Windsurf

The name on the roadmap is not the name on the product

If you came here from a roadmap, a tutorial, or a colleague's recommendation, start with this: Windsurf ships under a different name now.

Its own documentation puts the date on it. "On June 2, 2026, Windsurf is becoming Devin Desktop." The application is the same application. Cognition, which makes the autonomous coding agent Devin, folded the editor into that brand. Existing installations were not asked to migrate. The change arrived "as a regular over-the-air update", and "All of your Windsurf settings will be ported to Devin Desktop automatically."

So if you have Windsurf installed and it is now called something else, nothing has gone wrong. And if you are evaluating it today, the thing to evaluate is called Devin Desktop.

What Devin Desktop is

It is a code editor built around an agent rather than around autocomplete.

The distinction is the whole proposition. A completion plugin predicts the rest of the line you are typing: it works inside your current file and its unit of work is a few tokens. This works at the scale of a task. You describe a change in a chat pane, and the editor reads across the repository, edits several files, runs commands, and reads the results before deciding what to do next.

How it finds the code it needs

Where the agent gets its context is what separates a tool that can edit your codebase from one that can only edit your file.

The documentation describes a retrieval system rather than a large prompt. "The entire local codebase is then indexed (including files that are not open), and relevant code snippets are sourced by Devin Desktop's retrieval engine as you write code." Open files get weight of their own, being "the current file and other open files in your IDE, which are often very relevant to the code you are currently writing", and the system "uses LLMs to perform retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on your codebase."

That is retrieval applied to source code, and the reasoning is the same as for documents. A repository does not fit in a context window, and sending all of it would be expensive and worse, for the reasons context engineering sets out.

There is also a manual override, which matters more than it sounds. @-mentions let you name a file or symbol in the chat input and have it included. Automatic retrieval is a guess, and being able to say "this file, definitely" is the difference between arguing with the tool and directing it.

What replaced Cascade

Every piece of writing about this product from before mid-2026 will mention Cascade, the agent the editor was built around. It is on its way out: "The existing Cascade agent remains available through July."

Its replacement is Devin Local, and the documentation is specific about what changed.

It is the same agent as the terminal tool. Devin Local uses "the same agent harness as Devin CLI directly inside Devin Desktop", operating "on your machine with access to your local files, tools, and environment." The editor and the command-line agent stopped being separate products that shared a vendor.

It uses subagents. It "can spawn independent subagents to handle subtasks, either in the foreground or background", and those subagents can be defined as markdown files under an agents/ directory. This is context isolation as a product feature: a subtask explores in its own window and returns a result, instead of filling the main conversation with everything it read.

It is cheaper to run. The documentation claims it is "significantly more token-efficient, with a greater focus on prompt caching", reducing task tokens by up to 30 percent compared to Cascade. That figure is the vendor's own measurement of their own product. Prompt caching is why a claim like that is plausible. An agent re-sends a growing conversation on every turn, so caching the stable prefix is the single largest saving available.

Permissions work differently. Cascade's auto-execution levels are replaced with "a more fine-grained permissions system" for controlling what the agent may do unsupervised, which is the decision every agentic tool eventually has to expose, since the useful setting differs between reading a file and running a migration.

One honest note for anyone migrating today. The documentation lists features Devin Local does not yet support that Cascade did, including memories, workflows, code lenses, app deploys, conversation sharing and arena mode. If you depend on one of those, check its current status rather than trusting this sentence.

Where an agentic editor sits against a terminal agent

Codex is the comparison worth making, because it is the same capability with the interface moved. The fact that Devin Local now shares a harness with Devin CLI makes it sharper: the same agent is offered in both places, and the question is only which one you want in front of you.

An editor keeps the file tree, the diff view, the debugger and the running application where you already are. When the agent proposes a change, you are in the place you would review it. That is worth a lot when the change is one you intend to read closely, which for anything going to production is most of them.

A terminal agent gives that up and gets composition back. It runs in a pipeline, on a server, in a container, across a repository you never opened. Work you are not going to read line by line does not need an editor around it.

These are less competitors than two places to put the same thing, and which fits depends on whether you plan to read the output.

Reading documentation for a product that moves this fast

The lesson here is not about one editor.

A category this young reorganizes faster than the writing about it. In a few months this product changed its name, retired the agent it was built around, and replaced it with one sharing an architecture with a different product. Every tutorial written before that describes something that no longer exists, and none of them says so.

Two habits help. Check the vendor's current documentation rather than a summary, including this one, because a summary is always older than the product. And when a URL redirects, read the redirect as information: windsurf.com answers a permanent redirect to devin.ai/desktop, which told me more about the state of this product than any article did.

Further reading

• Devin, Devin Desktop FAQ: the rename, the Cascade timeline, and what happens to existing installs.
• Devin, Devin Local agent: subagents, the shared harness, the token-efficiency claim, and the feature gaps.
• Devin, Context awareness: how the codebase is indexed and retrieved.
• Codex: the same capability with a terminal interface.