Building Windsurf with Varun Mohan

The Pragmatic Engineer · May 7, 2025 · 1h 27m · transcript

Supported by Our Partners

•⁠ Modal⁠ — The cloud platform for building AI applications

•⁠ CodeRabbit⁠⁠ — Cut code review time and bugs in half. Use the code PRAGMATIC to get one month free.

—

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…