JetBrains

⚡️Launching Ona: Coding Agent with Fully Sandboxed Cloud Environment

Sep 1, 2025 · 33:44

Gitpod co-founders Johannes Landgraf and Chris Weichel launch Ona, a coding agent platform with fully sandboxed cloud environments, arguing that the future of development is parallel agent-driven work rather than mono-focused IDEs. They explain their rebrand from Gitpod to Ona, driven by their product outgrowing the technical name. Ona provides reproducible dev environments via dev containers and automations YAML, runs any Linux workload, and by default gives agents full autonomy (Yolo mode) since environments are ephemeral and risk-free. They dogfood heavily—75% of their PRs are co-authored by Ona. Key challenges include file edits (they settled on Anthropic's string replace tool) and underspecification by users. Pricing follows a credit model blending compute and token usage, with enterprise VPC deployment and $100 in credits for new self-serve users. They envision IDEs shifting to interfaces supporting parallel tracks, but currently offer one-click transitions to desktop editors like Cursor.

🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)

Jul 28, 2025 · 3:53:23

This episode traces the oral history of Windsurf (formerly Codeium and Exafunction) with founders Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, and Anshul R, charting its evolution from a GPU virtualization startup to a leading agentic IDE and its dramatic acquisition by Cognition. The narrative covers the pivot to code completion in 2022, the shift to a free model to gain traction, and the launch of the Windsurf editor in November 2024 with Cascade, an agent that operates on a shared timeline with the developer. Key principles include meta-learning (auto-generated memories that adapt to each user's preferences) and scaling with intelligence (replacing hard-coded rules with LLM reasoning as models improve). The episode also details the acquisition weekend when Cognition bought Windsurf after Google acquired a stake, highlighting product synergies between the synchronous agent (Windsurf) and async agent (Devin) and the ambition to build a comprehensive platform for real-world software engineering teams.

Cline: The Collaborative AI Coder

Jul 16, 2025 · 1:15:44

Saoud Rizwan and Pash from Cline join to explain why their open-source coding agent uses a Plan + Act paradigm — having models explore and plan before executing — pioneered before competitors like Claude Code. They argue that "RAG is a mind virus" and "Fast Apply got bitter lesson'd" as frontier models now achieve sub-5% diff edit failure rates, making layered workarounds obsolete. Cline's bring-your-own-API-key model avoids inference markups, with enterprise features driven by Fortune 5 companies asking for security and ROI insights. The MCP ecosystem grew via Cline's marketplace (150+ servers, top ones with hundreds of thousands of downloads), though monetization and security remain open questions. They detail how Plan mode extracts user intent and Act mode auto-approves, how context engineering prioritizes agentic file exploration over retrieval, and why they stayed a VS Code extension rather than fork — to focus solely on the agentic loop.

The #1 SWE-Bench Verified Agent

Apr 2, 2025 · 31:46

Guy Gur-Ari, co-founder of Augment Code, explains how their coding agent achieved the #1 spot on SWE-Bench Verified without fine-tuning, using off-the-shelf models with techniques like sequential thinking, ensembling, and code base understanding. He shares that orientation and memories help the agent learn codebase conventions, and that MCP support allows extensibility. Gur-Ari contrasts Augment's IDE-first approach with competitors like Devin and Factory, emphasizing meeting developers where they are. He also discusses the future of IDEs, the role of custom models, and recommends the SWE-RL paper for reinforcement learning in coding. The episode features a live demo of the agent implementing a feature from a Linear ticket and creating a PR.

Windsurf: The Enterprise AI IDE

Dec 13, 2024 · 1:06:36

Varun Mohan and Anshul of Codeium explain why they built Windsurf, a new AI IDE, arguing that VS Code's API limitations prevented them from delivering the best agentic experience. They detail how Cascade, their agentic system, uses proprietary retrieval and planning models alongside third-party LLMs, and describe their evaluation method that masks commits and tests incomplete code states. The duo also reveals that over 800,000 developers use Codeium extensions, that they still support JetBrains and Eclipse for enterprise customers, and that they intentionally avoided a waitlist launch. They discuss the trade-offs of building first-party vs. third-party models, the importance of 'go slow to go fast' in enterprise infrastructure, and their belief that individual developer profits should come after building switching costs through superior product.