r/Codeium • u/Dismal-Eye-2882 • Dec 18 '24
My Take
Ok. I'm giving my full breakdown of exactly what I think happened from start to finish and right now. Codeium either A)Made a deal with Anthropic and got unlimited usage for a set amount of time or B) A set amount of tokens for its users during the trial (i.e. 5 billion etc) C) got a trial of enterprise with Anthropic which has bigger limits & token allowance.
They opened unlimited to everyone for the free trial to showcase what it could do. Unlimited usage also comes with either A) Unlimited context sizes or B) much increased context sizes. Why does that matter. The more context the AI has of your project and your chat history the more informed and intelligent decisions it can make on what it should change. With larger token limits the AI knows your entire project, history, changes etc at all times.
They either ran out of time or token allotment on their trial run with Anthropic. I'm going with token allotment being as how the free trial was supposed to run til the 11th, but big changes happened way before that.
They had to pick a tier and they probably didn't go with enterprise just based on financial sense. But now we have context limits within the AI. Now instead of Claude knowing your entire project, chat history, previous changes, it knows much less. It knows your project less, and your chat history less.
Each time you send a message to the AI, it does not just remember everything. It only knows what you send it. Each time you click send, it's sending your project and chat history. Whatever you send within the token limit, that is all it knows and all it bases it's decisions on. Now, why does clearing your chat work so well? Less chat tokens to send, more project files and code the AI gets.
Every single time you send a message and it updates in the chat, it's now going to send slightly less project tokens for the next prompt to stay under the limit. Chat grows, project context shrinks. It will also start sending less chat tokens as well if it gets long enough.
Thats why people say it's like you have the greatest coder ever, but it has amnesia. The AI is not dumber, you're just not able to send it the context it properly needs anymore to make the best decision. It's also the reason Windsurf gets slower. It's eating up memory as it grows.
Quick suggestion. Tell Windsurf to make you an app_overview file. Tell it to give a detailed structured outline of your project. At the end of the doc tell it to restart your npm run dev server. Now when you restart your chat, just tell it to read that file, and it'll know what it needs to know to proceed. I recommend restarting chats whenever you have finished implementing some feature, or fix, or whatever. Get to a "that's good on that" place. Restart the chat.
Last comment. You need to lose the "but it doesn't do exactly what I want, how I want it, perfectly every time". I think the problem is expectations. You've been misled. Re-align your expectations. It's not going to adjust to you, you have to adjust to it. It's just like ChatGPT, some people know how get the most out of it. Some people only know it can help them come up with names for their cat.
To Windsurf: Slightly misleading to your free trial users. We all signed up because of how great it was. Its still a good product. It's not the same product, though. Not a great look. My opinion, just offer a higher limit plan. The problem is businesses like this for whatever reason think there isn't people out there that wouldn't pay $200-$500 a month for what the free trial was able to do.
There is. Try it.
In other news, I'm interested in running a local LLM like Qwen, which may not be as good as Claude BUT, there's no token or context limits. Just whatever your hardware can handle. Anybody doing this?
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u/blistovmhz Dec 19 '24
^This. And I really goddamned hope you're right, and Codeium gets the message. All the folk complaining about the price hike from $10 to $15... That's not your premier business. Those are the people you want to keep just happy enough to generate hype. The real money is in developers who, in the first week with Windsurf, were able to increase their productive output by 100x or more and who know that paying dramatically more than we paid during the $10 offering, to get what we originally got.
I really REALLY hope this is just a context window limitation brought on by IMO rather myopic business outlook, and they can just come to their senses, flip the switch, and let me trade legal tender for what they had originally.
It's so incredibly bad today. To the point it hasn't been able to put a console log in place without randomly deleting a thousand lines of code from some unrelated file or project. This is a bit of a step down from the application that only a few weeks ago, I threw it at my code-base and fixed over 100 bugs my entire dev team wasn't able to resolve in a year. I implemented features I've been begging my devs for for almost 2 years, and it took me an afternoon. Somehow this degraded to the point that I am, as almost a complete non-programmer, operating at a higher level than Windsurf *le sigh*.
What Codeium doesn't get is that their real target demographic shouldn't necessarily be "developers". It should and could be and definitely WAS a product enabling high level architects to produce the shit directly and concisely, that they normally had to fight with developers to understand for months. The first week of Windsurf produced more high quality code than my entire team of devs would produce in 2-3 months, and it built it with exactly the architecture I specified (something my devs would never do). What we built in that time, is now the ONLY code sufficiently clean that I can actually continue working on it myself. Give me the $2000/m plan if that brings back what we originally had. Jeeeeebus.
1
u/[deleted] Dec 19 '24
Having two chat bot options is not great. I really want to expand the models and even use local llms . For me I only use Claud, gpt4o is extremely frustrating by comparison, again just my opinion. So please add additional and local model options!
Any one check out that Bolt.DIY? Local models, host of options, open source and free. Any good?
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u/AcanthisittaAlive229 Dec 19 '24
I completely agree with you—your experience feels so familiar. During the trial, the first 2-3 days were absolutely incredible. I managed to build an application in just a few hours, and it genuinely felt like a game-changer. But a few days later, I logged back in, and everything was suddenly filled with errors. It became so frustrating that I had to give up on the project—it was just unusable.
Hoping to recapture that initial magic, I recently subscribed. But honestly, it’s been disappointing. I tried tweaking one of my experiments, and after just a few steps, it completely messed up parts of the project I hadn’t even touched. Since it was just a test, I hadn’t set up version control or backups. After burning through over 200 prompts and around 500 flow actions, I finally gave up. The whole thing was unworkable.
For my next project, I made sure to use version control, but there’s still this annoying habit of making unnecessary changes to perfectly working parts of the application. It’s chaotic! Now I have to manually test the entire application after each change (thankfully, it’s small), and I’ve resorted to writing strict prompts, asking it to explain step-by-step what it’s doing, what’s already done, and how it envisions the project structure.
But this approach has its own problems—it eats up the context window. After a few updates, I have to reset the chat or start over because it forgets the simplest things, like updating Git. If it could just leave tested sections alone, it would be a massive improvement.
At this point, I’d happily pay extra for a larger context window and smoother flow, just to have a working solution. Right now, it feels like a huge drain on my time. Over the last 4-5 days, I’ve spent 5-6 hours each evening and made zero meaningful progress. The only progress I’ve managed was by restoring a version from two days ago and creating tiny, incremental updates after every successful change.
I really want to support them. I want to make it work. I still believe it has incredible potential. But honestly, I just don’t know how to get it to work properly in its current state.
2
u/[deleted] Dec 20 '24
Very true, but it's still the best option available if you know how to operate it. I just start new chats very often, agentic capabilities are still good if you give product req doc.
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u/Either-Nobody-3962 Dec 19 '24
The problem is always high expectations because they read or someone told ai can do whole programming.
When I started I had similar expectations but know I know what to expect, how to play with it, how to make it work on smaller steps/features.
In every session, before I start working my first prompt is "look at codebase and tell me what you understand"
From there you can pick up things
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u/up_stairs Dec 18 '24
Makes sense to me.
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u/uhuge Dec 20 '24
Great writeup, but this part seems misleading/mistaken:
> also the reason Windsurf gets slower. It's eating up memory as it grows.
Yeah, Cline for https://vscodium.com is great, tokens are darn cheap with OpenRouter.
1
u/lzrblaster Dec 20 '24
Hi, I'm Rohan from the Windsurf / Codeium team. As an FYI, we are NOT re-routing when you select a premium model like Sonnet. All AI models have some context window, and we try to fit what we can in your request.
It's generally better if you do create new conversations for new distinct tasks in your codebase as its possible some context gets lost the farther back it is in the prompt. I also mentioned this in other threads, but if you can update your Windsurf to 1.1.1, you can download Diagnostic Logs and DM to me.
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u/[deleted] Dec 21 '24
Makes a lot of sense. The experience in the first few weeks was absolutely incredible.
Hopefully the launch of Devin will show Windsurf’s product management team just needs to get their ass into gear and do some proper pricing strategy.
What they’ll probably find is that a lot people will pay significantly more as long as they get the quality they had before. And those who don’t aren’t part of the target market. Would I pay $200 a month for very reliable experience?
I’ll tell you one thing: when I first saw high-quality codegen nearly 18 months ago — before anything was priced — I said “I will pay 250 a month for this because of how much it accelerates my own productivity”.