“Your code is your understanding of the problem you’re exploring. So it’s only when you have your code in your head that you really understand the problem.” — Paul Graham
Software development only becomes engineering with understanding. Your ability to reason through your most challenging coding tasks is constrained by your mental model of how things work — in other words, how quickly and how well you onboard to any codebase for solving any problem. However most AI vibe coding tools are aimed at relieving you of that burden by reading → thinking → writing the code for you, increasing the separation from you and your code. This is fine for low value, commodity tasks, but absolutely unacceptable for the hard, sensitive, and high value work that defines real engineering.
We all need more AI that turns your brain ON, not OFF.
Today we are announcing Windsurf Codemaps, which are first-of-its-kind AI-annotated structured maps of your code, powered by SWE-1.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5. Building on our popular work from DeepWiki and Ask Devin, Codemaps is the next step in hyper-contextualized codebase understanding, grounded in precise code navigation.
Why Codemaps?
Every engineering task — debugging, refactors, new features — starts with understanding. Great engineers aren’t just good at writing code; they’re good at reading it, building mental models that span files, layers, and systems.
But modern codebases are sprawling: hundreds of files, multiple services, dense abstractions. Based on own experience and deep conversations with our customers across the Fortune 500, even top engineers spend much of their deep-work time finding and remembering what matters.
It’s a huge tax on productivity:
New engineers take 3–9 months to fully ramp (estimates)
to fully ramp (estimates) Senior engineers lose 5+ hours per week onboarding others (source)
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