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Building Windsurf with Varun Mohan
Varun Mohan, CEO of Windsurf, shares how building an AI-native IDE is reshaping software development—from optimizing LLM latency to enabling non-engineers to ship code.
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Stream the Latest Episode
Listen and watch now on YouTube, Spotify and Apple. See the episode transcript at the top of this page, and timestamps for the episode at the bottom.
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In This Episode
What happens when LLMs meet real-world codebases? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by Varun Mohan, CEO and Co-Founder of Windsurf. Varun talks me through the technical challenges of building an AI-native IDE (Windsurf) and how these tools are changing the way software gets built.
We discuss:
What building self-driving cars taught the Windsurf team about evaluating LLMs
How LLMs for text are missing capabilities for coding like “fill in the middle”
How Windsurf optimizes for latency
Windsurf’s culture of taking bets and learning from failure
Breakthroughs that led to Cascade (agentic capabilities)
Why the Windsurf teams build their LLMs
How non-dev employees at Windsurf build custom SaaS apps – with Windsurf!
How Windsurf empowers engineers to focus on more interesting problems
The skills that will remain valuable as AI takes over more of the codebase
And much more!
Takeaways
Some of the most interesting topics discussed in the conversation were these:
1. Having a robust “eval suite” is a must-have for LLM products tools like Windsurf. Every time Windsurf