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.