Wave 7 marks a very special moment for us as a company, but more on that a little later. The only product announcement in Wave 7 is that we have brought the agentic Cascade experience via plugin to the JetBrains IDEs - IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, PyCharm, GoLand, and so many more.
Cascade on JetBrains
Similarly to Tab in Wave 5, Cascade on JetBrains is such a monumental step forward that it warranted its own Wave. We are now the only leading AI-powered code assistant platform to have a truly agentic experience available in a JetBrains plugin. Not just Autocomplete, Chat, and Command (all of which have existed for a while on our highly-used and highly-rated JetBrains plugin), but a truly industry leading experience.
Especially in the enterprise setting, Visual Studio Code and the JetBrains suite are the most commonly used IDEs, easily supporting the majority of all developers globally. Each IDE has their own benefits, but the JetBrains suite specifically has a lot of language-specific and enterprise-focused benefits that make it suboptimal to switch away. One of our core beliefs is that we should try to give the best experience we possibly can to as many developers as we possibly can, and so while the Windsurf Editor is a VSCode fork, from day one we have been thinking about how we could bring the same experience to the JetBrains IDEs so that these developers don’t have to pick between the best AI experience and the best IDE for their language and stack.
Unlike VSCode, where the limited set of APIs exposed to extensions restricted our ability to create a great agentic experience via our VSCode extension (thus prompting the fork of VSCode into the Windsurf Editor), the JetBrains suite has a much richer set of customizability and configurability.
In this Beta launch of Cascade in JetBrains, we are releasing Cascade as it looked like in our original Windsurf Editor Launch - there is Write, Chat and Legacy Modes with all the tools that you’ve come to love in Cascade, access to premium models, a Terminal integration, and a Plan Info widget for billing information.
Notably, there are a number of features within Cascade that have been introduced post-original-launch that we will be introducing in future Waves to JetBrains: MCP, Memories, Rules, the evergreen toolbar, Previews & Deploys, and more. Separately from Cascade, we have also not yet brought the full Tab experience to JetBrains, so the passive experience is currently just a powerful, context-aware Autocomplete. As the original launch of the Windsurf Editor showed us, this Beta launch is still going to be a massive step function over the status quo single-LLM-call experiences, so hold tight for the newer features!
We also do want to call out that the JetBrains team themselves have been fantastic partners in figuring out the optimal ways to bring the same UX we have on the Windsurf Editor to our JetBrains plugin, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with them towards our shared mission of bringing the best development experiences to every developer possible.
With Cascade on JetBrains, we truly believe that we are the optimal choice for any enterprise that has a mix of IDEs in use. We already have an industry-leading AI native experience in the Windsurf Editor, and now even non-VSCode users have a truly agentic experience, making us a single vendor that can provide the best that AI has to offer to every developer in the organization. Reach out to us!
It’s All Windsurf Now
Now for the special moment that we teased at the top…
With Cascade on JetBrains, we recognize that naming has gotten a little confusing, to put it lightly. The Windsurf Editor has an agentic experience called Cascade which is now available on a JetBrains plugin that is called a Codeium extension.
It is time we simplify some of this naming, and so, perhaps to very little surprise, we are going to be consolidating on the name “Windsurf” as opposed to “Codeium” moving forwards. Our AI-native editor will be called the Windsurf Editor and our extensions into existing IDEs, such as the JetBrains suite (among many), will be called the Windsurf Plugins. Even more products to come.
Besides moving on from the frequent misspellings of “Codeium,” we do believe that “Windsurf” better captures the essence of what we want to provide through our products - incredibly powerful combinations of human and machine that also feel like being in flow state. We already provide value beyond just the process of writing code, so Codeium has become a more limiting and non-representative name with time.
After 2.5 years of going by Codeium, this is a new chapter for us, one that we are incredibly excited about.
Surf’s up.