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bluelightning2k 2 days ago

I really think more people should give Windsurf a go. It's really good. I'm a senior engineer and do a mix of agentic and regular coding and I really think people are looking past Windsurf.

As the conversation shifted towards Cursor vs Claude code vs Codex people seem to have stopped mentioning it which is a shame.

Source: user for 12 months - not a shill.

Codemaps was a very pleasant surprise when it showed up.

mpalmer 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I co-sign this as a similarly-credentialed person. I use windsurf at work and recently started enjoying Claude Code, but the UX of Windsurf is actually a legit value add. Codemaps especially - been using them for weeks and they're excellent. Ask me again in a year maybe; churn in code could make maintaining codemaps annoying, but even that seems solvable.

swyx 2 days ago | parent [-]

appreciate the feedback! just a reminder codemaps are based on snapshots of your code when you run them; technically there's nothing to maintain, because you just rerun them if you need to.

mpalmer 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yep it's low friction, but is it easy to discover that I need to? I guess it's the "needing to know that I need to rerun" that I'm less enthused about.

gslepak 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I prefer IDEs like Zed that don't lock me in to their ecosystem and force me to "log in" to use them.

gnarlouse 2 days ago | parent [-]

`codeium` which is now `windsurf` started out as a vscode fork IIRC

froober 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not to be confused with `vscodium` which is an open source build of vscode

gnarlouse 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah definitely confused it with vscodium, thx

bpavuk 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

you missed the point. Zed develops and pioneers ACP (Agent Client Protocol), which I can also use in other editors and with other agents. at the moment, only Neovim is available as an alternative editor, but nothing stops, say, JetBrains from implementing it. I can plug Codex, Gemini, Claude Code, and Goose directly into my editor of choice.

TiredOfLife a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Codeium started as VS Code extension (after their pivot). The whole Windsurf rebrand fork happened years later

all2 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is enough for me to give this a go. I've tried a few different tools; abacus.ai (and their IDE), claude CLI, crush-cli. My workflows are still mostly on the command line, and a little in VS Code. I haven't found a flow that works "right", yet.

swyx 2 days ago | parent [-]

first mention i've heard of abacus.ai and IDE. what do you think stands out about them?

you might struggle with Windsurf since you're so command line heavy. but pro tip - ask for command line work to be done inside of Windsurf's Cascade agent. they were first to the terminal-inside-aichat pattern and i really like how it's much better at command line stuff than i am (or can do the legwork to specify command line commands based on a few english descriptions)

all2 2 days ago | parent [-]

> first mention i've heard of abacus.ai and IDE. what do you think stands out about them?

Their reasoning agent is better than anything else I've used, tbh. The inability to use it in a CLI environment is why I stopped using it. They have a router that they hook into that "intelligently" chooses models for you in a normal "chat" setting. The power comes with their DeepThink (or whatever) mode that has a VM hooked up to it, as well as many, many well designed agents and internal prompts that handle all sorts of interesting things, from planning to front-end dev, to reasoning about requirements and requirements fulfillment.

swyx 2 days ago | parent [-]

ah yeah i have heard about their router. i wonder if GPT5 doing a router hurt it a bit.

corefinder 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm surprised that people still aren't discussing Github Copilot baked into VSCode. I pair agent mode + Sonnet 4 + Sequential Thinking + Tavily MCP servers and it works wonders. I recently prototyped the first version of our SaaS with this setup in a minimal amount of time. Also worth nothing, the pricing is extremely reasonable. Free credits + pay per use. I frequently max out the free tier and have never spent more than $40 per month.

nake89 a day ago | parent [-]

I second this. As a previous AI skeptic. VS Code with Agent Mode is amazing. Perfect amount of control over what the AI is doing. For me its been a game-changer. I would describe it as letting the AI do lots of the work and me being the guiding hand.

I will say, it is extremely important to have a good AGENTS.md file and other .md files that the agent can refer to when it needs to. Also having tests is more important than ever.

And when you notice common hiccups, document it in the AGENTS.md.

gnarlouse 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed. I'm back and forth about whether I want to spend the time with an agentic coding editor yet, because it's sitting right on the cusp of distraction/enhancement.

I've also tried the 3 C's, and it still feels like Windsurf has the net best user experience.

CSMastermind 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I as a big Windsurf advocate, miles ahead of Cursor IMO but I've fully switched to Codex these days. The cloud environments are just such a nice feature.

Still like Windsurf though their pricing is what drove me to not roll it out across my company.

swyx 2 days ago | parent [-]

cloud envs are good :)

1) did you compare codex cloud with devin?

2) how about the new claude code teleport feature from web to cli?

just wanted to pry for more opinions on what matters to you

CSMastermind a day ago | parent [-]

>1) did you compare codex cloud with devin?

I have. I tried Devin after the initial release and then again when they did their 2.0 release. Found it to be the worst of the tools I've tried.

More of a tangent but an underappreciated part of Codex is their PR review bot. Just miles ahead of all the competitors we've tried (greptile, charlie, cubic)

>2) how about the new claude code teleport feature from web to cli?

I have not. I rarely use Claude Code these days but I will give it a spin because you just told me it existed.

sama004 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I just tried out windsurf yesterday, The only thing I hate for now is that when there are changes and I accept one of them, then trying to accept the others gives an error saying the file was changed

lord_sudo 2 days ago | parent [-]

I’m sorry to hear about that. What version are you on? Looking to fix / repro this asap

swyx 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

(also you can hit "share conversation" or "view response statistics" and then "copy request id" and send to support!)

sama004 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm on v 1.12.28

dingnuts 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've used it, and I thought it was absolute trash. Goes crazy doing shit I don't want. I spend more time deleting crap I didn't want and reviewing and changing its code than I do just writing it myself.

I know what you're going to say: I need to learn to use this groundbreaking technology that is so easy to use that my product manager will soon be doing my job but also is too hard for me a senior engineer, to find value in.

Kindly: no, I trust my judgement, and the data backs me up.

Have you taken measurements of how many features and bugs you've shipped over the last twelve months or are you just like the engineers in the METR study who self reported an improvement but when measured, had been impaired? What evidence do you have that your attitude is not simply informed by the sunk cost of your subscription?

Please share your data below

Madmallard a day ago | parent | next [-]

Wholeheartedly agree.

Nothing my friends that heavily use AI for is groundbreaking at all. It's stuff they already entirely know how to do, describe in full detail what they want implemented, then double-check all of the results. I'm not convinced at all that they're doing architectural and long-term design thinking in this process. They're just "making the thing". I don't think they really care enough to do any of that hard thinking either. Not that they should be, considering the state of the industry and the lack of loyalty companies have to developers.

ghurtado 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

chrisweekly 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sir-this-is-a-wendys

gnarlouse 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stop, I bruised a rib laughing at this

Madmallard a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This isn't really a comment fit for Hacker News.