Debugging the Internet with AI agents – with Itamar Friedman of Codium AI and AutoGPT

**Alessio** (0:10)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast.
This is Alessio, Partner and CTO of Residence at Decibel Partners. I'm joined by my co-host, Swix, writer and editor of Latent Space.

**Swyx** (0:20)
Today, we have our special guest, Itamar Friedman, all the way from Tel Aviv, CEO and co-founder of Codium AI. Welcome.

**Itamar Friedman** (0:26)
Hey, great being here. Thank you for inviting me.

**Swyx** (0:28)
You like the studio? It's nice, right?
So I'm going to introduce you back on a little bit, and then we'll learn a bit more about who you are. So you graduated from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, it's kind of like the MIT of Israel. You did a BS and CS, and then you also did a master's in computer vision, which is kind of relevant. You had other startups before this, but your sort of claim to fame is VisualLead, which you started in 2011 and got acquired by Alibaba Group. And VisualLead, I actually went to your website.
Well, you showed me your website, which is the sort of QR codes with different forms of visibility. And in China, that's a huge, huge deal. It's starting to become a bigger deal in the West, but the way that you sort of deal with computer vision nuances. And I think that my favorite anecdote that you told me was something about how much sales you saved or something. I forget what the number was.

**Itamar Friedman** (1:18)
Generally speaking, there's a lot of peer-to-peer transactions going on, like payments in China, with QR codes. So basically, if, for example, 5% of the scanning does not work, and with our scanner, we reduce it to 4%, that's a lot of money. Could be tens of thousands, millions of dollars a day.
I'm sorry, tens of millions, sorry.

**Swyx** (1:37)
Tens of millions per day.
And at the scale of Alibaba, it serves all of China, it's crazy. You did that for 7 years, and you were just in Alibaba until 2021, when you took some time off, and then hooked up with Deddy, who you've known for 25 years as business partners, to start Codium AI, and you just raised your $11 million seed rounds with TLB Partners and Vine. Congrats!

**Itamar Friedman** (2:00)
Thank you.

**Swyx** (2:01)
Okay, should we go right into Codium?

**Itamar Friedman** (2:03)
Yeah, sure.

**Swyx** (2:03)
What is Codium?

**Itamar Friedman** (2:04)
Okay, so we are an AI, coding assistant, slash agent, to help developers reaching zero bugs. We don't do that today. Right now, we help to reduce the amount of bugs.
Actually, you can see people commenting on our Marketplace page, saying that they found bugs with our tool, and that's our premise. But our vision is, let's say, for Tesla, zero emission or something like that. So for us, it's zero bugs. That's our focus.
And we started with building an ID extension, either in the VSCode or in the JetBrains, and that actually works alongside to the main panel where you write your code. And I can show later, what we do is analyze the code, whether you started writing it or you completed it. Like, you can go both TDD or classical coding, and we offer analysis tests, whether they pass or not. We further self-debug them and make suggestions, eventually helping, like, improving the code quality, specifically on code logic testing.

**Alessio** (3:07)
How did you get there? You know, obviously it's a great idea. Like, what was the idea, Mays, maybe? How did you get here?

**Itamar Friedman** (3:13)
I'll go back long. So, I was a two and a half times CTO, VC back to startup CTO. We talked about the last ones that I sold to Alibaba, but basically I'm like, it's weird to say, by 20 years already of R&D manager. I'm not like the best programmer because, like you mentioned, I'm coming more from the machine learning. Like, computer vision is one of the main applications, but a lot of optimization. So, we're not necessarily the best coders, but I am like 20 year R&D manager, and I found that the verifying code logic is very hard thing, and one of the things that really makes it difficult to increase with the development velocity, related to development velocity. So, you have tools related for checking performance, you have tools for vulnerabilities. We ask security Israelis are really good in that, but do you have a tool that actually helps you test code logic? I think we have like dozens or hundreds, even thousands to help you on the end to end, maybe on the microservice integration system, but when you talk about code level, there isn't anything. So, that was a pain I always had, especially when I did have tools for that for the hardware. Like I worked in Malinox to be sold to NVIDIA as a student, and we had like formal tools, et cetera, but let's not get to that. So, that's one part. The second thing is that after being sold to Alibaba, the team and I and Israel were quite a big team that worked on machine learning, large language model, et cetera, building developer tools with LLMs throughout the golden years of 2017 to 2021, 2022