Alibaba Qoder Technical Expert Phodal Departs After About Six Months: The Difficulty of Building Products Lies Beyond Technology

Beating AI News Flash, October 28 — Renowned open-source developer Huang Fengda (Phodal) announced his departure from Alibaba's Qoder team. In his farewell post, he remarked: "Doing a product well at Alibaba is incredibly hard. Technology is only part of it — more often than not, the challenges lie beyond technology."

Huang Fengda previously worked at Thoughtworks for over a decade, where he served as head of open source for China and developed open-source projects such as AutoDev and ArchGuard. After joining Qoder around May this year, he mainly participated in the design of a Canvas-based Agentic UI architecture and the development of the Agent plugin ecosystem, enabling AI to not only generate code but also invoke engineering capabilities such as architecture analysis and design review.

His departure comes as Qoder continues to adjust its product line. In August, Chen Xin (Shenxiu), the product and technology lead who had spearheaded the Tongyi Lingma project, also left. In September, Qoder disclosed that its annualized recurring revenue (ARR) had reached $100 million, but Alibaba Cloud simultaneously announced the gradual shutdown of QoderWork, directing development and office users to Qoder Desktop and Qwen Office respectively. Users migrating to the latter also need to re-register, and their existing credit benefits cannot be directly transferred.