My name’s Vladimir, I’ve been writing code for 15 years. I remember the days before IntelliSense, when “autocomplete” meant a printed O’Reilly book on your desk and a strong memory. Over the last decade and a half, I’ve moved from jQuery spaghetti code to complex Next.js architectures and microservices.
Like many of you, I jumped on the GitHub Copilot bandwagon early. It was impressive. But about a year ago, I started looking for alternatives. Not just to save $10 a month, but to see if the “industry standard” was actually the best standard.
After using it daily for the past 12 months on enterprise-scale projects (React, Node, Python, and some legacy PHP), here is my no-nonsense, personal review.
Enter Codeium.
The Pitch: Why I Tried It
The immediate draw was the Free Tier for individuals. Most “free” AI tools are glorified demos—crippled by rate limits or dumber models. Codeium promised unlimited autocomplete and chat for free. That was enough to get me to install the VS Code extension.
But I stayed for the performance.
The Good (Pros)
1. Speed and Latency
This is the first thing you notice. Copilot is fast, but Codeium feels immediate. In my experience, the autocomplete suggestions (what they call “Ghost Text”) appear slightly faster than Copilot’s. When you are in a flow state, waiting 500ms vs 200ms matters. It feels less like a query to a distant server and more like a local plugin.
2. Context Awareness (The “Repository” Context)
This is where Codeium surprisingly beat the competition for me. Early AI tools only looked at the open file. Codeium indexes your local repository efficiently.
- Real World Example: I was refactoring a TypeScript interface in
types.ts. Without me opening the file where that interface was used, Codeium correctly updated the function signature inutils.tsbased on the change I just made. It “understood” the project structure better than I expected.
3. IDE Agnosticism
I bounce between VS Code for frontend work and JetBrains (IntelliJ/PyCharm) for backend heavy lifting. Codeium supports both natively and consistently. I’ve even used it in Vim during server maintenance. The experience is uniform across the board, which isn’t always the case with competitors that prioritize VS Code.
4. The Price
For individual developers, freelancers, or consultants, the pricing model is unbeatable. You get the “Supercomplete” features and the Chat without a credit card. For a senior dev with 5+ subscriptions (hosting, domains, SaaS tools), cutting a recurring monthly cost while maintaining productivity is a win.
The Bad (Cons)
1. Complex Architectural Logic
While Codeium is blazing fast for boilerplate, regex, and standard functions, it sometimes lags behind GPT-4 based solutions when asked to architect complex systems from scratch.
- The Flaw: If I ask Copilot to “Scaffold a microservice pattern using NestJS with RabbitMQ,” I usually get a slightly more robust initial structure. Codeium gets me 80% there, but I often have to tweak the folder structure or dependency injection patterns manually. It’s a coder, not an architect.
2. The “Hallucination” Factor
We promised to avoid AI clichés, but facts are facts: it hallucinates. Specifically, I’ve noticed Codeium sometimes invents library methods that sound plausible but don’t exist. This happens more often with niche libraries than with standard frameworks like React or Django. You still need to be the senior engineer in the room; you cannot blindly tab-complete your way to production.
3. Chat UI vs. Inline Integration
Codeium’s Chat is a separate panel. While functional, it feels slightly less integrated than Copilot’s “Chat in Editor” experience, where the conversation feels like it’s happening inside the code. Codeium is improving this with their “Windsurf” editor, but if you are sticking to standard VS Code, the context switching between the editor and the chat panel can be a minor friction point.