CodeBanana

In the end of 2024, I had a quiet moment of clarity late one night. I was staring at hundreds of Lark messages from our 25-person product team and realized that everyone was busy, productive even, but completely disconnected.

One engineer was deep in Cursor, experimenting with AI-generated code. A designer was waiting for a build that hadn’t deployed yet. The PM was asking questions in Lark that no one had time to answer. QA was trying to make sense of screenshots shared over Zoom. We had updates everywhere — yet no shared understanding of what was actually happening.

That disconnect became costly when a developer spent weeks building the wrong feature. The issue wasn’t skill, it was communication. Our product manager said quietly, “I don’t even know what the team is doing anymore.” That sentence stayed with me.

In the days that followed, I kept thinking about how this could happen in a team that was already using all the right tools. We had Cursor for AI-assisted coding, VS Code for editing, Lark for communication — yet somehow, context kept getting lost. Everyone was efficient on their own, but the team as a whole wasn’t connected.

That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t our tools but how we worked. We’d optimized for individual productivity while neglecting the biggest opportunity of all: true team collaboration.I realized the future isn’t about better AI coding tools. It’s about AI coding teams.

That insight became the foundation for CodeBanana — a platform designed to make coding truly collaborative.

CodeBanana brings the transparency of Google Docs to software development.

1. Real-time collaborative coding – Watch teammates code live, share context instantly, and never lose sync.

2. AI that understands your project – Reads your repo, docs, and structure to act like a true teammate, not just autocomplete.

3. Shared virtual environments – Run apps live with identical setups for everyone. No more “it works on my machine.”

4. Accessible collaboration – Developers, designers, and PMs can finally contribute meaningfully in the same space.

Over the past six months, we’ve seen more than twenty teams adopt CodeBanana to ship faster, communicate better, and build together with clarity and trust.

As more indie developers and even non-technical founders started using CodeBanana, we noticed a clear pattern — many people can start coding with AI, but few can turn those early prototypes into real, evolving and scalable products. Our next step is to close that gap.

In the next 6 months, we’re expanding CodeBanana beyond collaboration into a full product-building ecosystem:

1. Collaborative Marketplace — Founders post ideas or prototypes, developers join to build sustainable and monetizable products.

2. Open Developer Network — Verified engineers earn by contributing to real projects.

3. Smart Matching System — AI pairs the right builders with the right ideas for faster, higher-quality outcomes.

Ultimately, our mission is to make software creation open, connected, and sustainable — where great products are no longer limited by who can code, but by who dares to build.

If this vision resonates with you, I’d love to hear your story.

Cheers,

Zhifei Li

Founder, CodeBanana

Congrats on the launch, Zhifei!

What I like about CodeBanana is that it’s not trying to replace your stack — it fits into it.

I ran a quick test with our backend setup (Python + APIs), and the environment was surprisingly stable. Being able to debug and explain code logic in the same space with non-engineers saved us hours of back-and-forth. It’s a quiet productivity boost that just works.

🎉 Congrats on the launch, Zhifei @zhifei_li and CodeBanana team! Love the "Google Docs for coding" vision — real-time collaboration + project-aware AI is a game-changer for remote teams.
The shared VM feature is 🔥 — no more "works on my machine" struggles!

One suggestion: Could you add conflict resolution hints when multiple users edit the same code block? It’d make collaboration even smoother.

Btw, your focus on bridging technical/non-technical roles aligns perfectly with our no-code agent builder Tate-A-Tate. Would you be open to exploring integration? Imagine deploying CodeBanana as a collaborative “coding agent” in our Skill Marketplace — your users could automate workflows while ours gain low-code superpowers 😉

Let’s chat if you’re keen!

I’ve been using CodeBanana recently, and honestly, it’s such a fun and refreshing experience. I first found it when I was super frustrated with Cursor — it kept freezing or doing weird things — and I thought I’d give this one a try. To my surprise, CodeBanana’s agent writes code just as well, sometimes even smoother!

What really got me is that it doesn’t try too hard — it just feels natural to work with. The interface is super clean, everything runs fast, and it already supports collaboration, which means I can literally invite a friend to hop in and code together. That’s something Cursor doesn’t even do yet.

Overall, I didn’t expect much at first, but now I’m kind of hooked. CodeBanana proves that great AI coding tools don’t have to come from the biggest names — sometimes the new players bring way more fun and creativity to the table

Indeed, when coding with Vibe, I struggle to manage my documentation and code. I often don't know what changes I've made or how to share them with colleagues; these issues have consistently bothered me, sometimes even causing anxiety. I'll be testing CodeBanana to see if it will improve collaboration efficiency within our project team.

I was caught by your tagline even if I have nothing to do with coding 😁 Good luck with your launch! :)

I love the idea of an AI that actually understands the project, not just auto-completes code, and the shared VM feature sounds like it’ll save so much time (no more “it works on my machine” issues).

The way you’re bridging the gap between developers, designers, and PMs so they can all work together seamlessly is huge.