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.
Real-time collaborative coding – Watch teammates code live, share context instantly, and never lose sync.
AI that understands your project – Reads your repo, docs, and structure to act like a true teammate, not just autocomplete.
Shared virtual environments – Run apps live with identical setups for everyone. No more “it works on my machine.”
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:
Collaborative Marketplace — Founders post ideas or prototypes, developers join to build sustainable and monetizable products.
Open Developer Network — Verified engineers earn by contributing to real projects.
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