Show HN: Windsurf – Agentic IDE

(codeium.com)

96 points | by fortenforge 5 days ago ago

49 comments

  • bberenberg 4 days ago

    I’ve been using it the past few days. It’s both magical and terrible. They do their own terminal management so you’re fighting env issues that make no sense. It somehow spawns a terminal that can’t find my installed version of node, so then it asks me to brew install one, but will this now screw up my system or no? It’s an uncanny valley moment where it’s close, but also not really there. Hopefully the team can quickly improve this UX and use the native terminal functionality as the foundation of how they interact with the system.

    • IAmGraydon 4 days ago

      I just got done with my first session in Windsurf. It's mostly magical, but the terminal implementation leaves something to be desired. That doesn't seem like it would take much to fix though. Setting that aside, this thing is insane. I spun up a Django project/app and was able to accomplish in about 5 minutes what would normally take over an hour. The way it seamlessly edits multiple files in unison is unbelievably powerful. You can create a URL route, a view, a model and a template all in one swipe and it gets it right time after time. I'm impressed.

      • knowitnone 3 days ago

        Nevermind the fix. IMO, if you have to identify these basic issues for them, that's already a problem.

        • IAmGraydon 3 days ago

          Is minimum viable product not a thing anymore? The software seems amazingly well baked for a first release.

    • viraptor 4 days ago

      > somehow spawns a terminal that can’t find my installed version of node

      That's weird. It just runs my usual zsh profile files. Have you got some very customised shell init?

      • bberenberg 3 days ago

        Nope just the usual stuff shoved in there by every damn thing I install. But I don’t touch it myself. In fact I even stripped out ohmyzsh and whatnot a few years ago.

  • layer8 4 days ago

    > an AI that can […] tackle complex tasks independently like an Agent. The AI is completely in sync with you, every step of the way.

    How can it tackle complex tasks independently if it is completely in sync with the user every step of the way?

    The marketing copy seems to promise contradictory properties.

  • j-pb 4 days ago

    Tbh while and after watching the video, I wasn't sure if the whole thing isn't just a parody of AI companies.

  • IAmGraydon 4 days ago

    Any idea how Codeium is able to provide users with unlimited access to Sonnet and 4o for only $10 per month? I can easily blow through $10 in API credits from either of them. Is that price going to be sustainable?

    • agluszak 4 days ago

      Of course it's not going to be sustainable.

      My idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

      • usbsea 3 days ago

        In this shovel rush, even the shovel factory makers (OpenAI) are not sustainable, and the shovel factory factory makers (NVidia) are doing well. Ironically the "gold" is with all the boring companies on the consumer side of the AI.

      • agluszak 4 days ago

        + I guess it's not really fully unlimited

    • knowitnone 3 days ago

      I bet you provide your own API key to Sonnet and 4o and you're paying to use their IDE...?

    • ilrwbwrkhv 4 days ago

      Just like Uber, keep eating the free food till the VC money runs out.

  • Yusefmosiah 3 days ago

    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.

  • swyx 4 days ago

    for the cynical folks, Codeium has been publishing blogposts with me on AI product thinking and its been remarkable to watch as someone with no vested interest:

    https://latent.space/p/enterprise

    yes, they started with "another copilot", and had one of the best years in code for enterprise ai this year.

    here they are starting with "another cursor".

    see the pattern?

    • ilrwbwrkhv 4 days ago

      Wow, so they raised 65 million dollars and yet I never heard of them. Crazy how much funding there is in the space

      • swyx 3 days ago

        and another $150m in aug

        • ilrwbwrkhv 3 days ago

          Omg. Time to raise on some AI. I haven't even heard of them as a major player.

  • panpandas a day ago

    I built an app on bolt.new and got stuck with broken locales. Tried Windsurf last night and damn, it just fixed translations perfectly without breaking anything else. Zero side effects. Pretty sweet!

  • FergusArgyll 4 days ago

    I've been using Codeium's vscode extension (have also tried out vim & emacs 'extensions') and it's my favorite (out of the free ones - that is)

    the ctrl-shift-i for "inline chat - sort of", generate docstrings, control over context, I dunno, a couple small details that make it a little better.

    I don't know what model they use but it's quite fast and I don't personally notice an "iq penalty" although I'm sure there is one

    • IAmGraydon 4 days ago

      Which other extensions have you tried? I've been experimenting with Cline and Continue.dev recently. Continue seems to be the winner for now, but I may give Codeium and Windsurf a try.

      • FergusArgyll 3 days ago

        cody, double, and 2 others that I dropped immediately bec they just weren't good. I don't remember their names.

        Cody and double are pretty good and I'll switch to them sometimes

  • mikecallaghan 4 days ago

    I haven’t experienced any of the terminal issues people stress complaining about. Maybe they fixed it?

    Today I had it build me an Angular component I could use to recognize and decode barcodes through the device camera. It did an excellent job and worked with just a little coaxing. I’m impressed.

  • myflash13 3 days ago

    Worth comparing this with OpenAI’s announcement today: https://x.com/minchoi/status/1857195085139480717?s=46

  • d4rkp4ttern 3 days ago

    Would be nice if it had a way to use Jetbrains keymaps (in addition to VSCode). Currently my fav editor is Zed, partly because I can set it up to use Jetbrains keyboard shortcuts.

  • benok 4 days ago

    I always develop remotely from windows laptop to Linux servers using VSCode's remote ssh extension.

    I don't know why you must fork the remote ssh extension, please keep these basic settings. Without supporting "remote.SSH.path", I can't connect to my server using putty. (Please refer to https://github.com/MarkusDeutschmann/ssh2plink)

    • benok 4 days ago

      I patched ssh2plink and can connect to my server. But, "Open Folder" button wants to open local folder. It seems that the remote ssh connection is not supported yet...

      • benok 4 days ago

        The editor tries to complete my local path, but I force it to set the remote unix-style path, and I can start evaluating the editor.

        First, I feel the chat text area seems very small (I want to tell ai my specs, but I can't input many lines.). So, I just asked to write "folder organizer" written in go. It's an easy example, but it outperforms my expectations. https://imgur.com/a/uKDwRx6 I think it's great and I love to try it this weekend.

  • barbazoo 4 days ago

    Does anyone know if there's a similar flag as in Cursor that makes sure the local code isn't used for training?

    https://www.cursor.com/privacy

  • ned99 4 days ago

    It's a cool idea but i really don't see how this is any diff from Cursor IDE. It might have features that are totally diff from Cursor but visually looking it just looks to me exactly like Cursor

    • barbazoo 4 days ago

      Cursor doesn't edit files directly last time I checked.

      • punkspider 4 days ago

        It does edit files directly when using its' Composer feature (Ctrl/Cmd+I).

  • wcallahan 4 days ago

    I wanted to watch the video, but the keyboard typing being the loudest part of the video made it rather hard to listen.

    I wonder if a tool exists to strip keyboard noise from YouTube videos?

  • WhatsName 4 days ago

    How is this different from cursor?

    • IAmGraydon 4 days ago

      For one thing, it seems to be half the price.

      • anonzzzies 3 days ago

        Non-sustainable pricing is not a thing... They have VC money, when it runs out, you'll get 'shafted' (possibly, it's all expectation management of course, but they seem to set very strange expectations these days).

        • IAmGraydon 3 days ago

          I realize prices will likely go up at some point in the future, but what's a fair price for something like this? It's amazing how much time this can save a developer. $10 per month seems ridiculously cheap for the value it creates. I think the market will happily pay more.

        • ignoramous 3 days ago

          tbf, Cursor isn't exactly bootstrapped. Generally speaking, when product competition heats up, prices tend to go down.

    • valtism 4 days ago

      It's free (for now)

      • barbazoo 4 days ago

        > You are already in a free 2-week trial so you can explore all Pro features right away.

  • maille 4 days ago

    Can you write, compile and debug c++ with that?