Michael TruellCo-Founder & CEO

We spent almost a year wandering in the desert working on mechanical engineering tools—something we weren't passionate about. It had really bad founder market fit. We weren’t mechanical engineers, and the space didn’t click for us.

We were deeply passionate about programming. After realizing we had limited CAD data and not much excitement about the space, we knew it was time to focus on building for developers something we truly cared about.

It started with GitHub Copilot. It was the first AI tool we found actually useful and not just useful, but the best dev tool we'd used in a decade. That showed us how big the opportunity was for AI in coding.

At first, yes. We wanted to redefine how software gets built, so we created a minimal version of VS Code ourselves. But it became clear we were spending too much energy reinventing the wheel, so we switched to building on top of VS Code.

Because we needed to edit the UI deeply. If you want to change how people build software, you can’t be limited by the constraints of someone else’s interface. We needed full control to shape the experience.

We're not about vibe coding. Developers still need control, especially in large codebases. We want to raise the level of abstraction, but also give people confidence by letting them drill down when needed.

No languages likely evolve to be more structured and higher level, not raw English. You still need things like methods, structure, and reusability to build solid software.

Honestly, it didn’t feel fast. The first year was full of slow, hard product work. We only saw the growth curve take off after really dialing in the product and working on foundational models under the hood.

We waited too long to start building the company around us. We were so focused on the product that we delayed hiring, even though growth demanded a bigger team.

We obsessed over the first 10 hires. They were extremely high impact. Some dropped out of school, some were ex GitHub engineers. They covered product, infra, ML—each person spiked in something critical.

We had this fear of doing anything but working on the product. We even ignored hiring and growth to keep focus. It wasn’t the best call in hindsight great hiring takes time, and we didn’t make space for it soon enough.

We’re always open to using the best tools. Good tools have huge ROI and are incredibly cheap for the leverage they provide. We use Notion, Slack, Cursor, and experiment where it makes sense.

It’s our wiki boarding, schedules, engineering docs everything lives there. As we’ve grown to about 100 people, it’s become crucial for giving everyone context and visibility.

We’ve been in a high noise environment for years, so we’ve learned to filter. Not everything matters. We look for teammates who are macro optimists and micro pessimists ambitious but detail obsessed.

Be skeptical of advice. Lots of startup playbooks contradict each other. We started with a solution in search of a problem—which many say is wrong but it worked because we stuck with it.

The founding team. I’m lucky to have three excellent co-founders. Even though we looked similar on paper, we had different strengths and interests. That helped us move fast and cover a lot of ground early on.

We believed that only a few things really matter, and we stuck to them. We ignored hype, spoke less, built more, and kept a clear focus on building something truly useful for developers.