Windsurf IDE

Today I tried the Windsurf editor from the team behind Codeium. I’m really impressed by this editor! I’ve just used it for a few hours today, but I felt very productive during my time with it! I would say it’s a significant leap from GitHub copilot’s current way of working.

The way you have an agent that you interact with during a coding session feels very collaborative. I am not a fan of the idea of letting an AI agent perform a full task and report back the results when finished. The way the Cascade agent reports back progress feels very collaborative and as I’m very much in control over the final output.

And the way it automatically picks up context and my current intent is impressive. It helped me implement a search feature I had planned to build in a few minutes. It figured out my SQLite schema and made a query of the necessary columns, added a form, and it worked on the first try. I felt that it respected my use of server side rendered JSX via preact, together with native HTML forms. When I received a type error due to a casing issue for an attribute, it could quickly be guided to augment the JSX d.ts file.

It will be very interesting to see the interaction model around AI agents evolve over the coming year with multiple new editors, or alterations of VS Code competing for developers’ time and money.