Manicode is no more. Meet Codebuff!

We renamed, relaunched, and promptly burned a billion tokens

Hello everyone! If you are reading this, you are one of our very first users. Whether you just joined after our Hacker News launch or used Manicode from the start, we want to welcome you and thank you for taking the leap to try us out.

I’m excited to say that we’re growing extremely rapidly. The day after our Hacker News launch was our biggest yet, with >700 million tokens burned! That would rank us as #2 on OpenRouter by token usage — watch out Cline!

Life after Jim Manico

Unfortunately, we had to give up the Manicode name (RIP the maniverse). After our Product Hunt launch, Jim Manico made us aware of his existence and his software education company, also named Manicode. Our lawyers told us that he has legal precedent, so we would have to change our name.

You can find the entire dramatic story on this market on Manifold about what Manicode would be renamed to. We got 57 candidate names (and even more in a Notion doc)! Codream, Heycode, Yocode, and Dreamcode were close contenders, but we went with Codebuff in the end. Let us know in the comments what you think of the new name!

Customer case study

We get new reports daily in our Discord (join us!) of Codebuff doing something awesome.

Here’s a standout example posted this morning, from Stefan. When you can spend $50 to save 4 days of engineering, that’s a Codebuff win!

Codebuff improvements 🔥

The product has improved exponentially in the last couple weeks. This is no exaggeration!

Codebuff now uses the new Claude Sonnet 3.5. The upgraded Sonnet 3.5 has achieved 49% on SWE-Bench, improving on the previous Sonnet’s score of 33%. The previous world-record was 45%, which shows that Codebuff’s strategy of leveraging off-the-shelf models is working well compared to other startups training their own custom models.

The new Sonnet 3.5 is just nicer to chat with and use. It makes better edits and writes cleaner code. It's way better at refactoring large sections without introducing bugs and just feels smarter in general. Congrats to the Anthropic team on shipping this!

We’ve implemented prompt caching and switched the LLM behind picking the relevant files in a codebase to the much-awaited Haiku 3.5. We’re now doing the same work of file picking in 1/3 the cost with lower latency. I even had a market on when Haiku would be released. All files and edits are cached, which drastically reduces the token costs. Codebuff credits should go almost 10 times further with these changes!

Earlier this year, Cursor shipped a special speculative decoding model that can edit files at a thousand tokens per second. Last week, OpenAI released “Predictive Outputs” for their models, which uses speculative decoding and speeds up model outputs (though not quite to that level). We now use GPT-4o-mini to rewrite files when the deterministic edits can’t be applied, which should prevent Codebuff from deleting your entire file when an edit fails :P (We are also in talks with some startups like Relace.ai, which will help us compete head-to-head with Cursor’s speculative decoding models.)

We now have a website, where you can upgrade your plan, read testimonials and the FAQ, monitor your usage, or refer more people.

What’s next

Codebuff is unusual in terms of how few approvals it asks for. It will literally just run any command it wants in your terminal with no guardrails.

We heard some feedback on this, especially after our Hacker News launch, and so we’re going to make some adjustments, in order to help our users feel safer and more confide—

—Psych!

No, instead of that, we’re doubling down on this unique angle of a fully capable agent in your terminal.

We’re planning to invest more heavily in autonomous operation, including helping Codebuff to automatically fix type errors, linting errors, and failing tests.

Imagine this. You brain dump a description of a new feature and tell Codebuff to implement it while using tests and the type checker to verify progress.

You further say, “keep working on the feature until you have something good” and step out to make coffee.

When you check back—Bam! It’s produced a really strong first stab at your feature with some creative ideas and an implementation you hadn’t thought of, saving you days of work.

This is the future, and it’s coming soon to Codebuff.

Tell your friends!

For every person you refer, you’ll both earn 500 credits per month, forever-ish*. This is an insane deal that only works because of sweet VC cash. What are you waiting for?

* Probably not actually forever, but we’ll see.

And so concludes the first-ever newsletter for Codebuff. Thanks for reading! Until next time.

Keep on burning the midnight tokens.

—James