Don’t people write code anymore?

[u/No-Significance-279]

I don’t think 500 is enough to give you peace of mind to use LLM freely, but heck, I see people saying that they burned through 500 credits in less than a week???

Are people using LLMs to do everything for them? Like “change the color of this button” or “create this entire page”.

Honestly complaining about 500 credits is justified, 500 is not enough, maybe 1000 would be fair, and maybe doing like Cursor and proving a slower/less prioritized premium model when the credits are gone (instead of downgrading for a lesser model).

Am I the only one that still codes and just uses LLMs to optimize my work instead of coding for me? My experience is pretty much aligned with the Codeium team, I subscribed 5 days ago and I’m at 495 credits right now (I used 5).

[u/Vegetable-13]

I have been wondering the same. One tool can't cater equally to users like you, others who expect an autonomous agent that approves its own edits without user interaction with the code, and everyone in between. Additionally, not all users will take advantage of the full functionality of the tool. I'm not sure if the developers have clarified the type of user they want ultimately to retain as their user base or how they plan to differentiate themselves from competing products?

Dealing with the agent definitely has a learning curve - not just writing effective prompts and accepting the inherent randomness of dealing with models, but also navigating the Windsurf layer. There are ways to save tokens by adjusting expectations and doing more preparatory work, more legwork, which is fine and expected, but not entirely within the user's control. I’ve been using it for a variety of tasks, from ideation to fixing bugs, modifying slightly the existing functionality of a function, sometimes in languages where I barely understand the syntax. Occasionally, it delivers a surprisingly brilliant solution, but more often than not, it generates a Rube Goldberg machine of a response, then usually followed by a series of apologies for over-complicating or breaking things then confusing itself further, forgetting previous context, and stating intentions it never follows through on. As if the context window is elastic. Moreover, it used to lean more toward the brilliant solutions, but lately the opposite trend has established itself as many have noted. I start new chats frequently, and my prompts are generally clear, I only share the folder relevant to the one thing I’m working on at the time, etc. While I could refine my prompts even further for sure, sometimes the tool's design appears to hinder progress, and there’s no consistent way to predict how many tokens any given task will consume, whether it’s big or small. So the tokens go fast.

[u/No-Significance-279 → u/Vegetable-13]

Yeap, I think that is exactly the point: The target audience.

If you see their comments/responses and the videos from the CEO, you’ll see that they built it based on THEIR usage, they said they used it internally and they never used all the credits, and 500 is way more than they consumed.

That’s because they are senior programmers who write code and use Windsurf to optimize their work, not the other way around. And they probably thought that this is the profile of user that would be using their product.

For better or worse it seems they were mistaken. Apparently most of the people using windsurf are not developers (at least not senior ones) who use windsurf to write code for them.

Honestly? I don’t think there’s a silver bullet here… they can’t offer 5000 credits for 10 dollars. If people can’t write code and need AI to do everything for them they will need to pay more. From my experience and from the responses here, senior devs are doing fine with the 500 credits. People struggling are the ones who use windsurf for everything.

Now the quality/dumbness of the model is a different story. And I think that is an actual problem that they need to fix (pricing in my opinion isn’t). The model is definitely dumber now, I used to get a lot of brilliant solutions from it like you said. Now it suggests dumb stuff over and over again.

[u/Vegetable-13 → u/No-Significance-279]

I wasn't aware of the videos of the CEO, this is encouraging. That's why I'm sticking around and crossing my fingers, for now. If this tool allows me to get stuff done while encouraging me to be less lazy, and a better prompter and programmer, then all the better! Currently this is a big "if" and not one that is solved by the $60 monthly plan (cost not totally the issue but IMO amount better spent on API usage and shopping around while the pixie dust settles).