Windsurf IDE Review: Is Codeium's AI Editor Worth It in 2026?

Windsurf has had the wildest year of any developer tool in recent memory. OpenAI tried to buy it for $3 billion. That deal collapsed. Google poached its CEO and top researchers for $2.4 billion. Cognition (the Devin people) scooped up the product, brand, and remaining 250-person team. Through all of that corporate drama, the IDE itself kept shipping features -- and climbed to #1 in the LogRocket AI Dev Tool Power Rankings in February 2026.

So is Windsurf still a good bet for your daily coding workflow, or is it a product living on borrowed time? I've spent the last three months using Windsurf as my primary editor alongside Cursor and Claude Code. Here's what I found.

📋 What You'll Need

• A machine running macOS, Windows, or Linux -- Windsurf is a desktop app (VS Code fork)
• An internet connection -- AI features require cloud connectivity
• A Windsurf account -- free tier available at windsurf.com
• An existing project to test with -- Windsurf's AI shines on real codebases, not empty folders
• Familiarity with VS Code -- if you've used VS Code, Windsurf will feel instantly familiar

🏄 What Windsurf Actually Is (And Isn't)

Windsurf started life as Codeium, an AI autocomplete tool that competed with GitHub Copilot. In late 2024, Codeium rebranded to Windsurf and launched a full IDE -- a fork of VS Code, rebuilt from the ground up for deep AI collaboration.

If you've heard the name but aren't sure what the product actually does, here's the short version:

The VS Code foundation is both its greatest strength and its biggest limitation. You get the entire VS Code extension ecosystem out of the box -- your existing keybindings, themes, and extensions all work. But it also means Windsurf feels derivative at first glance. The magic lives in what they've built on top of VS Code, not in the editor itself.

The Ownership Situation

Let's address the elephant in the room. As of February 2026, Windsurf is owned by Cognition AI, the company behind the Devin autonomous coding agent. Jeff Wang serves as interim CEO and Graham Moreno as President. The product continues to ship regular updates, the 350+ enterprise customer base is intact, and the $82 million in annual recurring revenue has grown since the acquisition.

Cognition CEO Scott Wu has stated publicly: "We'll continue to invest significantly in both Devin and Windsurf." So far, they've backed that up with action -- new model support (Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5.2-Codex), Agent Skills, Arena Mode, and Plan Mode have all shipped since the acquisition closed.

Should you worry about the product disappearing? Probably not. $82M ARR and 350+ enterprise contracts create strong incentives to keep the lights on. But it's worth knowing your editor's parent company is a startup in a rapidly consolidating market.

🌊 Cascade: The AI That Watches You Code

Cascade is Windsurf's headline feature and the main reason to choose it over vanilla VS Code with Copilot. It's an agentic AI assistant that doesn't just respond to your prompts -- it actively tracks what you're doing and adapts in real time.

How Cascade Works

Cascade operates in two modes:

• Chat mode -- Ask questions, get explanations, request code snippets. Standard AI chat, but with deep codebase context.
• Code mode -- Cascade writes and edits code directly in your files. It can modify multiple files, run terminal commands, and iterate on its own output.

What makes Cascade different from Cursor's Composer or Copilot's agent mode is flow awareness. Cascade tracks your file edits, terminal commands, clipboard activity, and conversation history. It builds a running model of what you're trying to accomplish, so you spend less time re-explaining context.

Here's a practical example. Say you're debugging a Django REST API endpoint that returns 500 errors:

# You open views.py, scroll to the problematic endpoint
# Then switch to the terminal and run:
curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/api/articles/ \
  -H "Authorization: Token your_token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"title": "Test", "content": "Hello"}'

In Cursor, you'd need to paste the error into the chat and explain what you were trying to do. In Cascade, it already saw you open the file, saw the curl command, and saw the error output. Type "fix this" and it has the full picture.

Memories: Cascade Learns Your Patterns

Cascade autonomously generates Memories -- a persistent knowledge layer that remembers context between conversations. It learns:

• Your coding style and conventions
• Project-specific APIs and patterns
• Configuration details and environment setup
• Previous debugging sessions and solutions

Memories persist across sessions. Close Windsurf, come back tomorrow, and Cascade still remembers that your project uses SQLAlchemy 2.0 syntax, not the legacy 1.x pattern. This is genuinely useful for long-running projects where you'd otherwise re-explain the same context every session.

Turbo Mode

For the brave, Turbo Mode lets Cascade execute terminal commands autonomously. Instead of suggesting a command and waiting for you to approve it, Cascade runs it directly. This is powerful for tasks like:

# Cascade can autonomously run commands like:
npm install express cors helmet
npx prisma migrate dev --name add-user-table
python manage.py makemigrations && python manage.py migrate
npm run test -- --watch

You can configure guardrails around which commands Turbo Mode is allowed to run. I'd recommend keeping destructive operations (like rm -rf or git push --force) behind manual approval.

⚡ Features That Stand Out

Beyond Cascade, Windsurf packs several features that differentiate it from the competition.

SWE-1: Windsurf's Proprietary Models

Windsurf isn't just a wrapper around third-party models. They've built their own SWE-1 family of models, optimized specifically for software engineering:

The critical detail: SWE-1 models cost zero credits. This means you can use Windsurf's in-house models without burning through your monthly allocation. Save your credits for premium third-party models (Claude, GPT-5, Gemini) when you need them.

SWE-1 was built around Windsurf's concept of flow awareness -- the model understands the timeline of your coding session, not just the current state of your files. In practice, this means SWE-1 makes better suggestions when you're mid-refactor because it knows what you changed five minutes ago.

Tab to Jump

This small feature has saved me more time than any single AI suggestion. Tab to Jump predicts where your next edit will be and navigates you there with a single Tab keypress. Finished editing a function signature? Tab jumps you to the first call site that needs updating. Changed a type definition? Tab takes you to the file that imports it.

It sounds trivial, but the cumulative time savings are real. I estimated it saves me 15-20 manual file navigations per hour during refactoring sessions.

Arena Mode

Arena Mode runs two AI models side-by-side on the same prompt. You see both responses, pick the one you prefer, and the results feed back into Windsurf's model routing. It's essentially A/B testing for AI suggestions.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              Arena Mode                      │
├─────────────────────┬───────────────────────┤
│    Model A          │     Model B           │
│    (Claude 3.7)     │     (SWE-1)           │
├─────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
│  Response from      │  Response from        │
│  Model A appears    │  Model B appears      │
│  here...            │  here...              │
├─────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
│  [Choose A]         │  [Choose B]           │
└─────────────────────┴───────────────────────┘

This is genuinely novel. No other IDE offers this. It's particularly useful when you're evaluating which model handles your specific codebase best -- different models have different strengths, and Arena Mode lets you discover that empirically instead of guessing.

Agent Skills

Shipped in January 2026, Agent Skills let you bundle reference scripts, templates, and checklists into reusable packages stored at .windsurf/skills/ in your project. Think of them as domain-specific instructions that teach Cascade how your team works.

# .windsurf/skills/django-api.yaml
name: "Django REST API Pattern"
description: "Standard patterns for our Django REST endpoints"
instructions: |
  - Use Django REST Framework serializers for all endpoints
  - Always include pagination (PageNumberPagination, page_size=20)
  - Use Token authentication, not Session
  - Write tests using pytest-django with factory_boy fixtures
  - Follow the error response format: {"error": str, "code": str}
templates:
  - path: "templates/api_view.py"
  - path: "templates/serializer.py"
  - path: "templates/test_view.py"

Skills are project-level, so they travel with your repository. New team members get the same AI behavior as senior developers who've been on the project for years.

MCP Integration

Windsurf supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP) with 21+ tool integrations out of the box. Connect Cascade to GitHub, Slack, Stripe, Figma, databases, and internal APIs. This means Cascade can:

# Example: Cascade can query your database directly
# "Show me all users who signed up in the last 7 days"
# Cascade connects via MCP to your PostgreSQL database and returns:

# Result from MCP database query:
# | id | email              | created_at          |
# |----|--------------------|--------------------|
# | 42 | new@example.com    | 2026-02-15 09:30   |
# | 43 | another@test.com   | 2026-02-16 14:22   |

This isn't hypothetical -- MCP support is production-ready and works with the tools most teams already use.

💰 Pricing Breakdown: What You'll Actually Spend

Windsurf uses a credit-based pricing model. Here's how it works:

Plans

How Credits Actually Work

Not all prompts cost the same number of credits. The system has two pricing mechanisms:

• Flat-rate models (SWE-1, SWE-1-lite): Fixed cost per prompt, often 0 credits
• Token-based models (Claude, GPT, Gemini): Cost based on input + output tokens, with a ~20% margin over the provider's API price

A typical Cascade message with a premium model like Claude 3.7 Sonnet costs 1 prompt credit. Using Claude with Thinking mode bumps that to a 1.5x multiplier.

Monthly credits do not roll over. Use them or lose them. However, add-on credits ($10 for 250 credits) never expire -- useful for absorbing occasional usage spikes without upgrading your plan.

Real-World Cost Comparison

Here's what a professional developer actually spends per month:

Windsurf's cost advantage is real but comes with a catch: 500 credits per month works out to roughly 16-17 premium model prompts per day. If you're prompting heavily with Claude or GPT-5, you'll hit the limit. The workaround is to use the zero-cost SWE-1 models for routine tasks and save premium credits for complex reasoning.

⚔️ Windsurf vs The Competition

Let's cut through the marketing and compare what matters.

Windsurf vs Cursor

Bottom line: Windsurf is cheaper and has stronger memory features. Cursor has a larger ecosystem and parallel agents. If you're price-sensitive or use JetBrains, Windsurf wins. If you need maximum firepower for complex multi-file edits, Cursor's parallel agents are hard to beat.

Windsurf vs VS Code + Copilot

Bottom line: If your team is all-in on GitHub and you value stability over cutting-edge AI features, stick with VS Code + Copilot. If you want deeper codebase understanding and a more capable agentic assistant, Windsurf is the upgrade.

Windsurf vs Claude Code

These are fundamentally different tools:

Bottom line: These complement each other. Use Windsurf as your daily driver IDE and reach for Claude Code when you need to tackle a gnarly refactor or debug something that spans 50 files.

🔧 Troubleshooting Common Issues

"Cascade doesn't understand my project structure."
Open the command palette (Cmd+Shift+P) and run "Windsurf: Reindex Codebase." Fast Context needs to build its index before Cascade can reason about your full project. On large codebases (50K+ files), initial indexing can take several minutes.

"My VS Code extensions don't work in Windsurf."
Most VS Code extensions are compatible, but not all. Extensions that depend on VS Code Insiders APIs or use undocumented VS Code internals may break. Check the Windsurf compatibility list in their docs, or install from the Open VSX registry instead of the Microsoft marketplace.

"I'm burning through credits too fast."
Switch to SWE-1 for routine tasks -- it costs zero credits. Only use premium models (Claude, GPT-5) for complex reasoning tasks. Also check if you have Thinking mode enabled; it uses a 1.5x credit multiplier.

"Windsurf feels slow compared to vanilla VS Code."
Disable Windsurf's AI features temporarily (Settings > Windsurf > Enable AI) to confirm the AI layer is the bottleneck. If performance improves, reduce the scope of Fast Context indexing by adding large folders (like node_modules, .git, build outputs) to .windsurfignore.

"Memories are outdated and causing bad suggestions."
Go to Settings > Windsurf > Memories and review what Cascade has learned. Delete entries that reference old APIs, deprecated patterns, or previous project configurations. Cascade will regenerate accurate memories as you continue working.

🚀 What's Next

• Try the free tier. 25 credits per month plus unlimited SWE-1-lite is enough to evaluate whether Cascade fits your workflow. Download it at windsurf.com/editor.
• Set up Agent Skills for your team. Create .windsurf/skills/ files that encode your project's conventions. This is the fastest way to get consistent AI behavior across a team.
• Compare models with Arena Mode. Run the same prompt against SWE-1 and Claude side-by-side. You might be surprised how often the zero-cost model wins.
• Pair Windsurf with a terminal agent. Use Windsurf for daily coding and Claude Code for complex refactoring -- they cover each other's blind spots.
• Watch the Cognition integration. As Devin and Windsurf merge capabilities, expect new features that blur the line between IDE and autonomous agent. The AI Coding Agents Compared guide tracks these developments.

For a deeper look at how AI tools are reshaping development workflows, read The Rise of the AI Engineer and our GitHub Copilot Agent Mode Guide.