Windsurf Cascade
Agentic coding assistant inside the Windsurf IDE with deep codebase awareness.
About
Cascade is the AI agent built into the Windsurf editor. It maintains a live understanding of your codebase, tracking edits, terminal activity, and open files as you work, so it can take on multi-file tasks without you hand-feeding it context.
Cascade ships in two modes: Write mode, which creates files, edits code across modules, and runs terminal commands, and Chat mode, a read-only assistant for questions about your code. It supports semantic code search, web lookup, MCP tool calls, and model choice including Windsurf's own SWE-1.5 alongside Claude, GPT, and Gemini models.
What it can do
- Write mode for autonomous multi-file edits
- Chat mode for codebase Q&A
- Semantic code search and MCP tool integration
- Multiple model selection including SWE-1.5
Setup
Download the Windsurf IDE for macOS, Windows, or Linux from windsurf.com and sign in with a Windsurf account. Press Cmd/Ctrl+L to open Cascade.
Prerequisites
A Windsurf account; the desktop IDE installed.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 116; Trending score 86/100 from researcher assessment.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.