How We Built Kodezi’s Debugging Engine from Scratch
Sep 16, 2024
When I first started building Kodezi, I wasn’t trying to build infrastructure. I just wanted to fix code faster. Debugging felt like the part of programming no one enjoyed. It was time-consuming, repetitive, and often unclear.
I realized that most of my time wasn’t spent writing code. It was spent reading logs, scanning for bugs, and trying to understand what broke and why. Everyone around me was doing the same thing. Students. Engineers. Even senior devs. So I asked a question that became the foundation of Kodezi:
What if the system could fix itself?
The Early Prototype
The first version of Kodezi was small.
I scraped public repos, trained a basic model to match errors with likely solutions, and built a simple interface around it. It could detect common issues, suggest fixes, and explain the error in plain language.
It wasn’t perfect. But it worked well enough to get people’s attention. More importantly, it worked fast enough to help them ship.
That early feedback loop shaped everything that came after.
Making It Smarter
I learned quickly that debugging isn’t just about the error. It’s about context.
The line that breaks is rarely the root cause. So we trained Kodezi on full projects, not just isolated files. We kept import graphs and cross-file relationships intact, so the model could learn how real codebases are structured. That meant if a bug showed up in one file, the system understood how it might relate to another.
To go further, we used a method called Fill-In-the-Middle during training. Instead of just predicting the next line, Kodezi learned how to reason about missing pieces based on what comes before and after. That’s exactly what debugging is. Filling in the broken middle with clarity.
Fixing With Confidence
From the beginning, I knew one thing.
A fix is only valuable if the developer trusts it.
So we trained Kodezi to explain its suggestions. Every fix comes with a breakdown of what changed, why it changed, and what to watch out for. That transparency built confidence.
We also designed for safety. If the model isn’t sure, it backs off. It doesn’t guess. That was harder to engineer than it sounds, but it mattered.
Scaling the Engine
As our user base grew, the debugging engine had to evolve. We moved from file-level patching to project-wide reasoning. We extended the context window, optimized parsing at the repository level, and retrained the system on real-world codebases that reflect how developers actually work.
Eventually, we weren’t just fixing syntax issues.
Kodezi was learning from bug patterns.
It was analyzing structure.
It was quietly refactoring entire functions.
What started as a utility became part of a much larger system. A foundation for intelligent, long-term developer infrastructure.
What I Learned
Building this engine taught me more than I expected.
Not just about code models, but about product design, developer trust, and the difference between speed and depth.
A few things stayed with me:
Context is everything. Code does not exist in isolation, and neither do bugs.
Clarity beats confidence. A suggestion you understand is more useful than one you blindly accept.
Start with something real. You do not need scale to begin. You just need proof that someone cares.
Still Evolving
What started as a personal project is now used by millions of developers around the world. But the debugging engine is still evolving. Still getting smarter. Still learning how to communicate better, reason faster, and quietly keep things from breaking.
Because good tools don’t just fix problems.
They learn from them.
And then they make sure you never hit that bug again.