vscode-extension
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Continue Made AI Coding Yours. Then It Joined Cursor.
Continue gave developers a rare luxury: the freedom to choose the model behind their coding assistant. The project is now a 35,000-star time capsule, acquired by the rival whose black-box approach it once challenged.
Supermaven Made Autocomplete Feel Instant. Then It Disappeared.
For one vivid year, Supermaven made AI autocomplete feel less like a meeting and more like a reflex. Its long-context tricks now live inside Cursor, while the original plugin settles into a strange afterlife for existing users.
Phind Gave Coders the Answer. Then It Vanished.
Phind turned the web's scattered documentation into useful, cited answers for developers. Its brief run also became a neat lesson in how quickly a focused AI product can be copied, crowded out, and switched off.
Saoud Rizwan
Saoud Rizwan is the founder and CEO of Cline, an open-source AI coding agent that runs inside code editors like VS Code. He built the first version in June 2024, about ten days after Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, as a side project for the company's Build with Claude hackathon. He didn't win, but the project caught fire online and Cline has since passed millions of installs and raised $32M in seed and Series A funding from Emergence Capital and Pace Capital. Before Cline, Rizwan was a prolific iOS and Swift open-source developer. His pitch is unusually blunt for the AI era: Cline captures zero margin on AI usage, shows developers exactly what each request costs, and lets them bring their own models.
Rohan Kodialam
Rohan Kodialam is the co-founder and CEO of Sphinx, a New York applied-AI research firm building agents that actually understand data. A former Citadel quant who learned to squeeze alpha out of messy alternative datasets, and an MIT-trained researcher who once taught transformers to read hierarchical data, he started Sphinx on a simple observation: software engineers got Copilot, everyone else got ChatGPT, and data scientists got nothing. In 2025 Sphinx launched out of stealth with a $9.5M seed led by Lightspeed and backers including Steve Cohen and Naveen Rao, betting that the next frontier of AI is not language or code, but the spreadsheets and warehouses where real decisions get made.