What is Windsurf?
Windsurf is an AI-native Integrated Development Environment (IDE) developed by Codeium. It is a fork of the popular Visual Studio Code (VSCode) editor, but with deeply integrated AI capabilities designed to create a seamless and powerful collaboration between developers and artificial intelligence. Unlike plugins that add AI features to an existing editor, Windsurf is built from the ground up with AI at its core, aiming to understand the entire codebase and assist the developer in more holistic ways.
Key Features
- Deep AI Integration: Windsurf goes beyond simple code completion. Its AI is context-aware of your entire project, enabling more accurate suggestions and code generation.
- AI Chat Assistant: An in-editor chat allows you to ask questions about your code, generate functions from natural language descriptions, refactor existing code, and more, all without leaving the IDE.
- Advanced Code Completion: Leveraging Codeium’s powerful models, Windsurf provides rapid, multi-line code completions in over 70 programming languages.
- Project-Wide Context: The AI agent can scan and understand your entire repository, making it easier to work with large and complex codebases.
- Familiar VSCode Experience: Since it’s a fork of VSCode, developers can enjoy the familiar interface, extensions, and keybindings they are already used to, ensuring a minimal learning curve.
Use Cases
- Accelerated Development: Speed up the coding process by generating boilerplate code, functions, and even entire classes with simple natural language prompts.
- Codebase Understanding: Quickly get up to speed with a new or unfamiliar codebase by asking the AI assistant to explain parts of the code.
- Rapid Prototyping: Build and iterate on ideas faster by letting the AI handle repetitive and mundane coding tasks.
- Code Refactoring: Improve code quality by asking the AI to refactor complex functions or suggest better implementations.
Getting Started
Getting started with Windsurf is straightforward. Since it functions like VSCode, you can begin coding immediately after installation. Here’s a “Hello World” style example of using its AI generation feature in Python:
- Download and install Windsurf from the official Codeium website.
- Create a new file, for example,
app.py. - Inside the file, type a comment describing the function you want to create.
- The AI will automatically suggest the complete function implementation.
```python
A function that takes a name as an argument and returns a greeting string
def greet(name): “”” Takes a name as an argument and returns a greeting string. “”” return f”Hello, {name}!”
Example usage
print(greet(“Windsurf”))
Pricing
Windsurf follows Codeium’s pricing model, which is Freemium. It offers a generous free tier for individual developers that includes most of the core AI features. For teams and enterprises requiring more advanced capabilities, such as self-hosting, advanced personalization, and priority support, there are paid subscription plans available.