Building Windsurf with Varun Mohan

Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of Windsurf, discusses the engineering challenges of building AI coding tools. He emphasizes the importance of comprehensive evaluation suites for testing new models, drawing parallels to autonomous vehicle development. Mohan details Windsurf's history, from GPU virtualization to application-layer focus, highlighting the need for custom models with "fill-in-the-middle" capabilities for code completion. He shares metrics on Windsurf's usage, processing 500 billion tokens of code daily, and addresses the debate around fine-tuning models on company codebases, noting that great personalization and retrieval provide more value. Mohan also explores the balance between short-term feature development and long-term vision, as well as his perspective on the future of software engineering.