Our engineers' top picks

Hey all, welcome back to another edition of our Leaderboard. We're continuing with our 2024 product retrospective with three takes from our engineers on some of their favorite new dev tools this year — Windsurf, Codebuff, and Hex for product analytics. Grab a warm beverage and let's get into it.

Windsurf: An agentic IDE by Codeium

Windsurf is an AI code editor that shares a lot of similarities with Cursor, and at first glance, it might be hard to tell the difference between the two. However, Windsurf excels with its ability to easily search your codebase and identify what’s relevant, and I prefer its approach of directly editing your code. While I can’t definitively say Windsurf is better than Cursor, it’s certainly the tool I prefer right now.

Hex: An end-to-end workspace for product analytics

When working with data, I enjoy: Quickly exploring with ad-hoc queries using common programming languages like Python and SQL, with an inline AI assistant; creating informative and pretty charts for experiments and health metrics; elaborating, tweaking or building on others’ work without overwriting it, and version controlling. Hex does all of this. All in all, I rarely find myself fighting with it to transform my idea into a chart. (Here’s a good breakdown of how it fix into the data world.)

Codebuff: Edit codebases with natural language directly from your CLI

Cursor is getting all the attention, but not everyone loves VSCode, and it’s not clear they have the best interaction modalities. Codebuff gives me the parts I want the most from a coding agent, efficiently and autonomously searching the codebase, formulating a plan, writing to multiple files, as well as running tests and responding to their feedback. And since it’s a command line tool, it will drop into anyone’s workflow. I use it every day.