The Windsurf Editor Launch Video
One month into the job, with no technical background, I was handed the launch video for the world's first agentic IDE.
One month into the job, with no technical background, I was handed the launch video for the world's first agentic IDE.
I joined Codeium, which later became Windsurf, and in my first week the team told me they were about to introduce something new to the world: the world’s first agentic IDE. I had a strong storytelling and content background, but not a technical one, and the story had to be credible to developers, not just polished for a general audience.
Challenge
One month to learn a brand-new technical product well enough to direct engineers on camera.
There was no content system in place yet, so I had to build one while making the video. I needed to learn enough about coding and the product itself to write a script developers would actually respect, and direct founders, engineers, and research leads on camera without a technical background of my own.
Solution
I learned the product by working directly with the people who built it, then built the launch around one unforgettable shot.
I spent my first weeks in conversation with engineers, the founding team, and research leads, learning the product well enough to write and direct the story myself. For the opening, I wanted a shot that told the whole story before a single word of script: a pro windsurfer using Windsurf on a laptop, mounted to the board, windsurfing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. I found the right person through the office’s own network, worked with engineers to solve the laptop mount, rented a boat, and shot it on the Bay. We had also just moved into a new office whose exterior was the one used in Silicon Valley, so I leaned into that: we flew out Chris Diamantopoulos, who played Russ Hanneman on the show, and built scenes around him to make the launch feel like more than a standard product video. I edited the whole thing myself too, sitting with the engineers who had recorded the demos so they could walk me through exactly what mattered in the footage.
Result
The shot that opened Windsurf to the world, built in a month before I'd ever made a developer product video.
I watched the video become one of the first public impressions of Windsurf, and people reacted to it online. The Golden Gate shot became the iconic opening image because it told people what Windsurf was before I ever had to explain it. It also became the first step in a much longer arc: the same relationships and instincts I built on this video later shaped the Windsurf studio, the Waves cadence, and the enterprise video systems that came after. Windsurf was one of the first agentic IDEs anyone had built. There was no existing playbook for how to market a category that didn’t exist yet, so I couldn’t borrow one. I had to build the story out of the technology itself, which meant sitting with engineers until I understood it well enough to make creative decisions they’d trust. That’s the same instinct I’ve used on every AI product launch since.
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