Cody Is Cheating

The middle episode of the Cheating With Cody trilogy, and the one aimed squarest at Sourcegraph's enterprise pipeline: a head-to-head case for why Cody beats Copilot, with whitepapers promised "Soon!" and a help-wanted ad for a Head of AI on the way out. Steve declares he's holding pocket rockets at "the world poker tournament of software showdowns," rates Copilot Chat as apparent vaporware, and swears that no matter who wins the AI race, "Cody will always be your best coding assistant." Those are the trilogy's boldest promises, and the years since have collected on most of them.

The saving tension is one the post never acknowledges: the whole moat pitch rests on embeddings, and Steve had just spent a week in articles, papers, and textbooks trying to pin down what an embedding actually is, emerging with the certainty that nobody could tell him what the 768 numbers in one really mean. That defeat produced the good part. There are hand-drawn Tinkercad diagrams (AI art tools failed him, and he insists a vector database is properly drawn as a wastebasket full of arrows), a 20-questions analogy credited to the account executive who heard him ranting about all this, and a long interrogation of an increasingly evasive LLM about where embeddings come from. By his own timestamp it's 4am and he has deleted ten or fifteen pages of attempts. The engineer's honest bafflement keeps breaking through the salesman's certainty, and the bafflement is the better half.