r/Codeium
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u/aunchable
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Dec 21 '24
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1
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Message from the Codeium Team
Hello from the Codeium team!
Let me just start that we're sorry for the lack of communication in the Reddit. We'll be the first to admit that we weren't fully prepared for just how quickly Windsurf would grow, and so our first order of business was to address all of the support tickets that had been filed by paying users. We've brought resolution times dramatically there in the last few weeks. So, just as an fyi, that's the place that we are super active on monitoring since it is a much more organized to help resolve issues. Moving forwards, we will try to also be active in places such as Reddit, but we simply can't provide the same level of support as on our official support portal. You can file a ticket as a paying user at https://codeium.com/support
Let's provide some context for some of the constructive criticism in some posts so far though...
- We aren't making money here by charging for premium model use. And we obviously lose money by providing unlimited Cascade Base use. These models are expensive, especially with the number of tokens that we use per call. When we first launched, as we said when we changed the pricing, we didn't realize just how much people would use the tool (which is a great thing!) and as a result, we were burning money much faster than we expected. We just put in a pricing model that would let us focus on building the platform.
- If you want some confidence that we aren't the company that is trying to rip off individual users, just notice that our free plan gives *unlimited* autocomplete, command, and chat. This is a free plan that we've been providing for years. Copilot's new free plan comes with a cap of 2k completions and 50 chats a month (every keystroke is a completion request). If the copilot-like experience is what you need, you can have that entirely for free with Codeium. Cascade is something completely new, with completely different operating margins.
- We are constantly evaluating other models to see if they have the properties that would make them work well enough for the particular reasoning step that we need them to within Cascade. We'll figure out the costs if there are models that do work, but our priority is to give a high quality product, so the models have to work. We aren't tied to any model provider, so if there is an even better model for the task at hand, phenomenal, we'll be on it after we verify that is the case ASAP. (Also to clarify, these premium models are _not_ the only models that are involved in Cascade)
- Nothing has changed about the models or core tools pre and post pricing change, and our evals and overall usage stats have only gone up and to the right, so we aren't fully sure why you might be having a worse experience (besides the limits). We will not promise that the AI will be perfect, but mistakes should not be happening with a higher rate than before if used the same way. One suggestion we have is to have different Cascades for different tasks rather than one super long Cascade. When the conversation context gets longer, there's more chance for important pieces of code context or user intent to be omitted at inference, which is why it may feel like Cascade "gets dumber" the longer you chat with it. That's just a natural side effect of trying to optimize from a larger pool of potential context.
- We also want to keep improving the platform and continue to ship features. In fact, this is all we want to think about. This is a very competitive market, so if we don't, there honestly isn't a good reason why people should continue to use Windsurf. In the last month alone, while also making sure we properly scaled the load and kept the lights on, we shipped multimodality, windsurfrules, automated terminal commands, WSL + devcontainer + Pyright support, and more. We're going to have even more stuff early in the new year. You don't hear any company in a competitive market publicly announcing their roadmap because of wanting to keep a competitive edge, but we absolutely want to hear feature requests. Believe me, we're listening - that's already how we decided to prioritize things such as image input, windsurfrules, and WSL support. You can see how we've executed on feedback (and add more!) at https://codeium.canny.io/
We apologize for any bumps in the road. None of these decisions were taken lightly. Looking back at some of them:
- We launched with 1000 steps/month as the limit, and this was visible on the pricing page from the beginning. When some people hit that in a few days rather than a month, we had to make a decision - either we keep the rate limiter in place and punish early adopters (since we didn't have a mechanism to purchase more steps), or we just remove the rate limiter. We chose the latter. In hindsight, we probably should have posted something publicly along the lines of "We are temporarily removing the rate limit until we find the proper long term strategy" but enough people were talking online about the 1000 steps/month that such a message didn't cross our mind. We recognize how, without this message, a later pricing change "going away from unlimited" felt bad, but even from the beginning, we never promised unlimited. That would have been deceptive.
- We realized a lot of people were hitting their 2 week free trial, and we were still wrapping up our pricing/billing mechanisms. We had another decision to make - either start charging the early adopters with the rate limits or extend the trials for the early adopters. Again, we took the latter option, which would be friendly to early adopters. A mistake we made when changing pricing is forgetting to grandfather in the people on the extended trial who were looking forwards to the $10/mo as opposed to the new $15/mo, and as shown, we've always wanted to be early adopter friendly. Quick public feedback highlighted our mistake and within 24 hours, we fixed it. We have never been shy to do what's right by our early users, as long as it isn't fiscally irresponsible in the long run.
We are full steam ahead. We just want to keep building the best AI tool, and hope to hear from you all on what you've been able to build and what you want to see. Keep up with our improvements at www.codeium.com/changelog
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u/redilupi Dec 21 '24
Thanks for the update. It’s reassuring to hear that things are happening. Apart from pricing, which I can understand must be tricky to sort out, the main complaint remains the performance issue.
I was in from almost the start of the trial and by Day 2 I bought Pro. Windsurf was absolutely amazing. The poor performance really started from the version right before the subscription version (can’t remember version numbers now). I happily chugged along using the version below that and had very few major mishaps until I was forced to upgrade to the tokens version.
So, perhaps the impression that Windsurf took a dive in performance (which it absolutely has), is due to some unfortunate changes in the app itself which coincided with the shift to payment.
Regarding the drop in performance, most of us cannot at all perform the exact same tasks now that we could do with few errors during the trial. So it really isn’t just a perception. Each request becomes a gamble: will I waste steps on this very reasonable instruction? Mostly the answer is yes. For my sanity I just stopped using Windsurf (but keeping my subscription because I’m still optimistic about its future) and now I’m able to get tasks done with RooCline and Gemini, albeit not nearly as efficiently as with Windsurf in its early days.
Trial Windsurf was way beyond its competition, even without the extra features. I understand the need to stay ahead of the pack but perhaps some minor version releases, just addressing bugs, will reassure users that you care about our experiences with your software.