Windsurf

Windsurf is an AI-native IDE, also built on the VS Code foundation, whose centerpiece is Cascade — an agentic assistant designed to feel like a collaborator with full awareness of what you’re doing. Cascade tracks your recent edits, terminal output, and clipboard alongside a deep index of your codebase, so you can say “keep going” after making a manual change and it understands the trajectory you’re on. It plans multi-file changes, runs commands, and can preview your web app in-editor.

Windsurf’s pitch in the crowded AI-IDE space is flow: minimizing the ceremony between your intent and the change. Where Cursor exposes more explicit controls for context and modes, Windsurf leans on automatic context gathering so you prompt less and steer more. Features like previewing a running app inside the editor and sending a clicked UI element straight to the agent make it especially fluid for front-end and full-stack iteration. It’s also worth knowing as an industry case study — its acquisition saga was a landmark of the AI tooling boom.

In practice, you’ll open your project, invoke Cascade, and alternate between Write mode (agent edits files directly, showing diffs for review) and Chat mode (discussion without changes). You’ll set persistent rules and let Windsurf’s Memories accumulate project knowledge across sessions, use Tab autocomplete for inline speed, and connect MCP servers for external tools. The workflow: describe the goal, review the plan and diffs, refine — staying in flow rather than switching contexts.