Taking on the giants — an AI coding startup on the brink of success
We're winning users off of Cursor and Windsurf. Why does it feel like we are losing?
Meet my codegen startup, Codebuff.
Every day, there’s a new AI launch and we feel further behind. Gemini Pro 2.5. The new DeepSeek V3. Claude Code.
Every day, there’s a new bug report (or three or five). Our npm package is bricked, throwing an error on startup. A service we are using is down. We deleted a user’s code, and they didn’t have a backup — losing 7 hours of work.
But also, every day, there’s a new comment on our Discord, on Twitter, or on Bookface, saying they like our product best, it’s faster, it solved something another service couldn’t.
The rollercoaster is real
Our company is 7 months old. We are three people. We have >100 paying subscribers, but are struggling to make the product reliable to scale further.
It turns out that to make something “just work” means you need to fix 1000 papercuts, one at a time. That means debugging websocket connections, staring at logs to understand which of 10 steps went wrong in applying a file edit, and responding to angry users to get more insight on what failed this time.
(And if you’re me, you might need to deploy a hotfix for your hotfix for your hotfix haha.)
Cursor and/or the labs will crush you
Meanwhile, competitors are forging ahead. Is there room for another coding agent startup, when billions of funding is already distributed?
We have the best code output by some measures (speed x quality). Moreover, I can see how we can stay ahead, for at least a while.
Cursor/Windsurf are limited by $20/month plans and aren’t optimizing for a fully capable coding agent.
Claude Code can only use Claude. The best codegen will use many models.
Injection of better code context quickly will continue to be an advantage, even as models get smarter.
I recently met another codegen founder, who was seemingly resigned to the “bitter lesson”.
He says new models will come out and they will be better than whatever you are working on. Just stop trying to compete on code quality. Compete on infra and marketing — those will be the only enduring advantages.
I don’t agree. I continue to believe even very smart models will improve with more context.
Even models trained to be more agentic, where Sonnet 3.7 is just the start, will have a similar opportunity for improvement.
Historically, startups are the most responsive to customer needs. I think a startup will beat the labs at this task of cobbling together all the right pieces of context.
You need to do more marketing
For every startup, you talk to enough people while building it that you get an intuition for what everyone else thinks you are lacking.
Commonly, they will tell you that you just need to get your product out in front of more people.
Like, you need to personally go to events and tell people to use your product. You need to post on social media. Or, you need to email Bill Gates (something my Dad mentioned for my first startup haha).
Maybe.
But founders have limited time and need to prioritize. Assuming you have enough users that are providing feedback daily (a big assumption), focusing on building a high quality product that people can’t live without is often the better strategy.
The returns to marketing are sharply limited if your user retention sucks. Conversely, marketing is way easier if you have a killer product.
So, yes we need to do more marketing, but we also need to fix a high proportion of our bugs.
Why is your team so small???
—Say the VC’s hoping we will take more investment to dilute ourselves beyond what is necessary.
It’s human nature to over-hire. Nearly every first-time founder gets it wrong.
Your company is more impressive the more people it has. It can also get more done too. It’s a given that more hours worked collectively means better results, right?
Wrong.
If the scope of what you need to build is one hairy bit of software, adding employees is unlikely to speed that up, since most code should have only one owner.
It’s also dangerous to not keep a focused vision. New employees, even great ones, might want to take the company in a different direction. Even if they’re right, they’re wrong. Your startup can only go one way with full conviction or it will fail.
All that said, hiring our first employee did seem to take some of the weight off our backs, given that we had one more person we could trust to handle user issues. It helps that he’s a cracked engineer!
If you’re interested in joining us to build the best coding agent, email me (james@codebuff.com)!
The grind continues
I work everyday. Frequently, for the entire day. I like it. It’s rewarding albeit tiring.
But those sweet moments when users are happy,
when they’re rooting for us, when they say we’re about to blow up,
and when the roller coaster races, faster and faster, up the incline toward a new peak—
make the struggle all worth it.
Today I took a break and went to the blog club at a local coworking space to hang out with friends, resulting in this post.
Thanks for reading!
Great read, and +1 to your push-back on folks who interpret the bitter lesson as implying that working on code quality is a waste of time.
Such a nice read! Best of luck, and I hope your off days would include more blogathons!