Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. So Windsurf is an IDE, right? It's an application to go out and build software and build applications. The crazy thing is a lot of people who use the product don't even probably know what an IDE is, which is crazy. And we'll get into that in a second. But why did we go out and build Windsurf and what is Windsurf maybe? Why couldn't we have just done this on top of conventional IDEs like Visual Studio Code? So maybe just to get into this a little bit, as we saw that AI was getting more and more powerful, the way people go out and build technology, we thought the interface for that was going to change remarkably. It was not going to be a conventional pure text editor where the user is writing a handful of lines of code or most of the code and the IDE provides maybe some basic feedback on what the user is doing right or wrong. And the basic feedback could be, "Hey, there's a bug in your software or compiler error in your software." It could do much more, right? It could actually go out and modify large chunks of code. One of the key pieces that we recognized was, with this new paradigm with AI, AI was probably going to write well over 90% of the software, in which case the role of a developer and what they're doing in the IDE is maybe reviewing code. Maybe it's actually a little bit different than what it is in the past. And we'll see this very soon with Windsurf. Maybe when you're using the product, actually a good chunk of the user's time is that you're reviewing what the AI is outputting. So we needed to build custom-review flows into the IDE to actually make it so that it was easier to actually go out and do that, right? Because the developer is not spending all their time writing code. And this is the fundamental premise on why we built the product. We thought we were going to get limited a ton if we had very, very basic UI out there. And I'll give you even a simple example here. We have this auto-complete product that completes a handful of lines of code. Now we've actually launched this offering called Windsurf Tab that basically shows you refactors as well. And these refactors are almost inline refactors. And we were able to build a custom UI for that in Windsurf. But in VSCode, because of the access to the APIs, we needed to dynamically generate images right alongside the user's cursor because we just didn't have access to the capabilities to showcase and edit properly. And what we realized is immediately by porting over to Windsurf, our acceptance rate tripled. Same ML models, it just tripled. So what that, I guess, gave us confidence in is yeah, you could argue technology is very important. And I think technology is very important. But if our users are getting very little value from the technology we're sort of building, you need to really clarify, "Maybe we do need to build a new surface and interface." And that's what Windsurf is. So the big bet you took there just to make this super clear, is you were initially working within existing IDEs that everyone was familiar with. And then it was like, "This isn't going to get us where we need to go. We're going to try to convince people to switch to something completely new because it's going to be so much better. It's our own IDE. " I think maybe people may not recognize just how risky that is, convincing engineers to use something completely new. That's a huge deal. Yeah, no, of course. And one of the key pieces, maybe Lenny, that would be important to share is a lot of our developers do use Visual Studio Code. But there are lots of people that write in languages like Java, sort of C++ and so on and so forth, and they might use the JetBrains family of IDEs that like IntelliJ. And for us, we are actually still committed to building on those platforms, right? We just felt though that one of the dominant IDEs, which was Visual Studio Code, was limiting the sort of user interface that we could give to our actual customers.…

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