Mohan: VS Code limitations forced Codeium to fork it and build Windsurf
Varun Mohan · Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1m developers in 4 months: Inside Windsurf · Apr 20, 2025 · at 7:42
Varun Mohan is the co-founder and CEO of Windsurf (formerly Codeium). He explains why the team transitioned from developing IDE extensions to launching a dedicated standalone IDE.
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“So VS Code, which is a very popular IDE, had a ceiling for the AI capabilities we could showcase our users. And because of that, we decided to go out and fork VS Code and build our own IDE with some of these new agentic capabilities”
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