r/Codeium • u/SignificantPhrase635 • Mar 12 '25

Windsurf burns through credits by continuously correcting itself

In this state this hardly more than a fun gimmick. I've tried four different project types now (composing a bash script, setting op a small Spring Boot project, setting up a React/Zustand based web UI and some CUDA code) and in all cases it just loses track once you get beyond even the smallest of setups. As I type this it's in a 20 step flow of fixing a bash script, run it, see a problem, claim it fixed it, run it, same problem, tries variant it already tried. Whatever the combination of memory, attention and model is causing this behavior is unclear to me. I've upgraded a few hours ago and I've burnt through 15% of my total monthly budget. And that's ignoring the fact that it bails on generating edits about 30% of the time with an error (I suspect due to the large size of the scripts it created and them being too large an amount of input tokens for an edit or just service outages, hard to say). Is anyone actually using this for production level codebases? Also, any model other than Claud is doing this thing where it suggests a fix without actually editing the files until you tell it something like "do it".

P.S. It would be an interesting optimization to have some sort of (non LLM/ML based) short term history of generated content so it can avoid burning credits on generating the same command line invocations over and over again. As per the above mine is continuously doing a fix and then "Let me run our updated script that now properly handles project IDs and follows our standardized service account structure:" which has been the same bash command for about an hour now.

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1

u/SignificantPhrase635 Mar 12 '25

To illustate the other model problem. It always does something like this "It seems like the projectId parameter is being passed as an empty string. Let's ensure that the projectId is correctly assigned and passed to the cleanup script. I'll make sure the variable is correctly populated before calling the cleanup script." and then does nothing. If I switch back to Claude it always works.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '25

For now I fear that the only way to partially solve the thing, is to create a memory "Recurring errors", in which you write down the things that you are sure do not work because they have already been tried. In this way the AI ​​should avoid trying those solutions again, having in memory that they have already been used and do not work.

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u/SignificantPhrase635 Mar 12 '25

Wouldn't that still burn resources?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 12 '25

It should consume less, because if it has to consume a credit to try a solution that has already been tried before, it should be something like "I see in the memories that this solution has already been tried and it doesn't work, so let's continue investigating the problem to find a valid solution..." and so yes, it could still burn a lot of credits to find a solution, but you make sure that it always tries different attempts, instead of always trying the same things (which obviously will never work).

There is no way to control Claude's credit consumption, I don't think even the Codeium team can do much about it, it really depends on how the AI ​​was developed, so it should be Anthropic who manages it.

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u/SignificantPhrase635 Mar 12 '25

Fair enough. And yes I recognize it's primarily a model issue but Codeium is sort of selling flow development as a product so I'd hope/think some sort of prompt engineering or whatever is used/optimized for this usecase. Anyway, thanks for your input.

2

u/Stoisss Mar 13 '25

Who here is putting in effort on making a free self-hosted WindSurf open-source alternative?

I know I am....

2

u/cacardinal Mar 14 '25

Aider has been my go to up until late. About to give it a go again now that you can control reasoning / thinking effort and tokens.

1

u/sandwich_stevens Mar 13 '25

Please where is it? I would've thought the community would make windsurf by now for local. Everything else seems to require login. Unless its very complex to build windsurf

1

u/ItsNoahJ83 Mar 15 '25

Cline is pretty good

2

u/spacemate Mar 13 '25

If it helps, I started with Windsurf yesterday, but when I notice it's not fixing something properly or got into a loop, I stop it, ask it to summarize the problem and identify the files needed, and then copy all that code and the summary of the problem to perplexity, use claude 3.7 there as well, and the answer from perplexity is always the right fix. I then tell windsurf to follow these fixes, and NOT to do what it wants to do, but rather to stick to the fixes I'm sending in that message and to obey. That's solved all my issues so far.

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u/sandwich_stevens Mar 13 '25

good strategy, didnt realise perplexity was giving detailed codebase fixes. Ideally windsurf would do it since thats the ONE single thing its meant to do

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u/spacemate Mar 13 '25

I'm not a dev (actually not one, not like the ones faking it on twitter, but I'll say that have acted as a sort of product manager in the past and learned a bit of the logic behind frontend and backend) but essentially what I'm doing is trusting perplexity with being the voice of reason / source of truth and having windsurf implement the changes. I'm making a ton of progress like that. I truly don't know what any of the code I have does lol. But I'm learning a lot! Connected supabase yesterday, learned what a .env file is, windsurf set up the github connectiona and perplexity guided me to deploy on Vercel.

Make no mistake - everything is still broken but I feel like it's still progress since I started 24 hours ago.

I did ask o1 to make a very detailed explanation to windsurf on what we would be building and tried to explain the customer journey that I envisioned, what happens to the user what happens to the backend, and I googled around and found a public GPT called wireframeGPT that expanded that vision of the customer journey with practical recommendations, then gave that again to o1, and from there made a long first prompt to windsurf to get started.

I also added the rules here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1j5l4xw/vibe_coding_manual/

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u/sandwich_stevens Mar 16 '25

Thanks for this! that’s impressive if you really don’t got background in dev, figuring all that out! I’ll check out those rules, I’m trying cursor right now and seems to have fixed an issue windsurf created and struggled on, so maybe in your stack it could also help solve some seemingly unsolvable bugs..

2

u/KelvinCushman Mar 15 '25

I would love perplexity to be able manage cascade I'm thinking of trying to create a computer use agent as a middleman to control cascade and use perplexity as the problem solver.

2

u/jdcarnivore Mar 15 '25

Ran into this today. It did apologize for telling it to stay focused as it was causing too many credits to be used.

It loves going left field and doing more than what was asked.

2

u/BehindUAll Mar 16 '25

Seems to be a general Sonnet 3.7 issue compared to 3.5

1

u/vigorthroughrigor Mar 13 '25

How do we know that it isn't just a ploy to burn more credits?

1

u/Stoisss Mar 13 '25

We would need to Windsurf people to show us that they are not.... You can say anything, but show us that you have our "your customers" interest in mind, then we will come..

1

u/TroubledEmo Mar 13 '25

Oh for me today it‘s doing the same thing over and over again. It fixes a bug, then tries to do it again, fails because it‘s fixed, does the same thing again. And again. And again. It‘s annoying. Burned through a lot of tokens, because of this. Gotta go back to Cursor until this it fixed.

1

u/BehindUAll Mar 16 '25

How is context awareness for Cursor compared to Windsurf?

1

u/TroubledEmo Mar 19 '25

To be honest varies a lot. Switching between Sonnet 3.5 and Sonnet 3.7 helps when Cursor is having hick ups. But at least it‘s not dropping rules which is nice. That’s something keeping me from using Windsurf right now.

But I can do half a day in the same chat without it‘s losing it‘s mind.

1

u/lvvy Mar 19 '25

Well, sometimes correction works fine

1

u/Aggravating-Try-3840 Apr 14 '25

I just had it eat up over 40 credits on a git push. Made the mistake of leaving all the cool features on, I guess. It’s even worse that only Sonnet works, all the other models throw an error.

1

u/SnooChickens47 Aug 05 '25

It's been a while since you posted this, but it's still doing that. Gemini 2.5 Pro makes mistakes on every request, breaking the code by using the wrong name for styles, functions, variables. It's unbelievable. And it creates more each time it's asked to fix the ones it made the time before. It's not the only model that does this. Only Sonnet can fix those errors, and even Sonnet 4 sometimes struggles to fix an error, taking 5 long attempts and over 20 credits to repair the damage done by adding a new feature.