Kilo Code Launch Week: From Zero to #5 in Five Days!
Last week we unveiled Kilo Code to the world and got an overwhelming response! Our AI-powered coding agent for VS Code has taken off faster than we ever imagined. What a week it was!
We want to acknowledge that Kilo Code builds upon the excellent foundation of Roo Code and Cline. While we've dedicated ourselves to speed of development, added our own AI provider, and simplified the UI, we truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Our gratitude goes out to the Roo Code and Cline teams whose work made our rapid progress possible.
Monday: User Testing Revelations
We started feeling pretty confident that we were nearly ready for launch and kicked off the week with user tests. "Wow, it's impressive how much you can learn from a simple user test," Darko mentioned after being included in a user test for the first time in his life. This kicked off a huge list of improvements we need to make to improve the extension.
Tuesday: Payment Integration Challenges
One of the final pieces of the puzzle was the payment system. Between Stripe and Orb, it took longer than we had hoped. We're all about speed, and when something bogs you down, you have to ask the question: "Should we just launch without payments?" The question arose, but we pressed on instead.
Meanwhile, Google announced their new Gemini 2.5 model, which looked pretty promising.
Wednesday: Hacker News Success
Wednesday came around, and we did a final user test where everything seemed to be working. Time to announce ourselves to the world! We submitted the article to Hacker News, hoping that others would be interested and maybe we'd get some snarky comments along the way. The comments flooded in, and, to our surprise, so did the upvotes—we even ended up hitting #5 on the homepage!
Thursday: Product Hunt Launch Day
At 8 AM local time, our Product Hunt launch kicked off. This is such a nerve-wracking moment. Most companies plan three months ahead when doing this type of launch, and we've barely existed for three weeks. How is this going to go?
By the end of the launch, I was completely exhausted, but every comment was responded to, we had our first paying customers, and we even hit #5!
Friday: Growth Explosion and Infrastructure Challenges
Friday came around, and we learned Product Hunt had specifically featured us in their newsletter (thanks, PH!). Discord went from a place filled with white space and tumbleweeds earlier in the week to quite a lively community. We also started getting our first reviews. These are some of my favorites so far:
"...been using Kilo Code for a few days now and really enjoying it so far, thank you so much for free credits! ❤️ I use it in Cursor and Kilo's agentic capabilities are much better." - bgdn
"I asked Kilo Code to add directional arrows to a car route polyline on my webpage map. Surprisingly, Kilo navigated the page independently, selecting points to find a route. When the first attempt showed few arrows, Kilo immediately recognized the failure, corrected its code, and verified arrow placement. The second iteration worked perfectly. I'll continue using Kilo to explore its capabilities." - 최주영
Friday was also when we started maxing out our infrastructure. We had to scramble to get everything working and published our findings on Gemini 2.5, and although we had a team dinner planned to celebrate, it ended up happening at 9 PM that evening.
Weekend: Unexpected Security Challenges
It was a long week, and many of us were looking forward to a well-deserved break over the weekend. But since scammers never sleep and decided to create over ten thousand accounts this weekend, relaxing was not in the cards for us.
We were admittedly naive in thinking that requiring Google Auth would be a big enough hurdle to slow down abuse. We quickly learned that determined scammers are far more resourceful than we anticipated.
Eventually, we had to make the tough decision to switch everyone's account to zero dollars by default and only upgrade them to 15 dollars if they reached out to us on Discord (please do reach out to us!).
We are working on a different way to handle this and might end up with more stringent requirements to receive the free credits, such as requiring a credit card on file. It's unfortunate, but we're doing our best to make the situation manageable for everyone.
Our promises to you
On Wednesday, we promised we’d fix two things you’d bump into by the end of the week, and we did: The extension has a nice new paperclip icon for context, and we fixed an issue with the brand-spanking-new Gemini 2.5 pro models.
Our next goal: fix ten small issues you encounter by the end of this week!
What's next for Kilo Code?
We're just getting started! Based on your feedback, we're prioritizing stability, user experience, and new features that will make Kilo Code even more powerful. We are importing upstream changes from both Roo Code and Cline and expanding the models we provide out of the box. Join our Discord community to share your experiences and help shape the future of Kilo Code, and please share any issues or ideas you have on Github.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us during this whirlwind launch!
Will be a cool journey to follow where you guys going : )