Windsurf Wave 3

Cognition6 min read

The tl;dr highlights of Wave 3:

  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) Support: bring in more tools for Cascade to access

  • Tab-to-jump: an addition to our predictive passive AI in the text editor

  • “Turbo” Mode: let Cascade run all terminal commands for you

  • Drag-and-drop Images: highly requested feature to make using image inputs easier

  • Custom App Icons: a small thank you to our paying users

You can read the full changelog here.

If you are new to the Windsurf family, we group a set of major feature releases together in a single update that we call a Wave. After introducing Cascade-specific features such as image inputs, Memories, web search, and more in the first two Waves, Wave 3 was all about rounding out the overall Windsurf Editor experience (Cascade included) to simply be the best AI editor in every aspect.

There’s a lot here, so let’s unpack Wave 3…

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Support

In late November 2024, our partners at Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol, or MCP for short. The core idea was to establish a common manner for data providers to expose their information via MCP servers for AI applications to consume via MCP clients. In the last couple of months, MCP has exploded in popularity, with many MCP servers built for a variety of services. While we have built custom parsing and retrieval logic for critical data sources such as codebases and URLs, we recognize there are a lot of simpler-structured data sources that have information that could be relevant for an AI Flow system like Cascade.

As part of Wave 3, we are rolling out MCP server support to Cascade. You can specify MCP servers via JSON within the Windsurf Setting panel:

After you’ve specified an MCP server, Cascade will have access to calling it as flow action tool calls similar to searching through code, running a terminal command, or making an edit. It becomes another potential tool to call (so not guaranteed to be called, but should be called when appropriate).

This is currently available for individual plans, and will be coming to Teams and Enterprise plans shortly (with administrative control). To understand limitations on how many MCP servers can be added at once, credit usage, and more, please refer to our MCP docs.

Tab to Jump

While Cascade is the cornerstone of the Windsurf Editor, the passive predictive AI experience in the text editor is also critical to speeding developers when it is a matter of point edits. The whole generative AI code assistant landscape started a couple years ago with Autocomplete, which predicted additions at your cursor position that could be accepted with the “Tab” key. Last year, we introduced Supercomplete, which was the evolution of Autocomplete where the “Tab” key could be used to not just accept additions at the cursor position, but entire nearby edits (additions/deletions/refactors) irrespective of cursor position.

Today, we are continuing to add more power to the “Tab” key by making it capable of moving your cursor to the next location you would want your cursor to be at, i.e. “tab-to-jump”.

As part of Wave 3, we are rolling out unlimited Autocomplete and Supercomplete suggestions to all users, free or paid. Anyone on paid plans will get unlimited tab-to-jump suggestions as well as a more compute-intensive “Fast Mode,” which can be toggled on and off in the Windsurf Settings panel.

Besides these major launches, there were a lot of features that help to round out the experience of using the Windsurf Editor, both within Cascade and elsewhere.

Turbo Mode

Back in Wave 1, we introduced Automated Terminal Commands, a feature that let you whitelist and blacklist Cascade-suggested commands to be automatically executed without human approval. That control still exists, but it became very clear that the most requested version of this was to let Cascade just autonomously rip and iterate through its steps, command execution included.

And thus, came Turbo mode, which is currently available to all individual users.:

Drag-and-drop Images

Multimodality with image input upload was a big unlock in the first Wave, making it easier to build websites, translate from Figma, and more. One highly requested feature from the community was drag-and-drop support for image inputs. Consider it done.

Custom Icons

While we appreciate every single one of our users, we have to give a special shoutout to our paid users (Mac only for now). These users continue to amaze us with their innovative uses of Cascade and proudly share their achievements online and on social media. As a token of our appreciation, we’re giving our paid users the ability to customize their application logo with Custom Icons on their dock. Enjoy!

And as a reminder, a couple of other things that have happened since Wave 2 that were not part of any Wave:

DeepSeek-v3, DeepSeek-R1, o3-mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash

On the surface, this one is simple - more model support.

Behind the scenes, we put a lot of work into making sure that we could tap into whatever intrinsic “tool calling” abilities each of these models had before making them available to you. We still believe that Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet likely is the best for the task that we utilize these models for (selecting which tool to call at each step and with what inputs). That being said, optionality is good, and now all of these models are available via dropdown:

Because these models have varying costs, not all of them will use a single premium credit:

  • Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet: 1 credit
  • OpenAI GPT-4o: 1 credit
  • OpenAI o3-mini: 1 credit
  • DeepSeek-v3: 0.25 credits
  • DeepSeek-R1: 0.5 credits
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash: 0.25 credits

We have made sure to be transparent on your credit usage throughout Cascade’s execution, both for these variable credits and when credits are not used (ex. when Cascade makes an error on a step):

Windsurf Next

Windsurf Next is our new “pre-release” version of Windsurf. It’s designed for early adopters who want to access the newest capabilities as soon as possible. While these features may have some rough edges that need polishing, they’ll eventually make their way into the stable release of Windsurf.

Read more about Windsurf Next and how to get it here.

We’re firing on all cylinders. Wave 3 has come only a month after Wave 2, so you really don’t want to miss the boat this year.

And as a reminder from Wave 2, this is an enterprise ready solution. Developers at thousands of enterprises are already using Windsurf to get an edge over their competition, so ask your team to explore Windsurf and contact us to learn how you can get access.

Surf’s up.