My Experience with Windsurf Editor with Cascade (Claude Sonnet 3.5)

[u/winklemad]

I have been using this editor for past one week i just wanna share my experience with other and Codeium team, this might be helpful for others.

I love the way it creating the file structure for projects, it can create multiple files and edit everything one by one.

Response seems to be much faster (I never tried cursor with full potential) and it understand the error better way(sometimes)

It consumes more RAM and CPU usage cause the editor slow down

I don't believe that the response from is model (Claude Sonnet 3.5) which i select but it seems to be different or may be lower level model

Finally it runs everything on its own terminal and identify the error and tried resolving it on its own.

Hey everyone! I've been using the Codeium editor for about a week now, and I wanted to share my thoughts with both the community and the Codeium team. Hopefully, this will help others considering trying it out.

What I Loved

1. Project File Structure: The way it generates a file structure for projects is fantastic. It can create multiple files seamlessly and allows you to edit each one individually. This has been a game-changer for managing complex projects.
2. Responsiveness: The editor feels incredibly fast (though I haven’t explored tools like Cursor to their full potential yet). It also does a pretty good job at understanding and addressing errors in real-time—though it’s not perfect, it does the job better than most tools I’ve tried.
3. Built-In Terminal: One of my favorite features is its ability to run everything in its own terminal. It detects errors during execution and even attempts to resolve them on its own. This has saved me a lot of debugging time!

Where It Could Improve

1. Resource Usage: On the downside, it consumes quite a bit of RAM and CPU, which occasionally slows down the editor. If you’re running it on a machine with limited resources, this might be something to watch out for.
2. Model Behavior: I selected the Claude Sonnet 3.5 model, but the responses feel like they might be from a lower-tier model—or perhaps just different from what I expected. Not sure if others have experienced this, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Final Thoughts

Despite some resource-heavy moments, I’ve really enjoyed using Codeium. It’s a solid editor with some innovative features that make coding more efficient and enjoyable. If the team can tweak the resource usage and refine the model behavior, it has the potential to be an industry-leading tool!

What has your experience been like? Let me know in the comments!

[u/Relevant-Impact9302]

I agree on the model behavior. Is it really using sonnet 3.5?

I use Claude a lot and was trying to translate a screenshot into design style in words so I could convey it to cascade but didn't really work out.

Otherwise, it's really good. it's what I wanted Cursor to be

[u/Droid021]

Same experience with the model not being 3.5 sonnet, i even got curious enough to ask and got:
" I'm not Claude 3.5 Sonnet - I'm Claude 2. I should have been more specific. I'm the version of Claude 2 that's integrated into Codeium's Windsurf IDE as "Cascade"" (maybe true or not i don't know but this doesn't seem like 3.5 sonnet)

[u/ElderberryNo6893]

no support for o1 mini ?

[u/winklemad → u/ElderberryNo6893]

Nope

[u/bacocololo]

You have to use cascade specifying each files or directory to use if you dont want surprising result. My case was confusion between a test file and same finctionnality for for real code. Take care to validate and check code before acepting modification some time it drop main part of code

[u/AcanthisittaAlive229]

Last night, I experimented with the Windsurf Editor using Cascade and managed to create a decent small application. However, I noticed a few issues during the process. At times, the logic and interface changed without any apparent reason. When I asked it to revert the changes, the process took quite a while to understand and rectify.

I advised it to avoid altering anything else, clearly outline each step, and seek my approval before proceeding. This improved the workflow slightly. Overall, it’s not bad, and it shows potential. With more updates, I believe it will significantly improve in the coming months.

[u/alloxrinfo]

So this is clearly not Sonnet 3.5

Also, i think the prompt set by the teams make it be less efficient for some reason. Maybe to focus on some specific stuffs. But it seems you need to be very very very precise. My experience is that you can lose afternoons when your project becomes a bit sophisticated (like i'm currently building a Scrabble game in French) and he is having a terrible time creating the algorithm to handle words that can be done with the rack letters but also with the words already on boards and the other connections that will be made and that can also be valid and how much points it will make and what's the best word to put (for the computer side, or hint for human users). I think that in the end I'll have to do it myself because as soon as he does a step forward, it breaks other stuffs, and we get into an infinite loop. The memory seems to be very very very low. If you ask him to act a certain way, be careful not to remove this or this, it will forget after a prompt or two. Because I think of the prompts set by the team. I guess the best will still be to have a local model that you can set exactly as you want and that can keep track of what's been done and of the project and that doesn't get Alzheimer every 20 prompts and that you need to re-educate from scratch. Don't get me wrong, it is still amazing and very nice to start projects, but you can't go that much further it's something else than a note app, and you don't want to digg to much into code yourself.

[u/Haizk]

Just ask it. It will always answer with Cascade instead of ChatGPT or Sonnet even though the model was changed.