I've had to restart alot recently, and it's getting tiring. Restarting means not just restarting the app but also the many procedures that I have running. Once a week is fine, but honestly, check this out: January 16, 2026 restart update
Love the intention behind @Windsurf Codemaps, which are "AI-annotated structured maps of your code, powered by SWE-1.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5." to enable "hyper-contextualized codebase understanding, grounded in precise code navigation".
Or put another way: a map to help find your way in a thicket of vibed spaghetti code.
I've been using @Spacemacs for a few years now. Recently, I started using @VS Code to "see what I was missing". I liked that linters and such seemed to work a bit smoother out of the box. I kept hearing:
VSCode is dead, Cursor is the way. Then I started hearing:
Windsurf is the way, Cursor is dead. Today I used Windsurf for the full day. Some raw thoughts: I like the icons! Treating it like an "op autocomplete" was pretty powerful! It made refactoring and quick changes really really fast. Asking it to make a bunch of changes doesn't flow well for me yet. I guess it's hard for me to grok the diffs quickly, and it just feels faster to be pushing code around myself. maybe this will change with experience.
When i wanted to "think hard" i found the autocomplete kind of annoying. i was trying to write some weird recursive code with bad variables names to quickly prototype. it would have been nice if I could say "chill out on the autocompletes until i finish this thought", maybe like a toggle somewhere? does this exist already? the center pop up menu is cool. how do i make the cascade drawer close from the keyboard? Cmd +B closes the left drawer -- something similar for "cascade" would be good to know. overall, i enjoyed it. will use again tomorrow.
There's a lot of options for models these days. I've been using Claude 3.7 but I'm curious what's been working well for others. What model are you using and why?
Is the thinking version of @Claude by Anthropic worth the extra credit spend? Does @DeepSeek work well enough to save some credits? Is it worth trying any of the @ChatGPT by OpenAI models?
Windsurf is an IDE that enables anyone to collaborate in lockstep with AI. Built by the Codeium team, the Windsurf Editor combines the best of copilot and agent systems to help you ship products faster, leveraging better context to provide better suggestions.
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)
The modern coding superpower. State-of-the-art suggestions on 30+ languages in your IDE: VSCode, JetBrains, Vim/Neovim, Emacs, and uniquely as a Chrome extension, enabling it on notebooks (Jupyter, Colab, etc), websites like JSFiddle, and web IDEs like Gitpod.
