Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It
11 comments
·November 4, 2025bluelightning2k
all2
This is enough for me to give this a go. I've tried a few different tools; abacus.ai (and their IDE), claude CLI, crush-cli. My workflows are still mostly on the command line, and a little in VS Code. I haven't found a flow that works "right", yet.
sama004
I just tried out windsurf yesterday, The only thing I hate for now is that when there are changes and I accept one of them, then trying to accept the others gives an error saying the file was changed
ChrisbyMe
this is the right way to try and tackle this problem imo. too much focus in AI dev tooling has been on building "products" that only half work.
making codebases understandable to humans, and LLMs etc, is a better approach
self documenting, interpretable systems would actually solve a lot of dev churn in big companies
plus it's not like artifacts have to be limited to code once that's figured out
esafak
I don't think it's a choice; I use both. Code understanding is especially useful in new code bases, but once that's over you need to get work done.
swyx
(coauthor) happy to take any questions! see 1 min demo video here https://x.com/cognition/status/1985755284527010167
this is brainchild of cognition cto steven who doesn't like the spotlight but he deserves it for this one https://x.com/stevenkplus1/status/1985767277376241827
if you leave qtns here he'll see it
bluelightning2k
Less a question and more a strong suggestion: codemaps should be viewable in the main pain. The sidebar is FAR too small. Either default or a button or something to open it like an editor tab.
swyx
acked. you can also open it in a browser window for now https://windsurf.com/codemaps/9e2791c4-0b14-4757-b4be-a71488...
dennisy
Looks an interesting enough feature to give Windsurf a try!
I really think more people should give Windsurf a go. It's really good. I'm a senior engineer and do a mix of agentic and regular coding and I really think people are looking past Windsurf.
As the conversation shifted towards Cursor vs Claude code vs Codex people seem to have stopped mentioning it which is a shame.
Source: user for 12 months - not a shill.
Codemaps was a very pleasant surprise when it showed up.