Observations after a few weeks of development with Windsurf

First of all, Im not a coder or developer by trade.

Im a founder and have spent decades hiring and directing coders and developers to build out my visions.

I have posted under another Reddit username quite a few of my historical projects, and just to sum it all up, I have spent a lot of money and time and employed a lot of people, both as employees and as contractors.

For me, after 3 weeks of use, Windsurf has changed the game. I have a working prototype of a project that in years past would have cost me 6 months minimum to get to MVP and hundreds of thousands of payroll dollars. I have the pro ultimate subscription and for full transparency have spent several hundred dollars I think (not really counting yet) on flex tokens, and to get to a public launch I expect a few hundred more. Still, as I said, I'm just one person who is not a developer. So the difference is mind boggling.

That said, Im also learning alot about development, because you almost need to be **sort of** a coder in order to direct Windsurf and oversee and troubleshoot. Someone with zero technical ability (or willingness to learn) simply cant do it, IMO.

That said, I just want to toss in with my endorsement, praise and gratitude a couple of the issues that to me make Windsurf almost unusable to any but those with the utmost patience.

First off, we are all familiar by now with AI hallucinations. But Windsurf can take these to a whole new level. I have almost exclusively been using the Claude 3.5 Sonnet Premium AI, and I have had Windsurf fairly often just make up stuff and randomly add it to my code, assume I want given functionality I didnt ask for (and didnt want), and most egregiously it will without asking generate new sets of code that duplicate existing functionality, even when nothing is broken. I tried to prevent this by setting memory items, and it still violates the memory items. When I remind it that it is violating memory items and setting development back for days because we then have to troubleshoot what it did and why and revert it, which often breaks more functionality. All the while Im burning flex credits, so yipppeeee for Codeium. It makes money by breaking things and then fixing them, or spending many hours attempting to fix them.

As I said, this issue alone has prompted me to almost abandon Windsurf, but the positives have outweighed the negatives so rather than switch coding tools midstream, Im going to stick it out and get to my public launch with Windsurf. The image paste recognition alone is an amazing feature I didnt get with other tools like Bolt.

Just wanted to give the Codeium devs some honest and raw feedback on what I see in the field the last few weeks.