Add history of code intelligence (#1628)

* Add history of code intelligence From notes I took in various discussions. * Update handbook/engineering/code-intelligence/index.md Co-authored-by: Eric Fritz <[email protected]> * Reworded origin statement to make it more clear. * Update handbook/engineering/code-intelligence/index.md Co-authored-by: Beyang Liu <[email protected]> * Update handbook/engineering/code-intelligence/index.md Co-authored-by: Beyang Liu <[email protected]> * Update handbook/engineering/code-intelligence/index.md Co-authored-by: Beyang Liu <[email protected]> Co-authored-by: Eric Fritz <[email protected]> Co-authored-by: Beyang Liu <[email protected]>
sourcegraph · Sep 23, 2020 · e705228 · e705228
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diff --git a/handbook/engineering/code-intelligence/index.md b/handbook/engineering/code-intelligence/index.md
@@ -12,6 +12,20 @@ The Code Intelligence team builds tools and services that provide contextual inf
 
 - Robust, extensible, and scalable infrastructure to index code across all languages, keep those indexes up-to-date, and efficiently resolve code intelligence queries against all indexed code.
 
+## History
+
+The origin of our work is the core of Sourcegraph, first implemented as [srclib](https://github.com/sourcegraph/srclib) a code analysis tool developed by our co-founders [Beyang](https://github.com/beyang) and [Quinn](https://github.com/sqs) in 2015.
+
+2016 - We evolved our strategy to utilize LSP (Language Server Protocol) to power the new Sourcegraph code search engine. LSP is a user oriented protocol and requires an implementation of a language server for each programming language.
+
+2017 - Over time we started to experience some issues with language servers. They can be difficult to deploy, slow at runtime, slow to adopt by members of their respective language communities, and slow to develop.
+
+2018 - We added a new basic code intelligence that is built on search-based heuristics to allow us to provide quick and good enough i.e. "imprecise" support for the [most popular programming languages](https://sourcegraph.com/extensions?query=category%3A%22Programming+languages%22). 
+
+2019 - While looking for more efficient alternatives to language servers we found LSIF (Language Server Index Format) which provided an index-based implementation of precise code navigation (similar to srclib) with the advantage of being able to build on top of the work done in the LSP community (LSIF and LSP are sister protocols).
+
+2020 and beyond - The Code Intelligence team is responsible for how Sourcegraph understands code and for providing data that powers semantic search, campaigns and code insights. Our API is the point of discovery for the knowledge graph for all source code.
+
 ## Vision
 
 To be the point of discovery for the knowledge graph for all source code.