At Codeium, we've been building AI-powered extensions for a while (we first launched our VSCode extension with autocomplete a little over 2 years ago!), but we've always thought there would come a day where we would hit the limits of what could be achieved within existing IDEs, so we decided to build our own: Windsurf (yes, it's yet another VSCode fork :)
We've stuffed a lot of cool features into Windsurf—a super fast autocomplete model, an inline diff generation experience that feels truly native, but we're most proud of Cascade, which is an evolution of the sidebar chat experience that many other extensions have. Cascade can perform deep reasoning on your existing codebase, access a vast array of tools that allow it to run terminal commands and find relevant files, and it's omniscient of all the actions that the user has taken independent of invoking the AI. (You can for example, start implementing a change manually and just ask Cascade to "continue").
We've been using Cascade internally at Codeium on our actual production codebase, and we're getting actual value from it. We hope everyone here does too! You can find a bunch of demos of Cascade on our website but I want to show one that I made myself using Cascade to solve an interesting cryptography challenge:
https://youtu.be/LbYepFmVB20
Cascade was able to explain the problem to me, install some libraries needed to interact with the challenge, give me some pointers towards a solution, and implement an attack that I described to it all by itself.
