Windsurf
The agentic IDE that navigates and edits entire projects.
Olya's profile
- What sets it apart
- Windsurf is now called Devin Desktop: on 2 June 2026 Cognition folded the IDE into the Devin brand, leaving accounts, plans and extensions untouched. What really sets it apart from other editors is that it opens on an agent command centre rather than on your code, with Cascade sitting alongside Devin Local and Devin Cloud sessions running in the background. Because it speaks the Agent Client Protocol, released under Apache 2.0, third-party agents such as Codex, Claude Agent and Gemini CLI can run in the same window as the in-house one.
- Strengths
- Cascade reads and edits whole projects, reasoning across many files at once, and inline plus Tab completion stays unlimited on every plan, the free one included. Cloud sessions run on separate worktrees, so a long job can keep moving while you carry on writing your own code. On Pro the in-house SWE-1.7 model and the large open-source models don't eat into your quota, which keeps day-to-day cost predictable.
- When to use it
- It pays off on a large existing codebase, where the value lies in navigating and changing many files together rather than generating a single one. It also suits anyone who wants several agents in one place instead of switching tools for every task, and who needs to hand long jobs to the cloud instead of sitting through them. Coming from VS Code the move is cheap: extensions and keybindings carry over.
- When to avoid it
- If your work is code-first and you reach for an agent only occasionally, an editor that opens on the agent panel is extra friction, and Devin Local is still in preview with openly documented gaps. The free plan restricts which models you can use, while the $20 Pro tier's daily and weekly quotas go quickly on heavy work: past them you pay API rates, and the next step up is the $200-a-month Max tier. If a terminal agent already works for you, the IDE adds a layer you may never touch.