Windsurf essentials

1. Windsurf essentials

Hi, and welcome to this course on Software Development with Windsurf!

2. Windsurf essentials

Windsurf is an AI-assisted IDE—a code editor with AI built in. If you’ve used VS Code before for example, Windsurf will look familiar.

3. Windsurf: an intelligent coding assistant

While traditional IDEs rely on manual tools for coding and debugging, Windsurf acts as an intelligent coding assistant and adds AI to the IDE: It understands our codebase through advanced context analysis; Lets us write prompts in natural language; And helps us build, refactor, and debug faster.

4. Course goals

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to: Launch a context-aware AI workspace that understands your project; Use Chat and Write modes to ask questions or generate code; Automate tasks such as querying, debugging, and enforcing rules with Cascade, Windsurf’s built-in coding agent; Build, secure, and deploy apps while monitoring and improving code with AI tools.

5. A standalone agentic IDE

Windsurf is a standalone, agentic IDE—built from the ground up to help developers work smarter with AI. Windsurf offers four plans: Free, Pro, Teams, and Enterprise. The Free tier is great for exploring and testing out the platform’s capabilities.

6. Get Started!

To get started head over to windsurf.com. Click download and choose the version compatible with your operating system—Mac, Windows, or Linux. Unlike some AI coding tools that run in the browser, Windsurf runs directly on your local machine.

7. After installation

Once downloaded, follow the installation instructions specific to your OS. After installation, launch the Windsurf app.

8. Step 1: Choose setup flow

When we open Windsurf for the first time, we’ll have the option to import settings from a previous IDE or start fresh. If we import our VS Code settings, it'll bring over theme, extensions, keybindings, and other preferences.

9. Step 2: Choose a theme

Next, we’ll be asked to choose your key bindings—let's stick with the default. We’ll also select a theme. Since we’ve imported our VS Code setup, we'll skip this step, but you can pick any theme that suits your style.

10. Step 3: Sign in or create your account

Finally, Windsurf will prompt us to sign in or create our Windsurf account— once that's done, we're ready to build with AI.

11. Windsurf interface

Let’s take a quick look at the interface we’ll see on launch.

12. Windsurf interface

On the left, we’ve got the file explorer, where we can open a project folder or clone a Git repository.

13. Windsurf interface

The center panel is the code editor, where we’ll write and edit our code.

14. Windsurf interface

On the right, we’ll see the Cascade panel—this is where we’ll interact with Windsurf’s built-in AI assistant. We can invoke Cascade by pressing Cmd + L on Mac and Cntrl + L on Windows.

15. Cascade modes

Cascade works in two modes: Chat and Write mode

16. Cascade chat mode

The Chat mode offers a conversational interface for exploring our code, debugging, or asking for implementation help. For example, if we give this prompt: “How can I add bottom tabs to my React Native app?” Cascade will walk us through the steps, customized to our project.

17. Cascade write mode

The write mode integrates directly into the editor to generate or improve code inline. We can type a prompt like “Generate an HTML file with boilerplate”, and it will create the file for us—right in our project.

18. Let's practice!

We’ll explore Windsurf further in the next lessons. For now, let’s apply what we’ve learned.

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