Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

122•janpio•3h ago

Comments

bluelightning2k•2h ago

I really think more people should give Windsurf a go. It's really good. I'm a senior engineer and do a mix of agentic and regular coding and I really think people are looking past Windsurf.

As the conversation shifted towards Cursor vs Claude code vs Codex people seem to have stopped mentioning it which is a shame.

Source: user for 12 months - not a shill.

Codemaps was a very pleasant surprise when it showed up.

sama004•2h ago

I just tried out windsurf yesterday, The only thing I hate for now is that when there are changes and I accept one of them, then trying to accept the others gives an error saying the file was changed

lord_sudo•2h ago

I’m sorry to hear about that. What version are you on? Looking to fix / repro this asap

swyx•2h ago

(also you can hit "share conversation" or "view response statistics" and then "copy request id" and send to support!)

all2•1h ago

This is enough for me to give this a go. I've tried a few different tools; abacus.ai (and their IDE), claude CLI, crush-cli. My workflows are still mostly on the command line, and a little in VS Code. I haven't found a flow that works "right", yet.

swyx•39m ago

first mention i've heard of abacus.ai and IDE. what do you think stands out about them?

you might struggle with Windsurf since you're so command line heavy. but pro tip - ask for command line work to be done inside of Windsurf's Cascade agent. they were first to the terminal-inside-aichat pattern and i really like how it's much better at command line stuff than i am (or can do the legwork to specify command line commands based on a few english descriptions)

dingnuts•1h ago

I've used it, and I thought it was absolute trash. Goes crazy doing shit I don't want. I spend more time deleting crap I didn't want and reviewing and changing its code than I do just writing it myself.

I know what you're going to say: I need to learn to use this groundbreaking technology that is so easy to use that my product manager will soon be doing my job but also is too hard for me a senior engineer, to find value in.

Kindly: no, I trust my judgement, and the data backs me up.

Have you taken measurements of how many features and bugs you've shipped over the last twelve months or are you just like the engineers in the METR study who self reported an improvement but when measured, had been impaired? What evidence do you have that your attitude is not simply informed by the sunk cost of your subscription?

Please share your data below

ghurtado•28m ago

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

gnarlouse•7m ago

Stop, I bruised a rib laughing at this

gslepak•31m ago

I prefer IDEs like Zed that don't lock me in to their ecosystem and force me to "log in" to use them.

gnarlouse•8m ago

`codeium` which is now `windsurf` started out as a vscode fork IIRC

gnarlouse•8m ago

Agreed. I'm back and forth about whether I want to spend the time with an agentic coding editor yet, because it's sitting right on the cusp of distraction/enhancement.

I've also tried the 3 C's, and it still feels like Windsurf has the net best user experience.

swyx•2h ago

(coauthor) happy to take any questions! see 1 min demo video here https://x.com/cognition/status/1985755284527010167

this is brainchild of cognition cto steven who doesn't like the spotlight but he deserves it for this one https://x.com/stevenkplus1/status/1985767277376241827

if you leave qtns here he'll see it

bluelightning2k•2h ago

Less a question and more a strong suggestion: codemaps should be viewable in the main pain. The sidebar is FAR too small. Either default or a button or something to open it like an editor tab.

swyx•2h ago

acked. you can also open it in a browser window for now https://windsurf.com/codemaps/9e2791c4-0b14-4757-b4be-a71488...

ChrisbyMe•1h ago

this is the right way to try and tackle this problem imo. too much focus in AI dev tooling has been on building "products" that only half work.

making codebases understandable to humans, and LLMs etc, is a better approach

self documenting, interpretable systems would actually solve a lot of dev churn in big companies

plus it's not like artifacts have to be limited to code once that's figured out

esafak•1h ago

I don't think it's a choice; I use both. Code understanding is especially useful in new code bases, but once that's over you need to get work done.

dennisy•1h ago

Looks an interesting enough feature to give Windsurf a try!

yunyu•1h ago

Great idea. I always end up having to tag the relevant files/abstractions anyways to avoid having the LLM produce duplicated slop, and something like this makes collecting this info much easier.

rmonvfer•1h ago

This looks awesome. I’m a very heavy Claude Code user (and Codex) in both the CLI and VS Code (and now in the web too!) and it’s quite infuriating when the agent just gets lost after context compaction and I have to point it to read CLAUDE/AGENTS.md (and update it if a lot of changes have been made)

I tried Windsurf a while back but I’ll definitely come back ASAP just to play with this and see how it does in a somewhat complex project I’m working on.

Kudos to the team!

asdev•1h ago

A feature like this isn't useful because knowing what connects to what, dependencies, etc. means nothing without business context. AI will never know the why behind the architecture, it will only take it at face value. I think technical design docs which have some context and reading the code is more than enough. This sits in the middle ground where it lacks the context of a doc and is less detailed than the code.

CharlesW•59m ago

> AI will never know the why behind the architecture…

That's true only if you don't provide that context. The answer is: Do provide that context. My experience is that LLM output will be influenced and improved by the why's you provide.

dingnuts•56m ago

it takes longer to explain the context to the model than it does to just write the code based on the context I already understand, especially since code is more terse than natural language

Jaxan•54m ago

But wouldn’t the context also be useful, in written form, to colleagues?

fizx•52m ago

Definitely, iff you have to provide the context with every task. If agent memory worked better and across your whole team, then providing context might be much easier

asdev•55m ago

if you know that context, you don't need a codemap

baq•29m ago

this is possible if you have a couple two-pizza teams. beyond that, good luck.

swyx•32m ago

you might be surprised how much business context leaks into a codebase and that's plenty to work on :)

https://deepwiki.com/search/vimfnfnname-lets-you-call-neov_e...

but also how much you kinda dont need it when you're just debugging code

https://windsurf.com/codemaps/87532afd-092d-401d-aa3f-0121c7...

asdev•22m ago

agree that AI can kinda infer business context sometimes. in my experience, it doesn't work that well.

a lot of the time, debugging isn't a logic issue, but more of a state exploration issue. hence you need to add logging to see the inputs of what's going on, just seeing a control flow isn't super useful. maybe codemaps could simulate some inputs in a flow which would be super cool, but probably quite hard to do.

philippta•28m ago

To add to that, a lot of business context is stuck in people‘s heads. To reach the level of a human engineer, the coding agent would have to autonomously reach out and ask them directed questions.

alansaber•9m ago

I really like this kind of applied statistical data infrastructure approach, feels much more natural than just raw text + immediate HIL

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Comments

NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware

Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access

This Day in 1988, the Morris worm infected 10% of the Internet within 24 hours

Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

Whole Earth Index

Show HN: A CSS-Only Terrain Generator

By the Power of Grayscale

Launch HN: Plexe (YC X25) – Build production-grade ML models from prompts

What is a manifold?

Recovering videos from my Sony camera that I stupidly deleted

Paramount blacklists actors for pro-Palestinian activism

Optimizing Datalog for the GPU

Singing bus horns in West Sumatra

My Truck Desk

How devtools map minified JS code back to your TypeScript source code

Bloom filters are good for search that does not scale

We're open-sourcing the successor of Jupyter notebook

How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

Chaining FFmpeg with a Browser Agent

Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software

You can't cURL a Border

Customize Nano Text Editor

Things you can do with diodes

Aisuru botnet shifts from DDoS to residential proxies

AI's Dial-Up Era

When stick figures fought

The 512KB Club

Tenacity – a multi-track audio editor/recorder

Reverse-engineered CUPS driver for Phomemo receipt/label printers