Windsurf
Ranked 3 of 9 AI code editors by recommenders
Fast agentic AI code editor, a VSCode fork, praised for coding help and codebase context. Most common caveat: frequent pricing changes.
Fast agentic AI code editor, a VSCode fork, praised for coding help and codebase context. Most common caveat: frequent pricing changes.
69 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 42
- criticize it
- 27
- approval share
- 61%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 42 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong agentic coding experience
“Once I was able to get some time in Windsurf I churned through my ideas in 2 hours.”
Comment from 24 Dec 2025 in “Anyone else struggling to sleep because of unlimited possibilities of building?” “It's really good. I'm a senior engineer and do a mix of agentic and regular coding”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It” “When things really broke open for me was when I adopted windsurf with Opus 4”
Comment from 12 Jan 2026 in “Don't fall into the anti-AI hype” - Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It”
- Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It”
Good codebase context and indexing
“I've found their ability to pull in relevant context improves tasks in exactly the way you're describing.”
Comment from 12 Mar 2026 in “Are LLMs not getting better?” “For Windsurf at least, it makes it easier to control context.”
Comment from 23 May 2026 in “Microsoft Drops Claude Code After Budget Overrun” “Windsurf kept memories a little better than Claude”
Comment from 20 Mar 2026 in “Ask HN: Who is still using Windsurf and why?” - Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?”
- Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Cursor - Securely Indexing Large Codebases”
Good value for an agentic editor
“Windsurf is somehow still the best deal for an agentic VSCode fork”
Comment from 24 Nov 2025 in “Claude Opus 4.5” “excellent outputs at low cost”
Comment from 28 Feb 2026 in “Addressing Antigravity Bans and Reinstating Access”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Pricing changes and rising costs
“Windsurf has just made a shitty move by changing their pricing structure from credits to rolling window percentages”
Comment from 25 Mar 2026 in “Ask HN: $50 monthly budget, which coding models would you recommend now?” “their pricing is what drove me to not roll it out across my company”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It” “Our previous credit-based billing model charged the same rate for both simple and complex requests.”
Comment from 19 Mar 2026 in “Our new Windsurf pricing plans” - Comment from 8 Jul 2026 in “SWE-1.7 Reach Near GPT 5.5 and Opus Intelligence”
- Comment from 8 Jul 2026 in “SWE-1.7 Reach Near GPT 5.5 and Opus Intelligence”
Inconsistent results across models
“It has the quirk of deciding for itself on any given day whether to use ChatGPT 5.2 or Claude Opus 4.5”
Comment from 19 Jan 2026 in “I was a top 0.01% Cursor user. Here's why I switched to Claude Code 2.0” “Windsurf results vary, even when I use it with Claude models.”
Comment from 9 Nov 2025 in “Toolkit to help you get started with Spec-Driven Development” Breaks unrelated code, weak architecture
“the AI breaks unrelated things while fixing others”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Speed at the cost of quality: Study of use of Cursor AI in open source projects” “write great functions but terrible architecture”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: I mapped System Design concepts to AI Prompts to stop bad code” “All of them get overwhelmed when there is something to implement or change in the codebase”
Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?” - Comment from 18 Nov 2025 in “Google Antigravity”
Weaker results than Cursor
“Windsurf for example, which we no longer use due to the inferior results.”
Comment from 5 Mar 2026 in “Something is afoot in the land of Qwen” “aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster”
Comment from 22 Apr 2026 in “SpaceX and Cursor partnership. Right to acquire Cursor later this year”
Other AI code editors people recommend
The four most recommended other AI code editors, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cursor | 853 | 820 | 51% | 13 | 1 yr65 owners | — |
| Google Antigravity | 337 | 576 | 37% | 13 | 1 mo26 owners | — |
| WindsurfThis page | 42 | 27 | 61% | 10 | — | — |
| AWS Kiro | 36 | 37 | 49% | 11 | — | — |
| JetBrains Air | 13 | 21 | 38% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 75 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Now it's barely any messages for paid models, completely watered down.”
“stopped offering customer support, raised prices, dismantled the brand, and raised prices again”
“As a (former) Windsurf user I'm pretty happy with the progress of the Cognition/Devin ecosystem”
“For Windsurf at least, it makes it easier to control context.”
“it's been pretty good for providing a Cursor-like experience; pricing is pretty similar”
“aren't even in the same universe. Cursor is just so much better, faster”
“Not bad for my second week of using it”
“Windsurf has just made a shitty move by changing their pricing structure from credits to rolling window percentages”
“Windsurf offers free models all the time.”
“BYOK keys work across prompts, agents, and autocomplete”
“Windsurf kept memories a little better than Claude”
“Our previous credit-based billing model charged the same rate for both simple and complex requests.”
“the AI breaks unrelated things while fixing others”
“After a while they wanted to uninstall some tools or switch to others.”
“I've found their ability to pull in relevant context improves tasks in exactly the way you're describing.”
“Windsurf for example, which we no longer use due to the inferior results.”
“excellent outputs at low cost”
“They'll all worth the cost with the exception of Devin”
“I couldn't tell it apart from windsurf besides the icon in my dock”
“I prefer windsurf indexing method”
“I found Windsurf excellent for what it does, but do miss my preferred $EDITOR”
“It has the quirk of deciding for itself on any given day whether to use ChatGPT 5.2 or Claude Opus 4.5”
“When things really broke open for me was when I adopted windsurf with Opus 4”
“write great functions but terrible architecture”
“Once I was able to get some time in Windsurf I churned through my ideas in 2 hours.”
“So of course great kudos to the developers of Cursor, Antigravity, Windsurf, OpenCode and all the other editors.”
“Windsurf is at least 10x better than Cursor in my opinion”
“The plugins all still work with normal Windsurf login.”
“asking it questions about the codebase”
“All of them get overwhelmed when there is something to implement or change in the codebase”
“the easier way would have been to pay cursor/windsurf etc.”
“Windsurf is somehow still the best deal for an agentic VSCode fork”
“clearly just quickly build on Windsurfs already rather issue laden code base”
“Windsurf results vary, even when I use it with Claude models.”
“their pricing is what drove me to not roll it out across my company”
“the UX of Windsurf is actually a legit value add”
“instructing users to run a command that will attempt to upgrade all packages on their system is nuts”
“it still feels like Windsurf has the net best user experience”
“they were first to the terminal-inside-aichat pattern”
“It's really good. I'm a senior engineer and do a mix of agentic and regular coding”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.