The first agentic IDE, and then some. The Windsurf Editor is where the work of developers and AI truly flow together, allowing for a coding experience that feels like literal magic.

The Windsurf Editor is built for the way AI is meant to work with humans. Everything you love in Codeium and more, with unmatched performance and a user experience that keeps you in the flow.

What makes the Windsurf Editor the first AI agentic IDE, and then some?

Flows - the way humans are meant to work with AI

Flows = Agents + Copilots

The Windsurf Editor is powered by an AI that can both collaborate with you like a Copilot and tackle complex tasks independently like an Agent. The AI is completely in sync with you, every step of the way.

Flows allow the dev and AI to operate on the same state at all times, creating a mind-meld experience beyond just an assistant.

Learn more about AI flows

Code flows smoother than your morning coffee

We built a reasoning engine that enables seamless, real-time collaboration between the developer and AI, working together in perfect sync.

// Experience a true flow state in the Windsurf Editor

AI flows enable true human-AI unity with real time understanding of human actions.

AI flows ensure that the AI always understands the context of your work, adapting instantly as you transition between tasks, so it can assist without needing to be brought up to speed or interrupt your focus.

// Flows are fundamentally a new way of working with AI.

How Humans work

Before the year 2022, humans and keyboards worked in unison, and code development was done completely manually. Every single line of code was a direct result of human input.

How Copilots work

In 2022, LLM’s took the world by storm and Copilots were introduced to help humans complete set tasks. If you started typing out a line, it would suggest a completion. Or if you asked a question, you would receive an answer.

How Agents work

In early 2024, the world was introduced to the concept of Agents, which were meant to complete entire workflows autonomously through access to tools and advanced reasoning capabilities. However, early iterations resulted in unreasonable waiting periods and subpar output that took more time to review.

How Flows work

In November 2024, we introduced a new way of working with AI called Flows. This innovation syncs the developer’s actions with the AI in real time, enabling seamless, continuous collaboration where the AI adapts to the developer’s work without needing to be brought up to speed on the scope of the work.

Introducing the flow evolution of Chat

Cascade

Cascade combines deep codebase understanding, a breadth of advanced tools, and a real-time awareness of your actions into a powerful, seamless, and collaborative flow. It is the most powerful way to code with AI.

Full contextual awareness

Deep contextual awareness allows you to run Cascade on production codebases and still get relevant suggestions.

Suggest and run commands

Cascade's tools encompass command suggestion and execution, as well as issue detection and debugging.

Pick up where you left off

With automatic reasoning of your explicit actions, Cascade can pick up your work where you left off.

Multi-file editing

Coherent multi-file edits through context awareness, tool integration, and iterative problem-solving.

Cascade lets you build and refine complex codebases with ease.

Multi-file multi-edit capability. Deep contextual awareness. Terminal command suggestions. LLM-based search tools that outperform embeddings. Implicit reasoning of your actions in the text editor. Blazing fast latency. All in one magical experience.

Not just the best AI-powered editor, but the best editor — period

The possibilities are literally endlessss

And here's the best part

Get free Cascade credits and Pro features on download

50 User Prompt credits（each message sent with a Premium Model=1 User Prompt credit）
200 Flow Action credits（each message sent with a Premium Model=1 Flow Action credit）
Premium large models
Unlimited access to Supercomplete
Increased indexing limits
Fast autocomplete speed

[ Let's surf ]

Experience a true flow state

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Windsurf?

We don't mind if you call the Windsurf Editor the first agentic IDE, the first native surface for developers to collaborate with AI, or simply how we like to think about it - tomorrow’s editor, today.

When we first used the Windsurf Editor, a lot of the words that we found resonating with us included magic, power, and flow state. Windsurfing perfectly captures the combination of human, machine, and nature in an activity that looks effortless, but takes an intense amount of power.

You can think of the Windsurf Editor as the first agentic IDE, and then more. It is a new paradigm of working with AI, which we are calling AI flows - collaborative agents.

We started with the existing paradigms of AI use. Copilots are great because of their collaborativeness with the developer - the human is always in the loop. That being said, to keep the human in the loop, copilots are generally confined to short scoped tasks. On the other hand, agents are great because the AI can independently iterate to complete much larger tasks. The tradeoff is that you lose the collaborative aspect, which is why we haven’t seen an agentic IDE (yet). An IDE would be overkill. Both copilots and agents are super powerful and have their use cases, but have generally been seen as complementary because their strengths and weaknesses are indeed complementary.

Our spark came from one simple question - what if the AI had the best of both worlds? What if the AI was capable of being both collaborative and independent? Well, that is what makes humans special. Working with that kind of AI could feel like magic.

With a lot of research, we built the foundations of this kind of system, which we are calling AI flows. AI flows allow developers and AI to truly mind-meld, combining the best of copilots and agents.

Understand AI flows even more here.

Why did you build your own IDE? And why did you fork VS Code?

We never went into building an editor until we realized the magic of flows and Cascade. That being said, we also were honest with ourselves that we did not have to build the editor entirely from scratch to expose this magic, so we forked Visual Studio Code. We are fully aware of the memes about people forking VS Code to create “AI IDEs,” but again, we would not have built the Windsurf Editor if extensions could maximize the potential of our vision.

With regards to extensions, we have been an extension-first company, and still recognize that people really like the editors that they have, especially within our enterprise customer base. So, our Codeium extensions are not going anywhere, and we are going to continue to improve them to the max of their capabilities. Even some flow capabilities like Supercomplete are doable within extensions, and so we will build them in! The only difference with the Windsurf Editor is that we now have a surface where we are truly unconstrained to expose the magic as it evolves.

As we start building towards a mission of helping across the entire software development life cycle, not just coding, we will be releasing our own products under this new Windsurf brand, starting with the Editor. These will be products natively and fully owned by us. Codeium will still exist as its own brand and product, representing extensions and integrations into existing products such as commonly used IDEs. So tl;dr, Windsurf and Codeium are two different products, though they do share a lot of underlying systems and infrastructure.

How is this different from other solutions(Cursor, Cognition,etc)?

As mentioned in the previous question, we didn’t set out to build an IDE until we had this concept of flows. It’s more than just “we want nicer UX,” though that is definitely an added benefit. Also, we don’t think we have a big enough ego to believe that we are the only ones that are able to come up with cool ideas and user experiences, and have a lot of respect for the teams at Cursor, Zed and elsewhere.

A lot of these agentic systems such as Cognition’s Devin live outside of the IDE, which is one of the biggest differences, because that means they are unable to be aware of human actions. They are truly agentic systems, which are meant to independently solve larger tasks with access to knowledge and tools. They are also not generally available, hidden behind waitlists and invite-only programs. This perhaps could be seen as an indication of potential limitations to the kinds of tasks that agentic systems are appropriate for, which would conflict with the social media hype that these systems can do anything and everything.

We actually believe that Cursor Composer got a lot of the ideas behind a flow system right. However, we think there is a depth to the components of the system that we have been able to build given our history and expertise. What makes Cascade insanely powerful is not just the breadth across knowledge, tools, and human actions, but the depth within each axis:

• Knowledge: This is where our multi-year work on building state-of-the-art context awareness systems that can parse and semantically understand complex codebases comes into play. If we weren’t really good at this, we wouldn’t be fortunate enough to be able to work with some of the largest and most technically complex companies such as Dell, Anduril, and Zillow.

• Tools: Cascade’s tools include making edits, adding files, grep, listing files in a directory, and even code execution. On top of this, Cascade comes with proprietary tools such as Riptide, which is the technology underpinning the Cortex research breakthrough that was covered by the press a few months ago. It is an LLM-based search tool that can rip through millions of lines of code in seconds with 3x better accuracy than state-of-the-art embedding-based systems, all with highly optimized use of a large amount of compute.

• Human Actions: There are a lot of different granularities at which you can capture this information, but it is very easy to either have too little or too much information. Either you miss actions core to determining user intent or you have too much noise. We won’t give away the magic sauce here, but we have done a lot of work on checkpointing, information compression, and more in order to make Cascade feel like an infinite stream of joint consciousness between human and AI.

We have put Cascade front and center - in fact, with Windsurf, we don’t even have Chat. It is all Cascade. The flow is core to the experience, which is different from features like Cursor Composer, which is not a front-and-center capability. In our experience: Cascade is better than Composer when working on existing codebases Cascade is better than Composer at context retrieval to ground work Cascade is faster than Composer.

Our hypothesis is that Composer doesn’t yet have the depth of knowledge understanding, the full gamut of tools, or super fine grained human trajectories, which likely restricts its usefulness to zero-to-one applications.

Who can use this and what are the security guarantees?

From our end, you can use the Windsurf Editor for any work, but check with your employer if you plan to use it for your professional work. Currently, the Windsurf Editor (and connected functionalities like Cascade) are available for any of our self-serve plans, and as we learn more about the extent of what Cascade is capable of, we will make the Windsurf Editor available to enterprise plans. The Windsurf Editor obeys the same security guarantees and code snippet telemetry rules as the Codeium extensions.

Available wherever you want it

Mac

Minimum Requirements:

OS X Yosemite

Linux

Minimum Requirements:

Ubuntu ≥ 20.04 (or glibc ≥ 2.31, glibcxx ≥ 3.4.26)

For other Linux distributions: glibc ≥ 2.28, glibcxx ≥ 3.4.25

Windows

Minimum Requirements:

Windows 10 (64-bit)

Codeium Extensions

Install the Codeium extension in your favorite code editors.

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