Discovering Windsurf: The AI Tool Transforming Software Development

As the leader of product at Windsurf, I'm thrilled to share our journey towards revolutionizing software engineering workflows and empowering developers to code anywhere, anytime.

1. Speaker: Kevin, leads product at Windsurf.
2. Windsurf's velocity in the industry is incredible, like being on a kite on the ocean.
3. A year ago, no one had heard of an agent, now millions use Windsurf editor daily.
4. The shared timeline between human and AI is Windsurf's "secret sauce," making users feel like it reads their minds.
5. Pre-autocomplete, everything was manual; services like C-Pilot started abstracting small edits for users.
6. With the advent of Windsurf's agent in late 2024, they could do more for the user, editing multiple files at once and executing terminal commands directly inside the editor.
7. Windsurf aims to change how software gets created, with a timeline that handles actions taken outside the IDE.
8. A developer's workflow happens mostly outside the editor; hence, Windsurf needs to read and ingest context from every source they use.
9. Three categories of information inform code generation: coding-related, external sources, and "metalearning" (organizational best practices).
10. An example workflow: building a new page on a data viz dashboard, starting from Slack, moving to Google Docs, Jira, Figma, and finally writing code in Windsurf.
11. Post-code completion, tasks like opening PRs, getting reviews, merging into main, deploying SEO analytics remain.
12. Windsurf can fetch context from Google Docs, read Figma files, and connect to various MCP services for user convenience.
13. The AI needs to take action beyond just writing code: interacting with third-party services, provisioning API keys, writing design docs, PRDs, wireframing, testing, etc.
14. Windsurf's goal is to do everything a human software engineer would do, not just write code.
15. Example workflow for building a new web app: running codebase-relevant terminal commands, using Windsurf browser previews, and iterating visually with the agent.
16. Using GitHub MCP to open pull requests, informing descriptions and test plans based on context from previous PRs.
17. Launching windsurf reviews for automated code review and suggesting changes asynchronously.
18. Releasing a one-click service to Netlify for deploying with Windsurf's custom tool integrations.
19. Windinsurf is now able to read everything that a software engineer can and do almost everything that a software engineer can do.
20. Aiming towards a future where Windsurf works 99% on its own, only asking for final approval from the user.
21. This vision includes coding anytime, anywhere: at home, in bed, on the bus, voice-activated, etc.
22. The AI model needs improvement to tackle the complexities of this timeline problem and revolutionize software development.
23. Introducing SU1 (Software Engineering Universe 1), a new software engineering model that handles software engineering workflows, not just code generation.
24. SU1 is trained using two main offline eval benchmarks: end-to-end task benchmark and conversational suite task benchmark.

Source: AI Engineer via YouTube

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