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