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Show HN: Windsurf – Agentic IDE

(codeium.com)
100 points fortenforge | 1 comments | 13 Nov 24 17:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source

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.

1. Yusefmosiah ◴[15 Nov 24 20:35 UTC] No.42150686[source]▶
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.