New in June 2026: Windsurf is now Devin Desktop

On June 2, Cognition retired the Windsurf brand. The product you knew as Windsurf is now Devin Desktop, shipped as a standard over-the-air update — your settings, extensions, and plan carry over automatically, so there’s nothing to reinstall. If you open the app today, it just says Devin Desktop. Pricing and tiers are unchanged through the transition, including the $15/mo Pro plan.

The rename comes with three real changes, not just a new logo. First, the default surface flips: Devin Desktop now opens on the Agent Command Center rather than the editor canvas. That completes the shift this product has been making all year — from a code editor that can call an agent to an agent-management hub that happens to contain a full IDE. Second, Cascade is being replaced by Devin Local, a Rust rewrite of the same agent that Cognition claims is up to 30% more token-efficient and now supports subagents. Third, Devin Desktop ships with the open Agent Client Protocol (ACP), which lets you run other vendors’ agents — Codex, Claude Agent, OpenCode — inside the same IDE instead of being locked to Cognition’s own.

One thing to put on your calendar if you’ve automated anything: Cascade reaches end-of-life on July 1, 2026. Any CI step, script, or workflow rule that explicitly invokes Cascade by name needs to be repointed to Devin Local before that date or it will break. For a solo founder clicking around the UI this is a non-event; for anyone who wired Cascade into a pipeline, it’s a hard deadline. Sources: Devin blog — Windsurf is now Devin Desktop, Devin Desktop FAQ, digitalapplied migration guide.

The bigger picture: Cognition now sells one consolidated stack under the Devin name — Devin Desktop for interactive, human-in-the-loop work and cloud Devin for background runs — funded by the $1B round it closed at a $26B valuation in late May. The “Windsurf” name below is kept for historical context, but everything in this review now lives under Devin Desktop.

New in May 2026: Codemaps, SWE-1.5 speed, and a price cut to $15

Wave 13 shipped in early May alongside the formal close of Cognition’s $250M acquisition, and it introduced two things Cursor and Claude Code don’t have.

Codemaps are AI-annotated visual maps of your codebase. Instead of hunting through file trees, Codemaps show you grouped sections, trace guides, and line-level linking — click a function reference on the map and it jumps you to the code. For anyone working in a large codebase they didn’t write, or picking up a vibe-coded project that’s grown past the point of easy navigation, Codemaps reduce the disorientation significantly. No other serious IDE has shipped this yet.

SWE-1.5 is Cognition’s proprietary coding model — not a general-purpose chat model, but one tuned specifically for the kind of iterative, agentic coding that Cascade does. The headline claim is 13x faster than Claude Sonnet 4.5 on equivalent agentic tasks, running at ~950 tokens per second. In practice that means faster iteration cycles on complex, multi-step tasks — less waiting while the agent thinks through a refactor.

Alongside these features, Cognition cut the Pro plan price from $20 to $15/month, making Windsurf the cheapest serious agentic IDE on the market. At $15, it undercuts Cursor’s $20 Pro tier and matches Claude Code’s base pricing — a deliberate move to accelerate growth post-acquisition. Sources: NxCode acquisition summary, Cognition SWE-1.5 announcement, Neowin Wave 13 coverage.

New in April 2026: GPT-5.5 lands in the model picker

OpenAI shipped the GPT-5.5 API on April 24 and Windsurf had it live the same day, alongside Cursor, the Vercel AI Gateway, and OpenRouter. For the past several days the model picker had been holding for the API drop, so this closes a short but meaningful gap during which Windsurf users were a model-rotation behind. Pricing for GPT-5.5 calls flows through Windsurf’s existing usage quota (it’s $5/$30 per million input/output tokens upstream, roughly 2x GPT-5.4 input cost), so heavy users should expect their effective per-task spend to go up if they default to 5.5. As always with new model launches, give it a week before judging — the early tests show GPT-5.5 is meaningfully better at long-horizon agentic coding (which is what Cascade is for) and roughly comparable on quick edits where GPT-5.4 is already strong. Source: Windsurf changelog.

New in April 2026: Windsurf 2.0 and Devin integration

Windsurf 2.0 launched on April 15, 2026, and it’s the most significant product update since the Cognition acquisition. The headline: Devin — Cognition’s autonomous cloud agent — is now built directly into Windsurf. You plan your work locally with Cascade, then hand the task off to Devin with a single click. Devin runs it in its own virtual machine with desktop, browser, and computer-use capabilities, meaning your laptop doesn’t need to stay open while it works through debugging, testing, and deployment.

The other major addition is the Agent Command Center: a Kanban-style dashboard showing all your active local and cloud agent sessions organized by status. You can monitor multiple agents in parallel without switching contexts. A new concept called Spaces groups related agent sessions, PRs, files, and project context into task-level units — essentially a persistent workspace for a feature or project rather than a per-session view.

Devin access is available on Pro, Max, and Teams plans, drawing from the shared Windsurf usage quota. New GitHub connections get up to $50 in extra usage credits. Enterprise access requires admin enablement and a Cognition Platform contract.

The practical upshot: Windsurf 2.0 is Cognition’s most direct answer to Claude Code Routines and Cursor’s Agents Window — all three shipped within two weeks of each other. The bet across the board is that “manage agents” is replacing “write code” as the primary activity, and the editor is becoming a control tower rather than a typewriter.

Windsurf started as Codeium’s entry into the AI editor wars — a standalone IDE built on top of VS Code, similar in concept to Cursor, but with its own opinionated take on how AI should integrate into the coding workflow. It launched to positive attention largely because Codeium had already earned developer trust through its free Copilot alternative. The corporate story since then has been… complicated.

The acquisition that happened in stages

OpenAI attempted to acquire Windsurf for $3 billion in mid-2025. That deal collapsed at the last minute over Microsoft’s involvement — Windsurf’s CEO didn’t want Microsoft (which owns a significant stake in OpenAI) getting access to the technology. After the exclusivity period ended, Google stepped in and licensed Windsurf’s underlying model technology for $2.4 billion and hired the CEO and co-founders. Then Cognition AI — the team behind Devin — acquired what remained: the product, the brand, the IP, and most of the engineering team.

The result is that Windsurf the product is now owned by Cognition, built on technology that Google licensed away, and running on a team that’s been through a bruising corporate transition. For users, day-to-day, none of this is visible. But it’s worth knowing the ownership structure if you’re making a long-term bet on the tool.

Windsurf has surpassed 1 million active users as of early 2026 and now supports GPT-5.4 and multiple Claude and Gemini model tiers on its paid plans.

Cascade: Windsurf’s differentiating feature

The most interesting thing about Windsurf is Cascade, its agentic mode. Where Cursor’s Composer lets you describe multi-file changes, Cascade goes further — it can browse your codebase, run terminal commands, execute tests, and iterate on its own output until something works. It’s more autonomous than the equivalent features in Cursor, which will either appeal to you or make you uncomfortable depending on how much you like being in control.

The “flows” model in Cascade is worth understanding: it treats a coding task as a sequence of steps the AI works through independently, pausing to ask for your input only when it genuinely needs a decision. In practice, this means you can describe a feature and come back to find it largely implemented, rather than shepherding the AI through each step.

Pricing update: May 2026

Windsurf raised its Pro tier to $20/month in early 2026, but Cognition cut it back to $15 in May as part of the post-acquisition push. A Max tier at $200/month targets teams with heavy usage needs. The free tier remains available with limited generations — still more generous than Cursor’s free allowance, and the $15 Pro price now gives Windsurf a clear cost advantage over Cursor’s $20 Pro.

Wave 13 and Arena Mode

Wave 13 introduced Arena Mode, which lets you run the same prompt through multiple AI models side-by-side and compare outputs. It’s useful if you want to understand which model handles your kind of project best — less useful if you just want to get things built quickly. SWE-1.5 is now the default model, which is a meaningful quality upgrade for agentic flows.

How it compares to Cursor

Cursor has a larger user base, more community resources, and slightly better autocomplete in most benchmarks. Windsurf’s Cascade is arguably more capable for long autonomous tasks. The choice often comes down to workflow preference: Cursor feels more like an AI-augmented editor; Windsurf feels more like delegating to an AI that occasionally checks in.

Both are VS Code forks, so if you’re already comfortable in VS Code, switching to either one is low-friction.

The non-coder reality

Windsurf is a code editor. Like Cursor, it requires knowing enough to direct it and evaluate its output. A non-technical founder will not find Windsurf easier than Cursor — both require the same baseline of technical literacy. The non_coder_rating of 3 is optimistic; it assumes some coding familiarity.

Reliability concerns

As a newer product, Windsurf’s Cascade can be inconsistent — confident when it should ask questions, occasionally going in the wrong direction for several steps before self-correcting. This is an area where more usage and refinement should improve things, but it’s worth knowing before committing to a complex task.

Bottom line

Windsurf is a strong contender in the AI code editor category, with Cascade providing a genuinely differentiated agentic experience and Arena Mode offering a unique way to evaluate model performance. The free tier is still the best in the category for getting started. At $20/month Pro, it’s now price-matched with Cursor — so the decision comes down to workflow preference rather than budget. If you want more autonomy from the AI, Windsurf’s Cascade is ahead. If you want tighter control and a larger com

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