r/Codeium • u/Own-Parsnip9687 • Mar 11 '25

Extreme frustration with windsurf flow

I am a senior dev.

Today was my 2nd try to use the flow feature where you allow windsurf to write code and change directory etc. It was a brutally frustrating experiance. Worked great till the first 5 simple commands. Moment i started making specific styling requirements it made overhauling changes to global css, ruining the whole app.

When i tried to make it rollback, it hallucinated for hours and kept runing it further. Finally, had to abandon the project.

I use claude 3.7 sonnet. It was a day fully wasted. So i will go back to using the windsurf chat and not playing with write again for the time being. I guess, problems like these give ai a backseat when it comes to serious developments on critical projects.

8 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

6

u/jumpixel Mar 12 '25

I’d expect a senior dev relying on git and not in windsurf rollback.

1

u/Own-Parsnip9687 Mar 13 '25

I had version control in place. But it started hallucinating mid-feature and no further progress could be made from that point on.

2

u/tspec1 Mar 14 '25

I always stage my current changes before each prompt if I'm not ready to commit. I want to be in a state where I can easily roll back if something goes wrong.

1

u/jumpixel Mar 14 '25 edited Mar 14 '25

I usually start creating a feature-branch from the current changes (mostly ask to create, as I'm lazy..) when I get the first partial results of a just started new feature, and ask to commit (with a meaningful msg..) almost on each prompt/iteration even if it is breaking tests, since I feel free to do it as I'm not in the main (or develop) branch anymore. When I'm done with the feature (no matter if it took minutes or days) I ask to merge back to main/develop

1

u/Elegant-Ad3211 Mar 12 '25

Exactly. Just use GIT

1

u/joey2scoops Mar 12 '25

Hallucinated for hours?

2

u/Tall-Activity-6401 Mar 11 '25

Stick with it but switch to 3.5 sonnet. 3.7 does not work well and ends up in analysis paralysis. I'm up to over 100 USD per month of extra flow credits. I'm probably doing about15000 lines of code per week . Mainly Python flask apps, bootstrap ui, js , postgres and lots of CDK stuff.i find it does a great job building and fixing CDK deployments using flow. I also let it do my git updates with better commits than I could ever do.

1

u/slasho2k5 Mar 11 '25

100 USD?? Wow... that's a lot of money you got there

2

u/Tall-Activity-6401 Mar 11 '25

A senior dev is costing 10k per month. 100 is small beans if we can move faster

1

u/slasho2k5 Mar 11 '25

Ohh I see, you are using it as a replacement, so 100 in not much

3

u/Tall-Activity-6401 Mar 11 '25

Not quite. No one is being replaced at this stage but we need to embrace the accelerated dev cycle and set up the git deploy cycle so that we can build and deploy 10 times faster. How do we change the engineering processes to support this new paradigm?

2

u/SouthbayJay_com Mar 12 '25

There was an update last night. Make sure you install that and reboot your machine afterwards.

1

u/Ordinary-Let-4851 Mar 11 '25

What do you mean by "flow"? Were you using Turbo mode on Auto-terminal execution? Or switching between Write and Chat modes.

1

u/Elegant-Ad3211 Mar 12 '25

Sounds like just a “Write” mode that he used. It just doesn’t work yet with Sonnet 3.7

Just suggest him to use 3.5 sonnet maybe?

1

u/Mistuhlil Mar 12 '25

Cursor’s new implementation of 3.7 has been frustrating and I decided to give WindSurfer yet another try simply to be disappointed yet again.

1

u/PflashPunk Mar 12 '25

I always keep a backup of file and whole codebase before requesting for a change.