Windsurf
Cursor’s smarter, quieter cousin — and the one I keep coming back to when the project gets weird.
What This Actually Is
Windsurf is also a VS Code fork with AI bolted in, so on the surface it looks like Cursor with a different paint job. It's not. The bet Windsurf made — and they made it deliberately, you can feel it — is that the AI shouldn't be a sidebar you summon. It should be a coworker that's already watching what you're doing and figuring out where you're headed.
They called it Cascade. The pitch was "Flow." And after a few hours in it I'll admit, kicking and screaming, that they were right about something Cursor's still catching up on.
Here's the thing nobody tells you: when you've been deep in a build for four hours, the cost isn't typing. It's re-establishing context. Every time you open a chat and have to explain "okay so I'm working on the checkout flow, the user model is over here, we're using Stripe, the bug is when..." — that's the tax. Windsurf eats that tax for you. Cascade already knows. It watched you do the last three things. It read the error you just hit. It saw which files you opened and closed.
That continuity is the whole product, and the feeding frenzy over this company told you everything about how seriously the big labs take this category: OpenAI offered $3B, the deal died, Google carted off the founders, and Cognition — the Devin people — bought what was left for a reported $250 million. In June 2026 they renamed the whole thing Devin Desktop, and Cascade became "Devin Local." Same product, new badge, shipping faster than ever. I'm going to keep calling it Windsurf and Cascade in this chapter, because so does everyone else.
Who Should Be In Here
Devs who tried Cursor and felt like they were still doing too much explaining. Cascade is built for you. Stop narrating, start working.
Founders who can read code but don't want to write every line. Windsurf is more proactive than Cursor out of the box. Less hand-holding required from your end. If you trust the AI to make a reasonable first move, it usually does.
Small teams on JS/TS/Python. Modern web stacks. Cascade eats them alive.
You, if you want a no-code chatbot that builds a finished app: still wrong chapter. Lovable. Bolt. Move along.
What Actually Matters
Cascade — officially "Devin Local" now. This is the headline. Session-aware agent that maintains a running mental model of what you're doing. The rewrite is more token-efficient than old Cascade and runs parallel subagents, and it queues cloud Devin jobs next to your local work in one Kanban view — more useful than it sounds. The first time you describe a bug and it solves it without you having to explain the codebase structure — that's the moment. You'll know.
Flow. Not marketing fluff (well, it kind of is, but bear with me). The practical effect: Cascade notices you've been making a series of related changes and starts predicting the next logical move. It surfaces relevant files before you ask. After a couple weeks it feels like working with someone who actually paid attention in the standup.
Multi-file edits with carryover. Like Cursor's Composer, but Cascade brings session context into the change. Means the new code fits the decisions you made an hour ago instead of fighting them.
Terminal integration that closes the loop. Cascade runs your tests, reads the failures, fixes the code, reruns. Without you copy-pasting error output into a chat box like a damn courier. This alone saves an hour a day on a hard project.
Inline completions. Codeium spent years building autocomplete before they built the IDE. It shows. Fast, accurate, doesn't try to write a poem when you wanted a semicolon.
Pick your model. Claude, GPT, Gemini, or Cognition's in-house SWE-1.6 — which comes free on paid plans and is obscenely fast. Switch as you go.
Cost
Free tier is still one of the most generous in this whole guide. Unlimited inline edits and Tab, plus real agent access on the free SWE-1.6 model with daily limits. Most competitors lock their differentiator behind a paywall and dare you to evaluate from screenshots. Windsurf says "here, try the actual thing." That's confidence.
Pro is $20/month. They matched Cursor in March 2026 when they killed the credit system and moved to daily and weekly quotas — which I actually prefer, because you know where you stand. Max is $200 if you're a quota-melting power user. Check devin.ai for current pricing because everything in this space moves around.
Teams is $40/seat with pooled quotas, privacy mode (your code isn't training anybody's model), team analytics, the usual.
Watch the quotas on big agentic days. Long Cascade sessions on large repos chew through the frontier-model allowance. You'll notice it during a sprint and not before.
What It's Good At
Web apps: Five stars. JS, TS, Python, React, Next, Node. This is its lane.
Mobile: Three stars, same as Cursor. React Native is fine. Native Swift/Kotlin works but you can feel the AI is less specialized.
Scripts, CLIs, data pipelines, internal tools: Four-plus stars. The terminal integration matters more here than anywhere else. Run script, fail, fix, rerun — Cascade does the loop. I've shipped Python tools in 30 minutes that would've taken half a day before.
Hosting? Same Deal
Local IDE. Your code, your machine, your hosting choice. Vercel, Railway, Render, Supabase — pick your weapon.
One real difference from Cursor: Cascade is unusually good at deployment scripts. Because it knows your actual project structure, the configs it generates fit your repo instead of being generic templates. Small thing, big time-saver on Friday at 5pm.
The Story
Real one, slightly compressed. I had a client project where the previous developer had left a codebase that I can only describe diplomatically as "creative." Three different state management approaches. Two ORM patterns. A custom event bus that solved a problem that didn't exist. Classic.
I opened it in Cursor first. Spent two hours writing prompts that started with "okay so the way this codebase works is..." Got tired of being a translator.
Switched to Windsurf. Pointed Cascade at the repo. Asked it to map the architecture. It came back with a summary that was — I'm not exaggerating — better than what I would've written after two hours. Because it had read everything, in context, in one pass.
From there I just... worked. Cascade carried the weird patterns forward instead of fighting them. When I asked it to add a feature, it matched the existing style instead of imposing a "correct" one. Shipped the change in a day. The original estimate was a week.
That's the unlock. Not "the AI is smarter." It's "the AI remembers."
Where It Bites
It's still a local IDE. You still own deployments, environments, secrets, all of it. If that sentence stresses you out, this isn't your tool yet — go find Lovable.
The quota system is honest but real. Long agentic sessions burn through it fast. Watch the dashboard.
VS Code extensions sometimes behave weirdly in Windsurf. Rare, but verify the one extension you can't live without before you commit.
And the ownership saga has been a soap opera — OpenAI, then Google, then Cognition, then a rebrand to Devin Desktop. Credit where due: Cognition has shipped faster than the old regime, and retiring Cascade for Devin Local made the agent better, not worse. But when a product changes hands that many times in a year, you keep one eye on the roadmap. Today it's great. Two years out, who knows. Track it.
Gavin's Rule: Let Cascade Architect The First Pass
When you start a new project in Windsurf, do not over-specify the architecture. Describe what you want in human language. Let Cascade propose the structure. Then accept it.
Why? Because Cascade performs dramatically better on code it wrote itself. If you scaffold the project in your head and dictate every file, you've handed Cascade a stranger's codebase to work in. If you let it draft the bones, every later session benefits from the AI understanding the foundation deeply because it built the foundation.
You can always refactor later — Cascade is good at that too. But starting with shared context saves you more time than any other single move I know in this tool. Try it once. You'll feel it.
Bottom Line
If you're a developer or technical founder who wants an AI that remembers what you were doing five minutes ago, Windsurf — fine, Devin Desktop — is your tool. The price advantage over Cursor is gone; they're both $20 now. The memory advantage isn't. It's not flashier, it doesn't have the hype curve Cursor rode. It's just better at the job in a way that gets more obvious the longer you use it.
I keep both installed. That's my real answer.
— Gavin