing the fork. It felt like the generative AI coding space was changing. At least the models and the intelligence were just getting better. But the user experience wasn't able to kind of meet the power of the LLMs. I mean, you had examples of people just generating code. You know, it's brilliant code in in Sonnet or in ChatGPT. And then now you've got this gap, right, between the browser and the editor. Like, we really had to to figure out how those two things could live together in harmony.

• 4:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  So thinking about like, one, a good example of this is if you've used Windsurf, we have that cascade action bar. So it's kind of like you can step through files. It's almost like a merge conflict resolver, right? You're saying, oh, I have these changes from the AI. I have my own changes. I want to review, kind of step through those changes and and accept and reject the ones that I want. Those are examples of patterns that would feel are kind of impossible or would be possible, but feel really bad if you were an extension. Because it doesn't feel native to the experience. And so that's you hit on a good point, which is user experience is is kind of king.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I guess maybe to add one more thing to that, we're not a company that's like, hey, these things are completely going to replace engineers. Because if we designed the product to be like that, it would just be this blob that ran asynchronously. And just you would kind of look at the response afterwards. We really care about the human AI sort of interaction paradigm, right? Like, that's what autocomplete was in the very beginning. And right now, I guess the hard part about the paradigm is the AI is writing more and more of the software. So actually, the role of the way the human and AI sort of interact is fundamentally changing. And to that, we needed to go out and build a new interface.

• 5:10Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, it makes sense that it's gotten over even laughing is the reason we initially switched to VS Code was because VS Code provided a much more rich UI for the different types of things. You know, there's autocomplete, there's suggestions, there's tool tips and you hover over top. There's sidebars and things like that. And then as we get into figuring out what does software development look like as people? We sort of wonder, like, do we need a different UI? Is this even, is the code editor even the right UI for this type of thing? So like, I have to ask is, like, obviously, Microsoft has their own, like, dog in this race as well. Are they just moving like too slow?

• 5:55Wes Bos?

  Or do they not open up certain parts of it? Or like, well, they eventually are probably, they're already implementing a lot of these features as well. Do you see a future where VS Code also has this?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the way I sort of think about it and the team sort of thought about it is, I think at the limit for software in general, like, in theory, sort of, they could have anything in the future. I think like, that's objectively true. I guess the problem for us is like, if we have to build a great experience and we are limited by whatever timeline that they have.

• 6:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  It kind of means that, hey, we can't tell our users, hey, we're smart and our product is great. And then meanwhile, people don't want to use it. I'll give you maybe a simple example of this, truly, truly simple example. And this is not even, has anything to do with Cascade, which is the agent-like part of the product. So we have this feature called SuperComplete. And the idea of SuperComplete is it's the next rendition of autocomplete, which actually does next intent prediction. As you're writing code, it also Refactors code for you. And the way we actually ended up building that was for VS Code because they didn't let us provide a edit sort of functionality, a passive edit functionality. We needed to go out and dynamically generate PMGs and stick them on the side and show them on the side. And by the way, they were hard to get aligned, given what the font size was.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  And we actually noticed the moment we implemented it natively in WinServe, the acceptance rate went up by multiple factors.

• 7:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Same exact product, right? And I guess the fundamental reason is because what we think is valuable to the end user may be different than what Microsoft thinks is valuable to the end user. They might think actually putting a lot of tooltips in GitHub is valuable and putting a lot of things in VS Code is not as valuable, but that ends up indirectly hurting us. Right? If if that's the case. So I think we started from what is the best possible experience we could build? And we were constantly realizing that we were fighting against what was accessible in VS Code. And it was not even just because they made proposed APIs that no one else can access. They also did that. Uh, but on top of that, they just didn't have a lot of functionality that we really wanted. So I I think maybe maybe the way I sort of look at it is every editor wins because of some disruption that's happening in the market, right? Like, why did VS Code win?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  It won because TypeScript became popular and then also you were able to build this very clean sort of ID experience on top of that and then a very good extension framework that enabled a single ID to handle a bunch of different languages. Instead of JetBrains where everything, every language is its own ID, right? So you have this unified view. And I think now with AI, there's going to be a better ceiling on what's possible. And we want to hit that ceiling. I guess is like the rough take we had.

• 8:25Wes Bos?

  Totally. Yeah, that UI matters a lot too, because I I find myself like over the last six months of when I ask AI to do too much, I would sort of get overwhelmed and just be like, ah, I don't know, and then close it, you know? And I've I found myself as the UIs get better, allowing it to do a lot more and and a lot of that has to do with like how it's how it's actually presented to you. And that's actually kind of a funny thing as well, because and maybe we can get into this is how you provide context to the model is extremely important. Like, we had Kevin on, I don't know, like probably a year ago and he was talking to us and we're like, hey, like you're using.

• 9:07Wes Bos?

  The models that everybody else is using and he's like, it's not just about the model. Like we can train models and whatnot, but it's what's really important is is about the context that you provide to it, you know, like what pieces of information are you you giving it? So that it can provide you the best possible output. So I kind of want to like go in that direction is like, how do you make the best possible completion or generation? You say, all right, make make a new file that is a component and do X, Y, and Z. How does it know that I'm using React? How's it know to use specific camel casing and all those things that I the way I code?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the paradigm shift with Windsurf was, so I remember having this conversation with you and it's, it was a lot of fun to think about and kind of audit all the, all the areas of context that we were pulling. And I think back then, you know, we were looking at your files, we're looking at some remote repositories, but we've kind of paradigm shifted the way that we're thinking about that because Windsurf is inherently like an agentic editor. So what that basically means is the way that we retrieve context is as if a human would kind of retrieve context. So if you think at the core of the editor, there is this sort of agentic like entity that is like, okay, Wes wants to implement a new signup form. What are the things needed for the signup form? You know, you're going to start crawling your code base as if a new, let's just say

• 10:29Speaker 01

  a junior editor or a junior developer just onboarded onto your team. They would go, they would read the documentation, they might go and look at some examples of past PRs or examples of files that already do this. They'll look at some configurations, they'll be reading, they'll be searching and grepping. And so this is the way that sort of humans kind of digest information.

• 10:49Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  In that way, we wanted to model how Windsurf would interpret and retrieve information similarly. So when you make that request, it decides kind of a plan of action. It is not just pulling everything all at once and then just hoping fingers crossed like, I have a million lines of code, let me just resolve this into the the solution. It's like, okay, no, first I'm going to go look at examples, I'm going to go look at, you know, your design system, I'll go look at your tailwind config. Okay, I think I have enough information now, I'm going to start generating and it'll do it in piecemeal. Think of it as, as a human, you might set up your validation library first before you set up your, I don't know, your post requests. And in this way, you're kind of stepping through the solution as opposed to just, all right, context retrieve. Dump. And so it's a bit of a different pattern.

• 11:35Scott Tolinski?

  So when you say agentic, just for the audience, I know you did explain it a bit there, but just to be super clear, like it's it's using the concept of agents, which are they're going off and executing tasks without you, right? So that's what you mean by that is like the editor itself is executing tasks like a human would behind the scenes. That's what you're saying?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yes, more or less. So when you think and if you use the cascade sidebar and when so if you really see what that really like what it kind of means. So we can run terminal commands on behalf of the user inside of their kind of like file system. So if you want to push a repository, right, it would it would say, oh, okay, how would I push this code to a repo? All right, I'm going to use these Git commands. I'm actually going to execute that on your behalf. It'll read files, it'll read from the internet, so it'll pull links and try and resolve those links. So it is behaving as if it has kind of like tools at its disposal to step through and kind of action by action, figure out what to do next.

• 12:34Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, sick.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  I think one of the maybe super quick things that we had when it came to like what we wanted to get out of these products is we think basically there's like a graduation happening in terms of the capabilities of these products, which is that, you know, in the past, like these tools, you would not mention a bunch of things, right? You'd be like, hey, build me a button that looks like at this, at that, and at that. And we think that that is like what Google looked like in maybe 1999 or 2000, where you would actually tell it an AND or OR of a bunch of queries, and then you would also say what site to get the result from. And we think that that is basically something that we think is an anti-pattern. We think what should probably be the case is you will write natural language, it should go out and do agentic retrieval, and we should actually be building out

• 13:19Speaker 02

  really good retrieval systems, which happy to talk about a little bit more, to make it so that the user doesn't need to add a bunch of things, and it can actually understand the intent of it at a very deep level. Yep.

• 13:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah, let's talk about that, that because that's super interesting to me, because like the steps of become using AI is like, oh, I use the tab thing. And then, oh, yeah, maybe I'll I'll highlight some text and add. To fix something and then you, oh, there's this sidebar where I can ask it to do multiple things, create multiple files, edit, edit all these things, you know? Like what I've been doing a lot lately is yeah, like doing that tagging, you know, like put these files into context, but you're saying that eventually we just won't need to do that? Like it, it would just be like a Google search where it just know what we want? How do you, how do you do that?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Actually, most of the people at our company don't add mention anything, right? Like you should be able to use the fact that if you name a particular part of the repository with either clever indexing or the fact that we have good retrieval and some of our retrieval techniques are pretty, pretty high powered. It actually goes through your entire code base with an L M and chunks it up and then validates what sections are the best. Should be able to find the best snippets that you should be operating on top of. Kind of like the way Kevin said, right? Like if you want to install a package, you shouldn't tell it where the installation file is. Actually, you should probably be able to find out where the installation packages, run it for you and then deploy the app for you.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Or, or if you think about a page in next JS, if you're looking at a contact page, we can resolve the fact that it's page dot T S X inside of, you know, probably slash contact. And if you think about the way the human would resolve this sort of query, they would probably command shift F in VS code and they'd grab for contact and look for files that are named kind of loosely to that. And so this is sort of what we're doing behind the scenes. It's not, you don't need to explicitly link the file that you're referencing. It's just, they'll kind of figure it out.

• 15:15Scott Tolinski?

  I know what a lot of other editor and co-pilot on VS code just added this cursor has this, this idea of like a, a rules file or a, like a code base code style file. Does WinSerp have an equivalent of that? Or is what you're doing behind the scenes take the place of something like that?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  So we actually do have like kind of a rules approach. We actually call it this idea of memories, which is this idea of you can actually have provide the system with some form memories. We're very soon going to launch this approach of memories actually being dynamic. So the AI itself can write new memories. So it's not just things that the user writes themselves. But the main reason why you would want to use something like that, and this is actually just valuable to have this idea of a rule is, let's say I write a different language or like I'm a person that's fluent in Turkish. I probably want the AI to be talking to me in Turkish and hopefully every time I don't need to tell it, talk to me in Turkish, right? Like that's a, that's a waste of time or if it talks to me in English every time. So for those things, yeah, we do have the ability to have these global rules that's on how you like to build apps internally.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  And we think that that's generally useful because it just reduces the number of like boilerplate messages that you need to send to the AI, which is, which is a good thing.

• 16:26Scott Tolinski?

  And so those are a markdown file is that I know, I believe in Copilot, it being a markdown file gives you like, heading, like importance. I don't know if that's true, but it does being a markdown file do anything special or should just markdown as a text file that's?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  For memories specifically?

• 16:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, I, I think all of these things make it more human readable is probably what's valuable. But I think to the AI, it doesn't matter if it's like markdown versus a bunch of bullet points. I think the AI is going to consume it like the same way.

• 16:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it knows. All right, let's talk about if we're cooked or not. And this is something that we've, I've been talking to a lot of people recently and you seem to find people who are, are on one side where they're like, no, it, it, it makes mistakes, you know? And I think those people are, are kinda not totally understanding how good this stuff actually is and how good it will be. And then on the flip side as well, you get these, these folks who have nothing in their GitHub and, and think that like, I'm never going to write a line of code ever again. I'm somewhere in the middle. I've never argued against something I'm so excited for and in favor of in my life.

• 17:39Wes Bos?

  Often people put me as like the anti-AI guy on Twitter, which is hilarious because I, I use it literally all day long. But I'm trying to just have some voice of reason here, but I'm curious with the caveat of knowing that you guys have raised a bunch of money to. Do the next gen of dev with AI. What does the future of being a developer look like with AI?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  I think it's kind of like what you said. There's like, what does the internet like? The internet likes very polarizing thoughts, right? Like, no one, no one's cool for saying the thing that is like normie. So you're gonna have a bunch of luddites that think AI is not gonna be useful. Very clearly, that seems like a bad opinion to have, especially when a technology is getting so much better year over year. And then you have a people that kind of like what you're saying. Maybe they have a hatred towards developers or a larger people. They like to get clicks and for them, they're like, software development is done, right? Like, you're gonna get those two people and they'll get the most response. It's kind of exactly what you said. It's in between. I think that software development, maybe this is gonna be the one hot take I have. I think a year or two from now, if you're not using a tool like Winserve, I think you are just like significantly less productive as a developer.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  So I think what actually ends up happening is the number of developers does go up. And I'll tell you the crazy stat about this. When we launched Winserve, before that, we had everyone at our company build an app using Winserve. And that include our go-to-market team, salespeople that have never written a line of software. And instead of going out and buying these trivial tools, and I'm not saying expensive tools, to do basic things like quoting the pricing of our software. They actually went out and built the tool themselves. So for these very quick standalone apps, they're actually going out and building things. I'm not saying they're gonna become what are the future of developers, but I think the aperture of what is possible for software development will grow in the next 10 years. And I think the number of developers will go up. But I think if a developer doesn't use these tools, they will be substantially less productive.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  I think is what's gonna happen and they will actually not be able to be competitive with developers, other developers out there. But I think the market is gonna grow. I think it'll grow tremendously.

• 19:39Wes Bos?

  So you think it's gonna grow? So what does software look like then? Because i- if we're thinking like, like even yesterday, I needed to download every single episode of a podcast from an RSS feed and cache it and skip the download if I needed for my daughter. She wanted me to download it and put it on like her little music player. And I, I just typed in the little box what I wanted it to do and 200 lines of code. It, it worked first try. And I was just thinking like, that probably would take me two hours if it wasn't this. So like, if we're so much more productive.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:14Wes Bos?

  What does software look like? Are we just going to take Fridays off? Or like, are we gonna get paid less? Are just regular people going to be able to build this stuff for us?

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Okay, that's a, that's a, that's an interesting question. My viewpoint on this, for these simple kind of apps, I kind of feel like there's not going to be a tremendous amount of like economic value that's going to be there. There will be a lot of personal value, but in terms of economic value, because this technology has become democratized, you're not going to be able to sell that podcast downloader to a bunch of people for like thousands of dollars. Is effectively what happened. That market has just disappeared i- in some ways. But hey, like now you can do it for your own personal stuff way more efficiently and you don't need to go on, on Fiverr or whatever to go and case, to go out and build it. But I think here's my take on it for the companies, because that is where most developers are, ultimately speaking. Most developers are not hobbyists, they're people that work at companies.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  I don't look at it as, hey, like, these companies are nice entities that are just going to pay their developers the same amount and ask them to work less. No, actually, like, if you were to look at it from like a purely capitalist standpoint, they have a better return on investment now on investing in software. Their given dollar now is giving them more technology. Then the question becomes, for this business, what is the ceiling of the amount of technology they can create and get value from? And I think for most companies that are large, there's a lot of technology that can be built to actually go in and optimize the business. I'll even give you a dumb example here. I think someone asked me a question, they were like, hey, what about a company like Safeway? You know, probably there's not much more they could do. And I think, hey, that's like a, maybe a lack of imagination. What happens if they went out and actually built robotics software?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  That actually went out and did robotics within the store. There's a massive, massive ceiling on what technology can sort of drive. And I think if you go to every company and you ask them, what is all the technology you want to go out and build? It is such a long list that they basically don't even look at a lot of the stuff out there because they just know that they can't build it. So I actually think what happens in the short term, maybe, maybe you go to the full AGI thing. I'd be, I don't particularly want to give a thought about like full AGI um out there. But if you look at the, at the medium term out there, these businesses are going to see there's an investment opportunity that has a higher return on investment and they will go out and invest more in that opportunity. That's what the, that's what the rational belief should be, if that makes sense.

• 22:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, it does. And you know, you know, maybe, uh, I don't know if you saw it going around the US. P S website, their alert system is just somebody commenting and uncommenting different alerts out in an HTML file. So maybe websites like that will actually be able to build a real alert system at the end of the day because their developers will have to spend less time on it. But I've noticed that entirely with with myself as well. I'm not having the editor replace me or the tools replace me. Right now I'm able to accomplish flat out more things faster and less time. And we've seen it firsthand over here at Syntax. Our producer, Randy, he created a smile detection app by himself and he's never made anything.

• 23:14Scott Tolinski?

  So it's like, people can just make stuff. Like you said, it's the tools that you maybe would have made and sold and whatever. Yeah, that stuff is going away. You can't necessarily do that. But just the amount of things that we can create personally will increase the productivity like crazy on a personal level.

• 23:31Wes Bos?

  Like the bar for features in software, too. Like I use Freshbooks and they don't have AI categorization for my expenses. Like I had to click on every single expense and categorize it. And I'm like, I'm at a point now where I'm like, first of all, I built it myself because I just use the API. But like, I'm pissed that they don't have that feature. Like that's you could just, you can build that now. And now the bar for software. So like, I'm in the spot where I'm thinking like, the software will just get better. You know, it's not like we're just gonna sit down and twiddle our thumbs. Be like, well, we built the crud apps now. Software is gonna is gonna keep getting better. We're gonna keep building stuff like we're hungry for apps that will do what it is that we want. So.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  The expectations will keep going up. It's like when you look at enterprise software from the early 2000s, it is hideous. It is actually hideous. It's like some Java Swing stuff that you and I would never want to touch anymore unless we were forced to and our company forced us to. And we worked at a big company. And such a product is not going to be able to get mainstream sort of adoption now. And that's, that's a good thing, right? That's a good thing.

• 24:37Wes Bos?

  What about larger code bases for this type of stuff? Because it's all fun to make a podcast downloader and whatnot. But like, let's say you open up like VS Code. That's a massive, massive project. How good is the AI at doing it right now with the sort of limitations of context windows?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Quite good. We built Windsurf with Windsurf, right? So the first version that was available internally, everyone switched over and we started building new features using Windsurf and that's currently, you know, I probably executed, I've opened four PRs this morning, probably 50% of the code at least is written by Windsurf and at least it tells me what files to change, right? So if I'm going to make a change that covers client, server, middleware, it's going to tell me exactly where to go, if not write the code itself. And I think it just goes back to, it's not, it's not really about the context window anymore. It's not how many tokens you can kind of shove in at any given time. It's a bit more like, what was the research done by the agent to figure out the steps

• 25:40Speaker 01

  needed to solve your feature, to create your feature or solve your problem? The agent is able to reason and broach through these like massive hundred thousand line repositories like VS Code. Maybe to put it in concrete, like there's, there's an architecture pattern in VS Code. So you have to create like an API that goes across different threads and, you know, the VS Code team has thought a lot about this sort of thing. And, you know, we were kind of hopping in on their codebase and trying to figure out, all right, if we want to add a button here, if we wanted to add a state variable here, how would we do that? You know, the agent is not going to just ingest every single file that is relevant, but instead it's going to say, all right, I looked at this, this thread. This is what I kind of gained and learned about this particular part of the system.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Now I need to go learn about system B, synthesize, summarize, understand now system C. And then it can kind of map reduce it to come back all three at the, at one time and then decide, all right, I'm going to make these changes. So it is able to accomplish quite a bit more. It's no longer capped by just simply how many tokens in you can put in. I think that's what's really cool about the way that the AI industry has moved. It's like not, it's becoming a bit more sophisticated, a bit way more powerful because of this shift.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe the intuition that Kevin just brought up is like because you don't have just one shot where an L M just outputs everything. It's not actually true that you need to pass the entire code base into the system. Right. It's more similar to like, hey, when you solve a problem about a large code base and you maybe contribute something to Linux, you don't know everything about all of Linux, right? But if I ask you to explain your change and why you made it, you could probably do the explanation for that and your your process of searching through the code base in less than 100,000 tokens, which is like 10,000 lines of code, right? You could explain that to me, hopefully, right? Unless it's like a mega complex PR, right? You could probably explain that to me. So basically, once you say you don't have just like one shot at bat and you can actually

• 27:37Speaker 02

  go and run code and you can search through code and do a bunch of stuff, it actually changes, maybe flips the paradigm a little bit from what these early chat products were doing, where all they were doing was talking about like ever larger context windows.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, an example of this is maybe the unit test generation with kind of a one shot that you were talking about before. You have one chance to write the perfect unit test.

• 27:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  It would probably, you know, not live up to most people's expectations and certainly not in the largest enterprises. But now with the ability to actually execute said test, to first think about test coverage, then run your code, then figure out what's going wrong, and then maybe tweak some parts about the test, maybe tweak some parts about the actual source code, you have many more chances, like Ruin said, to be at bat and figure out what's going, what's going wrong and how to make things better.

• 28:22Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io forward slash syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 28:47Scott Tolinski?

  So I know a big limitation of when libraries or platforms make a major change in their codebase is that the AI tools all suddenly are giving you the last version of stuff. So like me personally, you know, Svelte 4 went to Svelte 5, they changed a whole bunch of stuff. Now, every single time I do anything in any AI system, I have to urge it several times. Please, stop giving me this old syntax. How do you stay on top of those types of situations, given where the LLMs are at?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got some thoughts here. I think there's a combination of like, the recency of the data, not necessarily the training data, though model iterations and like, training data getting updated is certainly part of the equation, but simply the ability to expose the web and expose like, the most recent information, that's going to be a key part of this. And then the second interesting part that you mentioned, it sounds like your frustration is that you have to urge the AI to adhere to rules that you've told it many times, right? And even the youngest toddlers, hopefully, are reasonable at listening a second time, and I think that's where the concept of memory comes in.

• 29:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think that might be a little optimistic.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess. But it's this kind of like, marriage of those two ideas where, okay, if you're using a new library, a new version, like, we're doing an internal upgrade to React 19, and we are internally using like, Web Search to do this, and you'll just say, "I'm using React 19." Now, that's logged in memory, automatically. That's not something that you have to put in the rules, or yell it continuously every time you want to send a message, but now it just kind of knows, "We're going to use React 19." It's able to retrieve kind of the change log, the release notes, and the breaking changes, and it'll recognize, okay, here's the differences that I need to have in order to approach what I'm doing right now.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  And in this way, it can kind of passively meet you where you want to be, as opposed to explicitly every single time. Telling it to do the same thing. I don't know if there's anything you want to add on to that.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  No, I think that's that's huge. I think also the other pieces because of the system being able to actually look at the code base, right? Not only at the code that exists, but at the packages, the dependencies. It actually just makes it more sophisticated and what it believes is the state of the code base. I don't think this, after doing that analysis, it'll think you want like an older version of Svelte, right? Uh, internally, but we also think there are more robust ways to get this rather than just the AI finding. Like, I think what Kevin said with the idea of memories is is a huge, huge sort of approach that we could take.

• 31:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Maybe one other interesting thing that you could talk about here is, uh, like the notion of a like a trajectory, kind of understanding what someone has been doing.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example. If you were to to do an upgrade, right? You would start making changes. You might modify your package JSON to update the the version number, then you'll start actually ripping out certain functions and replacing the functionality. And what's really powerful about the fact that we now own the editor, and this is one of the reasons why I want to own the editor. The agent behaves very, very well when it knows your intent, right? As Verin mentioned before. And the way we understand and build up that that intent is by looking at your recent actions. So if you are making a set of changes and there's a clear pattern in those changes, everything you do in Windsurf will now recognize that you're on this trajectory. We understand that you're doing the type of work that like the the upgrade, for example.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  And so your next chat message, your next autocomplete, everything else will then take that into account going forward. So it is, it's like this idea of like learning over time.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  One, yeah, one of the cool properties about that is if you actually make a change in Windsurf to like one file, and that actually is like the first or maybe 20 file changes, you can just tell Windsurf Cascade, continue. And it will just go out and make the changes on the remainder. Because we are actually like passing in, we actually know at a granular level, the changes that the user is making. And that's why like, we think, you know, this notion of an agent is a term that is thrown out a lot. But I think the dream is actually the human and the AI are operating on the same version of where they think the software is going, right? It's not just like something that comes back to you with a bunch of code and vomits it out. It's like something that you had control over, and we've tried to build this throughout the product.

• 33:07Wes Bos?

  Switching a little bit, I just want to talk about the design of Windsurf. It's obviously just the VS Code fork, but there's just like a little bit of je ne sais quoi added to it, you know, like the the command palette pops up in the middle, the tabs are a little bit different on the side. Is that something you plan on going a little bit more? Because it's kind of nice when the editor looks a little fresh.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  I'm glad you noticed these things. The team will be very happy to notice or to know that you noticed some of the things. I mean, we spent a decent amount of time thinking about like typography, for example.

• 33:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  There's subtle changes in like the tabs that you noticed in the terminal. We did move the command palette to the center because we wanted to emphasize, we're treating it as almost like an everything bar type of pattern. So we made some like opinionated UX UI decisions, some of which just to simply feel like something is new, something is fresh. And this is where, you know, maybe it doesn't offer any sort of performance gain or feature improvement, but it's part of the story that we're kind of creating something new. And when people want to, they want to feel like they're using something new. And so that was part of the Cacius there. And then there are some things that just simply demand a new pattern, right? If you're making a bunch of changes across a bunch of different files, you need some way to step through those files.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  So that's where the cascade action bar comes into play. Check, reject, all those sorts of things. And a lot of these are kind of inspired by other products. And obviously, we try and stick to sort of the VS Code design because that's what people are used to. But we did give it a lot of thought to try and figure out, all right, what are the places that we want to add a little bit of spice?

• 34:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's much appreciated. It's funny how I always just want a little bit new, like even changing my tabs to a custom font via like some CSS hacks is really nice. It just makes it feel fresh.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  It's fresh, yeah, yeah.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  It's interesting for each of the new features, there's like a graveyard of like five that we like killed inside the company. But I think that's like the nature of how things go. Like, you know, we launch everything internally to our developers and like. We are also very opinionated, but sometimes you get you get maybe an idea that a bunch of people may not have been completely on board with, but you just kind of go with it. Sometimes you you need to be a little bold.

• 35:23Scott Tolinski?

  And do you keep do you keep it like up to date with with VS Code? Like, how how does that work when you fork VS Code, but you still want their updates?

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a it's a rather complex merge conflict. Maybe nightmare is too strong of a word. You can imagine, we made a decent number of changes to actually the core of VS Code. And so when, you know, VS Code releases version 1.9, we will be right there, ready to merge that branch into ours and do this resolution so that we can figure out, all right, let's keep all the things that we've done, but also, you know, we should benefit from the great work that the VS Code team does to just create a good IDE platform. So it's ours, I would say. It's manpower.

• 36:09Scott Tolinski?

  You don't use, do you use WinSurf for that?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. WinSurf is very good at synthesizing this information, to be honest.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  You know, one of the interesting things, maybe a couple of examples of this and the of other companies that do things like this are, they're much harder, by the way, significantly harder, is Google has their own version of Linux, right? And they're constantly like patching Linux in as Linux new versions come in. They're constantly making changes. And the difference for us in our space that's maybe a little true is, I don't know, a lot of the core functionality for VS Code, I don't know if you feel this, but like, what has really changed for you in the last year for pure VS Code? Don't include other extensions, but just pure VS Code.

• 36:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's all copilot stuff. It's it's nothing in the UI. And Microsoft, in particular, has never excelled in the UI department. I mean, that was this big sacrifice coming from Adam Editor beforehand was like, all right, you're going to VS Code, and it's not, it doesn't look as nice, but it does more, you know? So, yeah, they've never really been tweaking too much around the general UI, not even aesthetically, but features wise as well.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Which is why like the urgency for just everything that they have and a lot of stuff that they have is is not ridiculously high and we are like constantly on, you know, trying to see like, hey, are there meaningful things that they're doing? But I will say just in general, when it comes to like the copilot UI UX, I guess like we feel like a little bit opinionated on on how that UI UX should be. So we're not like the most excited to take like the copilot UI UX that they have. I think like some of it, we would not do ourselves. So I guess like that's the way we sort of treat it, but it is like an exercise inside the company, but not something that other companies don't do for other large like open source projects.

• 37:48Wes Bos?

  Totally. Yeah. Do you guys know like a back channel of VS Code, like a Telegram group of people who have forked VS Code? Because I was thinking about it. I was like, there's probably dozens of companies that have forked VS Code. Maybe not dozens, but like, like there's several companies that are like Code Sandbox are running it online and then there's there's several that are running it as desktop applications. And then there's several that are using it in their like product as like an editor or maybe it's just Monaco. And I was like, man, there's, there's got to be some sort of like back channel group of people who are like, hey, has anyone ever dealt with this?

• 38:25Speaker 02

  We gotta, we gotta make one. But interestingly, the craziest one, going back to Google, Google even has their own fork of VS Code inside of Google.

• 38:33Wes Bos?

  Really? Not, not IDX, but their own?

• 38:37Speaker 02

  My understanding is IDX is not being used internally. I mean, this is the classic thing of like how a lot of Google products, like they just put it out with their hide, the same one that they're using internally.

• 38:46Wes Bos?

  That's cool. I just like the future of AI. Do you think that there's going to be any like major leaps and bounds? The last couple of years have been nuts in terms of AI in general, not just coding, but the leaps and bounds we've seen, you know, like we went from, ha, ha, look at this thing, can't do a hand, can't write a word to, oh my gosh, they're making commercials with this. You're obviously in the space. Do you see that petering out or, or, or increasing?

• 39:20Speaker 02

  You know, I think, I think the way, you know, we sort of think about it are, what people do is they look at like ideas and are they tapering off? And I think one of the ideas that people thought were tapering off was this idea of pre-training. The idea of pre-training is we're going to make ever larger and larger models that have more and more compute. And that idea was petering off. And it makes sense that that idea, even if it doesn't peter off, can't grow like by a hundred X every year. You, you cannot build like a fifty times larger data center like every year. That would be very hard at some point, right? Because it, just from a power consumption standpoint. But human ingenuity is like very deep, right? And people want to solve this problem, interestingly. And there are many axes to make these products better, right? Like using different types of tool, right?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Multi-step ways of, of using the product. Even given the same model sizes, unlocking a lot of new value. You see people like OpenAI and probably many others will follow suit at this idea of like test and compute. What happens if you let the model think to itself? Granted, I think there's some trade-offs to that, too. If I, I'm not that excited about a model thinking it's to itself for ten minutes and giving me a response. If it could have just ran some commands and then given it to me in like ten seconds, right? Like I would rather prefer that outcome. But I guess maybe my point is there are so many axes by which these products can get better, that we will basically see like exponential improvements because of each axis getting better. Like, okay, you know, you'll see one axis of I let the model run for longer and it's smarter. Okay, people will get better at that. They will make it so that it doesn't need to run for as long and it'll get better.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  People, it'll get better at using arbitrary tools. It'll get better at using the context thing that it already has. There will be a much more efficient way of using a lot more context. Right now, to use context, you know, most of the approaches use this approach called attention, right? Which is a quadratic algorithm. So what that means is if you have a million tokens of context versus a billion, you are now plugging in a million times the amount of compute. So, you know, this answer probably doesn't sound clean, but the answer really is it's going to be stacking up wins in a bunch of different stacks, all the way down to Nvidia, right? Nvidia is now making their data center GPUs more efficient. And all of these approaches are going to give us a different type of improvement, right? Ultimately, uh, that is going to feel like it is an exponential improvement year over year. Yeah, singular approaches may hit a wall, but then we will come up with new approaches internally.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  So I'm, I'm actually very optimistic about this. I'm not of the opinion of, hey, this approach cannot scale anymore. Um, I think that just indicates to us that we don't have enough ingenuity to think of other ways to improve, improve the, the models and products.

• 41:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and even on top of that, you know, it does still feel like super early days for interface and how we interface with these tools in general. I think we're all still learning how to interface with them and finding new inventive ways to do that. I mean, even was a copilot workspace. That's an entirely different way of handling PRs than any tool before it kind of was like, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna build this right in, right into GitHub. And I think those types of, though those types of approaches, I think, are only going to continue to increase as we get more and more comfortable using these things.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  I totally agree with you. And in fact, I think the best example of this is chat GPT. I was, I was actually talking to, to Sam at some point from OpenAI and asked them like, hey, why did it take so long for you guys to come out with, for the world to come out with chat GPT, given the fact that these instruction based models had been things that Google and OpenAI had been noodling around with for over a year or two. And it's kind of just the right interface popped up, which is crazy to think about, right? It's crazy to think about. There's also just like this massive latent potential for these products that is just much more than just what the raw model capability is. But that's the software in general, right? In general, every piece of software is a wrapper around, you know, an AWS EC2 instance, right? And it's like, to figure out ways to build better software around that.

• 43:04Wes Bos?

  Is there any stuff like in your labs that you just, like, is there part of the company that just tries wild things? Because like, yeah, we, we don't know what that next killer way of approaching this is.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  I think one of the mottos we have, and Kevin can talk about his team and some product work, is like, we should be failing probably over 50% of the things we do. Okay, that's not like some, some glorious statement for the company. I think it's like, you know, three things. I think we hire really great people at the company, but we are not omniscient, right? I don't think smart people have a monopoly over being right always. In fact, we were probably wrong a lot of the time. And I think if we are not wrong a lot, that probably means we're not trying enough ambitious things. We're doing things once they're too obvious, right? Or we're unwilling to change our mind on the ideas that are clearly bad, right? Which is an even worse thing. That spells imminent Depth to a startup. So I think I think we should be willing to do a lot of things and a lot of things to fail.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Like we had Cascade was built on top of research that we're doing inside the company for many, many quarters. But we just couldn't crack it to make it feel like a good enough product until very recently.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think one of the big strengths of ours that we were in touch on earlier is that our internal team is incredibly skeptical. We are all technology optimists in the sense that we, you know, we we believe that technology is going to get better. We believe AI is going to get better, but we're incredibly skeptical about how these things actually fit into our lives. Right. It's the, oh, this is something cool, but really, is it actually going to help me every day? And it's not until it really hits that threshold of, okay, I'm using this like multiple times a day. That we really, okay, we're going to put this into production. We're going to start treating this with with seriousness. Because like, you know, like we were talking about, there's so many cool things and so many cool directions that you could take something.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  But you have to be very, very realistic about just how helpful it actually is versus kind of trendy or flashy.

• 44:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I could imagine you could you could find something to be cool. You could fall in love with it and then just not realize, oh, wait, never mind, this isn't actually going to get picked up. Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Totally, totally.

• 45:11Wes Bos?

  Can we talk about pricing? Because I know Codium has been been has free forever plan. I know there's a free version of Windsurf and then I know you launched at 10 bucks. Assuming nobody in the company has ever hit the the limit. And then like within a week, there was people like blowing through it, using it like, it's amazing. The the power users go through it. So now it's it's 15 bucks a month. How does that? How's that break down? What does that get you?

• 45:40Speaker 02

  I I could I could take this.

• 45:42Wes Bos?

  Sure, yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Okay, so basically, I think I think we have, there are many types of users that use the product, right? Some people actually are using the product who are extremely non-technical, right? For them, this is the only way that they interface with building applications. They don't even touch the idea to write code, which is foreign to all of us at our company, right? That's foreign to us, right? Because they're building these apps and probably very. Quickly, you know, sort of using them for what they want and maybe moving on to the next thing.

• 46:09Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  And when we originally built the product, we had some number of credits we were willing to give. We should realize our average user uses significantly more than that number of credits. So we had to increase the price and we also doubled the number of credits. So compared to what we what we had before, right? So it is not a cheap product for us to run by any stretch of the imagination. But despite that, people are also blowing through the amount of usage right now for for the fifteen dollar product as well. In fact, like our usage is so high, like, you know, we hit rate limits at the highest of highest levels for like providers everywhere. Uh, right now, I think like for us, we are not the type of company that really wants to take a lot of price.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  I know that that sounds like sketchy for a startup to roughly say, but the real reason is because we have like a real enterprise business like. Um, you know, companies like JP Morgan Chase and Dell have thousands, close to ten plus thousand developers uh using the product right now internally. And yeah, we even won like, you know, JP Morgan Chase's Hall of Innovation Award. And that's where we see the sort of real profitable revenue for the business coming from, uh, right? Not from individual developers that really want to cut their teeth on AI tools. So there's like this fine line of like, we cannot go bankrupt giving our product away. Uh, but also at the same time, like we want to set like the lowest price possible that we can to get the most people using the product.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  I would also say we've kind of positioned ourselves in such a way where, you know, the cost of intelligence is is getting cheaper and cheaper. And I think unanimously, like if you look across the board, all the different model providers, every model is just getting better. Every product is inheriting from that. And in the same way, like we are positioning ourselves to kind of benefit from the industry trends. So the quality will continue to go up, the cost will continue to go down, the speed will continue to get faster. And hopefully, you know, Windsurf will inherit from these things. And that's those three axes are really what we're working around the clock to try and figure out.

• 48:02Wes Bos?

  That's awesome. One more thing I wanted to ask about was this whole idea of like running it in the browser. Um, because it seemed like for a while that and even like companies like Shopify. All their devs don't download an editor. You know, it's all cloud-based. You just go to a website, you log in, it's your whole editing experience for everything. And that that cuts down a lot of their DevOps experience. I'm sure it's a big security thing, right? You can pull the plug and immediately if someone's fired, they don't have access to any of the code. It's sort of changed now that we've got all these AI things. Will that ever be a thing with Windsurf and these editors where it will just run in the browser? Or run on like a thin client somewhere?

• 48:45Speaker 02

  We actually have no problem with that in the long term to basically provide a way to run it in the browser. There's no real sort of detriment. One of the weird things that we sort of felt was, hey, if we need to make people download an app, maybe there would be some reluctance. I guess we were wrong. A lot of people are willing to download an app if they think the juice is worth the squeeze. And I guess one of the cool parts about the design of these kind of editors is they can connect to remote containers. So actually, a lot of companies, what they ultimately do is they use the dev container model, right? With remote S H. The idea is you are connecting to another machine. And if you do cut off access to that machine, you do lose access to the code. So look, if our users ultimately tell us, hey, we really, really want this product to run in the browser, we're happy to do that.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  But it comes at the cost of some iteration velocity for us in the short term. But products like, you know, the OSS version or Code OSS, which is the base of VS Code, can run in the browser, but that's largely because they are built on top of, you know, Electron and all of these other primitives that make it easy to do so.

• 49:44Wes Bos?

  Awesome.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  It kind of as a company, you gotta, you gotta be a little bit focused. There's going to be a lot of people asking for all sorts of things, right? We've all been kind of the recipient of users asking for features.

• 49:56Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  The Windsurf came out like two months ago. And so we're really intentional, you know, our team is growing. It's a cracked team, but you know, we only have so many people. And so we're trying to, we always have to be kind of ruthlessly prioritizing what to work on next. And, you know, at some point, maybe web is the place we want to extend to. But right now, we're pretty, pretty locked in on, on just the Windsurf.

• 50:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah. And I appreciate that as well. Because you gotta think like, rolling anything out in like Code standard, probably they have to think about every single possible person, every single type of developer, you know, like as Python developers is going to be okay with this feature because it does X, Y, and Z, or what about when somebody doesn't have a sidebar available? Or what about when someone's popped out? There's so many different edge cases for that type of thing. And as soon as you start to say, okay, well, we'll also run it in the browser and we'll also do this, then it gets slower to see new features and new improvements. And that's when a product starts to go.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:58Wes Bos?

  Usually in this show, at the end, we do sick pics and shameless plugs. Kevin, you've given a sick pic and a shameless plug before. Would you both like to give a sick pic and shameless plug?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  I could go first because I've, I've done this exercise before. And so I was on the train into work today. I was thinking about, I definitely have a sick pic recently. So as, as you two might know, I, I take a lot of photos. And so I recently treated myself to a new sick pic. It's called the Rico GR3X. It's a point and shoot, shoots raw, has film simulations and the whole thing. And I've recently been taking that all around where I go to kind of get the, the daily life, street view, film simulation type of look. And that's been a lot of fun for me. So that's my, that would be my sick pick. Something along that line, you know, it doesn't have to be work related. Vrune only works. So you know, it's hard to.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Okay, maybe, maybe this is, uh, this is, this would have been a nice one if I'd cycled as much, but I, I really like if I could get, be one of the cool kids that could get the automatic sort of gear changing mechanism, the DI2 on my, on my cycle. That's like a, that's a big one. Unfortunately, like I don't have one. So, so that's like, that's like

• 52:09Wes Bos?

  That's a sick wish.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  That's a sick wish.

• 52:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah. I've seen those often where there's no, there's no cable from like the gear select to where the, the derailleur is. And I often think like, man, that's wild. And I've seen guys change batteries out on them while they're like on tour de France, which is crazy as well.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  It's crazy. You don't need to change the, there's only one selector. So. It automatically cycles between the the big rig and the little rig automatically for you. It knows which one to sort of go on and it's a smooth experience. I guess the yeah, the hard, the hard part about all these things is the charging. It just feels like, uh, like I would just be worried about the charging the whole time. Like, when do I charge this? And and bicycles right now, like you don't need to worry about any of this stuff. I guess you do need to do routine maintenance and stuff like that. So.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Sometimes.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess the battery introduction is always. I feel like there's that one person who at the start of the ride is like, shoot, I didn't charge my.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yours. It's like, well.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  You're actually just you're just you're just screwed at that point. Yeah. Yeah.

• 53:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't just like fall back. I'm sure you could. Push it over, but that's crazy. I gotta, I wanna try this. I wanna hack it. What is it? Is it Bluetooth? I'm curious what the.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  It's Bluetooth.

• 53:23Wes Bos?

  Technology is. Okay, cuz I I've been dipping into the web Bluetooth API recently, which.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  It just just. That's my.

• 53:33Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah, I should whimsir- whimsurf it. Yeah. I wonder if it could. Cuz Chrome has a really good, like about Bluetooth or something like that, and it will list all the devices that are within range. It's really cool cuz it will show you if there's air tags and stuff around you. And you can.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  It's so wild.

• 53:51Wes Bos?

  Yeah, if you, if you ever wanna know like what Bluetooth devices are near me and not just like what the computer thinks you should see, like there's. Thousands of of devices that are constantly sending out Bluetooth.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Radiation.

• 54:05Wes Bos?

  Yes, exactly.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  You can like locate these things too, right? Cuz Bluetooth kind of helps you with location. Could you like just find where it is?

• 54:13Wes Bos?

  Oh, man, probably. It's it's all about. Like signal strength, right? Like there's. With the radios, there's a RSSI and there's another one. It'll tell you the signal of the radio. So assuming, yeah, you can move around and as the signal gets higher or lower, you could beep it. So maybe I'll try that.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  That feels like a very scary security risk. Uh, to just go to an airport and there's just someone doing this.

• 54:38Wes Bos?

  Yes. Yeah, I wonder this. The thing about it, about being able to access the stuff on the Bluetooth is some of Bluetooth devices have like standardized things like get temperature and whatnot, and they'll publish what they are. But then a lot of them will just like, they don't tell you what the the calls are. So you have to sort of guess or reverse engineer what the actual calls are. We have a new baby and he had this like foot monitor for a heart rate. I took that and hooked it up to the web and and put it on my thumb and I could get my heart rate. Through the the little, it's like a smart sock that tells you the baby's heart rate and temperature as they're sleeping.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 55:18Wes Bos?

  Hooked it up. So, yeah. Anyways, shameless plug. Well, obviously, probably you'd like to to shamelessly plug Windsurf.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems fair.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  It's where we spend most of our time, I would say.

• 55:31Wes Bos?

  Cool, I bet.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  You want to do the official shameless plug statement?

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you guys should all use Windsurf.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Wind dot surf.

• 55:41Scott Tolinski?

  Quite the pitch, yeah.

• 55:42Wes Bos?

  Wind dot surf. That's actually a good domain. Did you have to buy that or was it available?

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Ah, you know, it's available, but everything has a price.

• 55:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Did you? It wasn't a friend.com price or whatever that was, right?

• 55:54Speaker 01

  You would have made the news.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  We have not, we have not paid the friend.com price. How much was that?

• 55:59Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, it was an outrageous amount. Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Oh, the friend.com.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, how much was it?

• 56:03Wes Bos?

  No, how much was Winds, Wind dot surf? I want to know that, too.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Probably, I mean, it was probably maybe two orders of magnitude cheaper, probably. I don't know what the friend.com price is.

• 56:14Scott Tolinski?

  It was 1.9 mil, no, it was 1.8 million dollars.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Okay. A few orders of magnitude.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  It's a lot cheaper.

• 56:25Wes Bos?

  Oh, man. That's one of my favorite things to do is ask people, what's the story behind the domain name? And almost nobody ever wants to tell us a story. They're all clammed up behind it and.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Maybe sometimes the owner of the previous domain is just like it was hard to reason about it and it seems it's a bad feeling overall at the very end.

• 56:46Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Potentially.

• 56:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's true. Or often I think people buy them under mask. I had somebody negotiate with me back and forth for a long time on a domain name and I finally sold it to them. A week later, boom, they put it up for sale 10 times the price. I sold it to them and it was like they knew it was worth more, but they had like made a fake, a whole fake story and everything behind it. And I actually, I forget what it was. I don't know if they ended up selling it or not, but.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hope they didn't.

• 57:16Wes Bos?

  Yes, right. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Kevin and Varun for coming on. This is really fun, really interesting to learn all about it. Definitely going to, I've been using Windsurf, gonna be continuing to check it out with all the new features you guys are releasing.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Cool. Yeah, thanks for having us, Scott, Wes. Hopefully we'll see you in person at a conference maybe soon.

• 57:37Wes Bos?

  For sure.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:38Wes Bos?

  We'll be around.

• 57:39Scott Tolinski?

  Definitely.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  All right. Peace.

• 57:41Scott Tolinski?

  Take care, guys.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 57:42Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.