Show HN: Windsurf – Agentic IDE | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Windsurf – Agentic IDE

codeium.com

101 pointsfortenforge51 comments

At Codeium, we've been building AI-powered extensions for a while (we first launched our VSCode extension with autocomplete a little over 2 years ago!), but we've always thought there would come a day where we would hit the limits of what could be achieved within existing IDEs, so we decided to build our own: Windsurf (yes, it's yet another VSCode fork :)

We've stuffed a lot of cool features into Windsurf—a super fast autocomplete model, an inline diff generation experience that feels truly native, but we're most proud of Cascade, which is an evolution of the sidebar chat experience that many other extensions have. Cascade can perform deep reasoning on your existing codebase, access a vast array of tools that allow it to run terminal commands and find relevant files, and it's omniscient of all the actions that the user has taken independent of invoking the AI. (You can for example, start implementing a change manually and just ask Cascade to "continue").

We've been using Cascade internally at Codeium on our actual production codebase, and we're getting actual value from it. We hope everyone here does too! You can find a bunch of demos of Cascade on our website but I want to show one that I made myself using Cascade to solve an interesting cryptography challenge:

https://youtu.be/LbYepFmVB20

Cascade was able to explain the problem to me, install some libraries needed to interact with the challenge, give me some pointers towards a solution, and implement an attack that I described to it all by itself.

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I’ve been using it the past few days. It’s both magical and terrible. They do their own terminal management so you’re fighting env issues that make no sense. It somehow spawns a terminal that can’t find my installed version of node, so then it asks me to brew install one, but will this now screw up my system or no? It’s an uncanny valley moment where it’s close, but also not really there. Hopefully the team can quickly improve this UX and use the native terminal functionality as the foundation of how they interact with the system.

I just got done with my first session in Windsurf. It's mostly magical, but the terminal implementation leaves something to be desired. That doesn't seem like it would take much to fix though. Setting that aside, this thing is insane. I spun up a Django project/app and was able to accomplish in about 5 minutes what would normally take over an hour. The way it seamlessly edits multiple files in unison is unbelievably powerful. You can create a URL route, a view, a model and a template all in one swipe and it gets it right time after time. I'm impressed.

Nevermind the fix. IMO, if you have to identify these basic issues for them, that's already a problem.

Is minimum viable product not a thing anymore? The software seems amazingly well baked for a first release.

> somehow spawns a terminal that can’t find my installed version of node

That's weird. It just runs my usual zsh profile files. Have you got some very customised shell init?

Nope just the usual stuff shoved in there by every damn thing I install. But I don’t touch it myself. In fact I even stripped out ohmyzsh and whatnot a few years ago.

> an AI that can […] tackle complex tasks independently like an Agent. The AI is completely in sync with you, every step of the way.

How can it tackle complex tasks independently if it is completely in sync with the user every step of the way?

The marketing copy seems to promise contradictory properties.

Tbh while and after watching the video, I wasn't sure if the whole thing isn't just a parody of AI companies.

Felt like I was watching Silicon Valley.

Did you notice Russ Hanneman? It's supposed to be a play on SV.

Fun fact: the Codeium office is actually the Pied Piper office from the show [1], so yeah, they like Silicon Valley.

[1] https://x.com/codeiumdev/status/1851400416946462967

They've had astroturfers promoting it across social media today including this mad lad "$999/mo marketing team in a box " https://www.reddit.com/user/thelandofficial

> $999/mo marketing team in a box

What is this referring to?

This comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1e93c5f/prom...

> ...whole thing isn't just a parody of AI companies.

Tops this? https://openagi.xyz/

Any idea how Codeium is able to provide users with unlimited access to Sonnet and 4o for only $10 per month? I can easily blow through $10 in API credits from either of them. Is that price going to be sustainable?

Of course it's not going to be sustainable.

My idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

+ I guess it's not really fully unlimited

In this shovel rush, even the shovel factory makers (OpenAI) are not sustainable, and the shovel factory factory makers (NVidia) are doing well. Ironically the "gold" is with all the boring companies on the consumer side of the AI.

Just like Uber, keep eating the free food till the VC money runs out.

I bet you provide your own API key to Sonnet and 4o and you're paying to use their IDE...?

This has a lot of potential. I've been using Cursor Composer heavily and it's great but buggy, and could be more agentic.

After about an hour with Windsurf, I find myself frustrated with how it deals with context. If you add a directory to your Cascade, it's reluctant to actually read all the files in the directory.

I understand that they don't want to pay for a ton of long-context queries, but please, let users control the context, and pass the costs to the user.

It's very annoying to have the LLM try to create a file that already exists, it just didn't know about it.

Also, comments on the terminal management reflect a real issue. One solution is to expose the Cascade terminal to the user, letting the user configure the terminal in a working state, so that it has access to the correct dependencies and the PATH is properly sourced.

for the cynical folks, Codeium has been publishing blogposts with me on AI product thinking and its been remarkable to watch as someone with no vested interest:

https://latent.space/p/enterprise

yes, they started with "another copilot", and had one of the best years in code for enterprise ai this year.

here they are starting with "another cursor".

see the pattern?

Wow, so they raised 65 million dollars and yet I never heard of them. Crazy how much funding there is in the space

and another $150m in aug

Omg. Time to raise on some AI. I haven't even heard of them as a major player.

Totally useless and I'm sure I will not be subscribing to it at any cost.

It gets easily confused and cannot troubleshoot or understand a bit of the environment. It is good for creating one or two html pages or something that can be done within a one or two functions.

Don't expect or depend on it for anything serious. Even for some experienced folks, it is tough to get it do somethings.

Can see how the AI is going to take over the world!

Good for learning though. Sorry for sounding arrogant, but that's the reality.

I've subscriptions for most of the tools, but it's only as good as the user. It'll and can never replace or take over unless the user doesn't want to learn or adopt or become more efficient.

I've been using Codeium's vscode extension (have also tried out vim & emacs 'extensions') and it's my favorite (out of the free ones - that is)

the ctrl-shift-i for "inline chat - sort of", generate docstrings, control over context, I dunno, a couple small details that make it a little better.

I don't know what model they use but it's quite fast and I don't personally notice an "iq penalty" although I'm sure there is one

Which other extensions have you tried? I've been experimenting with Cline and Continue.dev recently. Continue seems to be the winner for now, but I may give Codeium and Windsurf a try.

cody, double, and 2 others that I dropped immediately bec they just weren't good. I don't remember their names.

Cody and double are pretty good and I'll switch to them sometimes

I haven’t experienced any of the terminal issues people stress complaining about. Maybe they fixed it?

Today I had it build me an Angular component I could use to recognize and decode barcodes through the device camera. It did an excellent job and worked with just a little coaxing. I’m impressed.

Worth comparing this with OpenAI’s announcement today: https://x.com/minchoi/status/1857195085139480717?s=46

Would be nice if it had a way to use Jetbrains keymaps (in addition to VSCode). Currently my fav editor is Zed, partly because I can set it up to use Jetbrains keyboard shortcuts.

I always develop remotely from windows laptop to Linux servers using VSCode's remote ssh extension.

I don't know why you must fork the remote ssh extension, please keep these basic settings. Without supporting "remote.SSH.path", I can't connect to my server using putty. (Please refer to https://github.com/MarkusDeutschmann/ssh2plink)

I patched ssh2plink and can connect to my server. But, "Open Folder" button wants to open local folder. It seems that the remote ssh connection is not supported yet...

The editor tries to complete my local path, but I force it to set the remote unix-style path, and I can start evaluating the editor.

First, I feel the chat text area seems very small (I want to tell ai my specs, but I can't input many lines.). So, I just asked to write "folder organizer" written in go. It's an easy example, but it outperforms my expectations. https://imgur.com/a/uKDwRx6 I think it's great and I love to try it this weekend.

I built an app on bolt.new and got stuck with broken locales. Tried Windsurf last night and damn, it just fixed translations perfectly without breaking anything else. Zero side effects. Pretty sweet!

Does anyone know if there's a similar flag as in Cursor that makes sure the local code isn't used for training?

https://www.cursor.com/privacy

It's a cool idea but i really don't see how this is any diff from Cursor IDE. It might have features that are totally diff from Cursor but visually looking it just looks to me exactly like Cursor

Cursor doesn't edit files directly last time I checked.

It does edit files directly when using its' Composer feature (Ctrl/Cmd+I).

I wanted to watch the video, but the keyboard typing being the loudest part of the video made it rather hard to listen.

I wonder if a tool exists to strip keyboard noise from YouTube videos?

Is there any plan to add image/screenshot support to Windsurf?

How is this different from cursor?

It's free (for now)

> You are already in a free 2-week trial so you can explore all Pro features right away.

For one thing, it seems to be half the price.

Non-sustainable pricing is not a thing... They have VC money, when it runs out, you'll get 'shafted' (possibly, it's all expectation management of course, but they seem to set very strange expectations these days).

tbf, Cursor isn't exactly bootstrapped. Generally speaking, when product competition heats up, prices tend to go down.

I realize prices will likely go up at some point in the future, but what's a fair price for something like this? It's amazing how much time this can save a developer. $10 per month seems ridiculously cheap for the value it creates. I think the market will happily pay more.

Can you write, compile and debug c++ with that?

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