Atlas · Details
All You Need Is Cody
Author’s note
This post is a painful read. I was going through a period of severe depression, and being asked to blog continuously without any real news. It's in here for completeness, but there is no reason to read it.
AI Notes
The June 2023 launch post for Cody, three months after Cheating Is All You Need. On the surface a product introduction — confessional war stories of being handed undocumented codebases (1990 FORTRAN, 2005 Amazon load balancer, 2016 Android), then a walk through what Cody could do in mid-2023 against the Wyvern codebase: codebase-aware Q&A, recipes, inline fixups, parallel "async Cody workers." Under it runs the thesis Steve repeats across his later Sourcegraph essays: the frontier model is a commodity, and the differentiator is the retrieval pipeline — backed by embeddings, not keyword search — that decides what the model gets to see. That argument gets its full airing later in RAG to Riches and The Self-Driving IDE Is Coming.
Related listings
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2023
Cheating Is All You Need
The March 2023 essay that preceded this one — the post-ChatGPT moment that led Sourcegraph to build Cody in the first place.
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2023
RAG to Riches
The end-of-year 2023 follow-up. Six months later: Cody is GA, and the retrieval thesis gets its full airing.
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2024
The Self-Driving IDE Is Coming
The architecture half of the same Cody bet. Read this for the retrieval pitch, then that one for how the pitch reaches every IDE.
Where it was argued
- Lobsters Jun 2023