Earlier this week, we announced that Windsurf had been acquired by Cognition, the legendary team behind Devin. The two teams have been hard at work ramping up on each other’s codebases, and with our combined firepower we’re excited to keep pushing Windsurf to be the best agentic IDE. Without further ado, here’s what’s in Wave 11.
Voice
As Cascade has gotten better, we noticed that the tasks users are giving it have gotten more complex. Instead of just asking Cascade to make simple edits, users are relying on Cascade to build out entire features, perform large refactors, and implement PRs end to end. More complex tasks mean longer prompts with more information which can often be laborious to type out. In this wave, we’re bringing voice support to Cascade. This means that users can just speak to Cascade rather than having to type things out (though it doesn’t talk back…yet)
Named Checkpoints & @-mentioning conversations
We’ve also seen Cascade conversations get longer and longer. That means it’s important to be able to create named checkpoints (i.e. “snapshots”) in the conversation that users can easily revert back to.
Furthermore, as Cascade tackles bigger scope tasks, it’s important for it to be able to reference past conversations. Imagine you ask Cascade to implement a feature in one conversation. In the next conversation, you might want Cascade to add tests for that feature. Now, you can @-mention the first conversation so Cascade has full context of it as it goes to write tests for you.
Deeper Browser Integration
In Wave 10, we introduced the Windsurf Browser on the premise that so much of software engineering happens outside the IDE and in the browser. In this wave, we’re making the integration deeper by giving Cascade access to more Browser tools. For example, you can chat with Cascade about tabs that are open in the Browser using @-mentions, and Cascade can take screenshots and retrieve DOM trees:
For frontend development, the browser often has critical information that developers end up copying and pasting back and forth into Cascade. Think things like screenshots of a broken UI, console logs, DOM elements, and more. Now, Cascade can intelligently decide to collect this information by itself – no need to copy/paste or select specific information to send to Cascade. We think tightening this feedback loop between code and the browser will greatly accelerate frontend development work.
Planning Mode
Planning mode has been a huge hit with our users! Collaborating with Cascade to plan out and monitor progress on long-horizon tasks provides the right combination of speed and control. Turns out, this planning step also improves the actual quality and accuracy of Cascade’s responses. Because of this, we are turning planning mode on by default. You can still disable it anytime from the Cascade panel.
Improvements to JetBrains
We first brought Cascade to JetBrains back in Wave 7, and since then many dedicated JetBrains users have enjoyed the best agentic AI experience but in the comfort of their familiar IDE. This was especially important for our enterprise customers, many of whom have large development teams working on JetBrains IDEs. We’ve continued to invest in making the JetBrains experience better, and in this wave we’re bringing Planning Mode, Workflows, and file-based Rules all to JetBrains.
Miscellaneous
There’s a host of smaller, quality of life improvements in this wave. Including:
- @-mention terminal: Now you can @-mention terminal in Cascade.
- Auto-continue: You can turn on the Auto-Continue setting to have Cascade automatically continue its response if it hits a limit.
- MCP OAuth and Streamable HTTP: Support for more MCP servers with easier and more secure authentication by integrating the new Streamable HTTP transport (replaces SSE) and MCP authentication (replaces access tokens or API keys in the config).
- Global .codeiumignore file: Important for enterprise customers who use Windsurf across lots of repos. Now, you can enforce ignore rules across all repositories by placing .codeiumignore in the ~/.codeium/ folder
Thanks to our users for sticking with us through ups and downs. We’re excited to keep building the best agentic IDE for you. More to come soon. Until then, surf’s up!