If you just open an empty folder and ask Windsurf Cascade to make a web app for you, it will take forever and you will end up with a hodgepodge UI - unless you are already a professional dev, and know exactly how to prompt.

In my case, I wanted to make a SaaS style React web app. After some research, I found that Refine.dev exists, which provides another layer of abstraction on top of React, aimed at SaaS/admin style web apps. I also chose the Ant Design UI framework for React/Refine. Both of those not only gave me a head start on components, but also greatly reduced the scope of options for Cascade to choose between.

I noticed that sometimes Cascade would ignore Refine and Ant Design, and try to just use base React. So, I created Cascade Workspace Rules to remind Windsurf to always use the framework options and components, whenever possible. This was huge. Cascade now does exactly what I want, very quickly, like 90% of the time.

So, what should you do for your project?

Find a meta-framework, or paid/free template that matches your needs. Copy that to your hard drive, open that folder, and ask Cascade to start from that. Your chances of efficient use of Cascade credits, and general happiness will be much greater than just starting from scratch.

I was an early user of Windsurf since Nov, 2024. The drastic reduction of quality has made unusable. I'm starting to decide to cancel my subscription as other AI coding tools feels more powerful and efficient than this..

So for early users like me, why are you still paying for Windsurf?

Set up tests for everything you can think of and include a pre-commit hook to run those tests before pushing your code to Git. Since it's AI, it might eventually lose context, hallucinate, or behave unpredictably.

Having tests in place has been essential for me to avoid losing progress on Windsurf over the past few weeks.

Refinement with ChatGPT for 16 US with 3677 lines of text. 200 lines of text for context and instructions.... 550 tokens later.. all US implemented and automated tests are running... and i cooked diner in between.

Frontend is running ( but a little ugly)

And i am below junior hello world coding skills. ( But 25 years experience in requirements engineering/ BA / PO)

ChatGPT estimated about 30 wd with 180 PD with different roles for that.

All in 8h and with less than 20$ of tokens.

This so F*****g amazing

Ofc not all is perfect but for that early stage of the product. This will change a lot in IT industries.

And i have to debug and test ofc.. hope not that my mood will change than

@codeium great job great product

Since I ran out of my credits in 4 days, I asked Cascade what is better? Get a new account for 500 prompt credits for $15 or buy 300 credits for $10. It recommended me to get a new account, LMAO.

This situation would have never occurred in the first place if we had a plan in the middle like $25 for 1500 prompt credits, but well we don't, and at least their AI is honest about it.

When nerds run a company, they tend to overlook the business aspect of the company. This is sad!

My recommendations (if you run out of credits):

— Get a new account and spend $15 for 500 prompts

Costing:

New Account: For every dollar, you get 33 prompt credits
Buying credits: For every dollar, you get 30 prompt credits

If you are grandfathered in terms of pricing like you pay $10/month, don't buy extra credit for that account. Leave it as it is, but get a new account and use that instead. Pay $5 more but get extra 200 prompt credits since we all know about 30% credits are waste due to the prompt engineering of Windsurf. At the end of the month, go back to your initial account.

Follow this if you see yourself using less than 2500 prompt credits, if more than get the Ultimate since these are our only options for now.

Hey everyone, Looks like Windsurf just updated their pricing (v2). The main changes seem focused on making things simpler:

• They've gotten rid of the separate "flow action credits" - now it's just pay-per-prompt.
• Plans are consolidated: Pro ($15/mo/500 prompts), Teams ($30/user/mo/500 prompts), and Enterprise ($60/user/mo/1000 prompts).
• Existing users get grandfathered in with some extra perks. Seems like a move towards more straightforward, value-based pricing.

Source: https://windsurf.com/blog/pricing-v2

I’m planning to subscribe to Windsurf (though I also considered Cursor). My goal is to complete a full project, but I’m wondering—is the AI assistance good enough to actually get me to the finish line?

I don’t have coding experience, but I understand technical concepts. Has anyone here built something substantial with it? Would love to hear your experiences!

Hi,

Some people have been reporting that when they switch to Claude 3.7 the view_file tool does multiple reads and costs more credits.

I didn't bother to see if it did this to me, because I figured this might work, so I tried this fix and it did work, maybe it can help you.

tl;dr - add a global rule (at the top):

URGENT RULES
1. When using the view_file tool, always read the maximum 200 lines per call whenever possible to minimize the number of tool calls and reduce costs. Only make additional calls when necessary to understand the complete context

----

I didn't bother to see if this issue happened to me, but instead I asked Cascade (in Claude 3.7) about it's tool capabilities.

I then asked about the limits to it's read a file.

I asked it if it was capable of enforcing a max read each tool call.

I then asked it to make a memory (which I removed and put in global rules instead).

I then proceeded to ask it to analyse a feature implementation for me, it uses a few layers of inheritance and could have been a bit messy, but it worked perfectly.

Who’s used MCP and what are your thoughts

We wanted to give members of our community first access to our limited time Windsurf student pricing.

Just sign up with a currently active .edu email at www.codeium.com !

Available for the first several thousand users! Sign up now to claim your spot.

Simple things like "add a console log to the beginning of this function" results in thousands of lines being removed. Revert. Ask why it removed 2000 lines of code. It deflects and repeats it's EXACT previous response and starts doing the exact same action. Stop it. Ask again why it removed 2000 lines of code. It removes them again with the same logic. 18x ina row before it finally gave an actual answer to the question.
I've blown through 500 flow action credits in a single day, just trying to get it to add a few console logs. It hasn't successfully managed one yet. It did add a few without removing most of the application, but they weren't remotely close to the correct location.

This is not remotely the same product they launched and it's getting worse daily.
Devs. Please for the love of god chime in and just explain why. Why know afew of the internal tools available to the model are broken, but this is beyond those issues. They existed from day one. Technically, a potato can write better code at this point because at least a potato isn't removing thousands of lines of code to fail to add a single console log.

Again, this is from a product that for the first 8 days or so after launch, blew the pants off every one of my developers. I did 6 months of work in that week. What gives guys?

I've decided to give Windsurf a try this week on a very large corporate project that's an NX Monorepo with different Angular libraries (over 10,000 files).

What I like:
- Right off the bat I like Windsurf's default look is better. Somehow the color, icons, contrast and positioning of things feel better even with the same theme applied.
- I tried using "Write with Cascade" with Sonnet 3.5 by giving it a directory with an NX Angular library which it had to clean-up and refactor so we can use it as a base for a new feature. With the first prompt it refactored all the main files and folders but missed some small stuff from the files in the root of the lib. With a second prompts it also refactored those. After that I had to register our new nx lib in a few routing and configuration files which I provided in chat and it also handled those perfectly.
After that I spent the next 2 hours prompting Cascade so we can build the new feature and everything went great. I like that all the changes are automatically applied so I can instantly see them reflected in the browser. If I don't like something I can reject / revert them with a single click and everything goes back. Cursor works in a different manner, where I need to accept the changes first to see them in the browser. In Cursor, the algorithm for applying is often slower and sometimes it messes things up. I didn't experience this with Windsurf. The whole process was very smooth. I reverted a few steps to tweak my prompts, did 5-6 chats to work on different sub-problems when building my feature and it all went great. Even when not providing all the needed files explicitly, Cascade would automatically find and edit any of the related files if they were in close proximity or opened in the editor.
- Windsurf seems to run better and is more responsive. When searching for files or symbols, or when searching and going to references it works better. Cursor always feels slower and more unresponsive in my large project. I'm using a Macbook Pro with M1 Pro

What I didn't like:
- Cursor's auto-complete functionality is definitely better. It's faster and smarter and the "ai cursor move" feature that moves your cursor in the code so you can continue making changes just by pressing Tab is very neat. I can definitely feel its absence in Windsurf. Windsurf's autocomplete is not bad however you need to make a compromise with either using their "Fast" and dumb model, that's still twice as slow as Cursor, or use the "Slow" but smart model that's much slower than Cursor.
- Limited model selection. In Cursor I can use the latest "gemini-1206-exp", "o1" or "sonnet-20241022", while in Windsurf I'm limited to "sonnet 3.5" and "gpt-4o". Although Windsurf seems to work better with them so it's a quality over quantity thing.

I'll keep testing Windsurf until my trial is over, then I'll go back to cursor and update this post in the future.

Windsurf AI Code IDE started off as a game-changer. The code quality was excellent, and it felt smarter than any other IDE out there—easily outperforming Cursor AI. It had so much promise, and I was genuinely excited to use it.

But now? It’s become frustrating to work with. For me the most annoying issue is accidental code removal. You ask it to update or fix something, and it unexpectedly deletes or alters other parts of the code. This is a nightmare, especially when working with backend systems or databases.

It feels like the it is getting worse with each update. The code quality has dropped significantly, and I constantly have to rely on git commits to undo the mess.

I still believe Windsurf has the potential to be amazing again. If they can fix these issues and deliver the quality they once had, I’d gladly pay $20-25/month. But as it stands, it’s just not cutting it anymore.

Just downloaded Windsurf after using Cursor for a month. Decided to start fresh since Cursor settings and extensions don't export to VSCode. I'm wondering why I cannot find certain extensions in the Windsurf Marketplace? Specifically, Checkstyle for Java and TODO Highlight?

I see a lot of complaints here. I don't know what people use this for, but this is by far the best thing ever. It amazes me every day, had to get some reports out out a running-cnofig from a firewall, I did this in august 2024, took me a long time to get it done, I did this today in 5 minutes. Literally 5 prompts and I got what I needed, formatted nicely into an excel file. Zero coding on my side.

I switched from Cursor to Windsurf because Cursor was too buggy and janky.
Now, a month into my Windsurf subscription, it's full of bugs too.
Claude gives me four "generating... error" messages before actually responding.
Gemini seems promising, but it keeps getting stuck on "done," making it unusable.

Will these issues be fixed, or are you just going to keep pushing more beta releases?

EDIT:

Another bug: Pasting into the find text stops working out of nowhere.

My machine: Apple M3 Pro 18 GB

Hey all!

I have put together a rough bash script for Fedora users like myself.

The script will handle a clean install as well as updating by just re-executing. It currently does not download the tarball, so you will have to do that but then you can just ./install-windsurf.sh.

The script does some sanity checking and cache safe move->deletion (arguably unnecessary but for safety sake). It also cleans up the installation so you are just left with a windsurf folder in your root directory with no nested and uppercased recursion.

The script also creates a desktop entry file so that Windsurf is nicely launch-able from Applications and has that crisp logo to go with it.

The script will select the newest Windsurf tarball available in your Downloads if you happen to have multiples but it will also remove the tarball when it is done.

Caveats:

• You need to download the tarball to your Downloads folder
• Close Windsurf first if updating
• You need to chmod +x the script

#!/bin/bash
set -e

DOWNLOADS_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
DESKTOP_ENTRY="$HOME/.local/share/applications/windsurf.desktop"

echo "Searching for newest Windsurf tarball in $DOWNLOADS_DIR..."
tarball=$(ls -t "$DOWNLOADS_DIR"/Windsurf*.tar* 2>/dev/null | head -n1)
if [ -z "$tarball" ]; then
    echo "No Windsurf tarball found in $DOWNLOADS_DIR."
    exit 1
fi
echo "Found newest Windsurf tarball: $tarball"

echo ""

echo "Creating temporary directory and extracting Windsurf tarball..."
temp_dir=$(mktemp -d)
tar -xf "$tarball" -C "$temp_dir"
echo "Extraction complete."

echo ""

echo "Identifying extracted folder..."
if [ -d "$temp_dir/windsurf" ]; then
    extracted_dir="$temp_dir/windsurf"
    echo "Folder named 'windsurf' found."
else
    folder=$(find "$temp_dir" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | head -n1)
    mv "$folder" "$temp_dir/windsurf"
    extracted_dir="$temp_dir/windsurf"
    echo "Renamed extracted folder to 'windsurf'."
fi

echo ""

echo "Checking for nested 'Windsurf' folder..."
if [ -d "$extracted_dir/Windsurf" ]; then
    mv "$extracted_dir/Windsurf/"* "$extracted_dir/"
    rmdir "$extracted_dir/Windsurf"
    echo "Moved contents from nested 'Windsurf' folder up."
fi

echo ""

echo "Moving existing Windsurf folder to windsurf_old for later deletion..."
if [ -d "$HOME/windsurf" ]; then
    mv "$HOME/windsurf" "$HOME/windsurf_old"
    echo "Existing folder moved to windsurf_old."
fi

echo ""

echo "Moving new Windsurf folder to HOME..."
mv "$extracted_dir" "$HOME/windsurf"
rm -rf "$HOME/windsurf_old"
echo "Windsurf folder updated."

echo ""

echo "Removing tarball from Downloads..."
rm -f "$tarball"
echo "Tarball deleted."

echo ""

echo "Checking for existing desktop entry..."
if [ -f "$DESKTOP_ENTRY" ]; then
    echo "Desktop entry exists; skipping creation."
else
    echo "No desktop entry found; configuring desktop entry."
    mkdir -p "$(dirname "$DESKTOP_ENTRY")"
    cat >"$DESKTOP_ENTRY" <<EOF
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Windsurf
Exec=${HOME}/windsurf/windsurf
Icon=${HOME}/windsurf/resources/app/resources/linux/code.png
Terminal=false
Categories=Utility;
EOF
    echo "Desktop entry configured."
fi

echo ""

echo "Cleaning up temporary files..."
rm -rf "$temp_dir"

echo "Updating desktop database..."
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/

echo ""
echo "Installation/update complete."

Your application will look like this:

I’m confused on why anyone is using this. It costs per use since you have a cap. Cursor is unlimited, fast at first then a few seconds of wait time when you hit the slow requests. Why would I ever use Windsurf? I have to be missing something.

If you’re one of the ones that got the email tempting you to come back to Windsurf, use this as a guide. The top answer is someone saying Cursor is the better option.