Kevin Hou, product lead at Windsurf (Codeium), discusses the design decision to remove conversational chat from Windsurf in favor of the Cascade agent.
“We only have an agent, and it's called Cascade inside of Windsurf. Chat is a legacy paradigm, and we completely replaced it, and as you can see here, users are enjoying it, or in fact, they might not even know the difference, but they're just enjoying the higher quality.”
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More from Kevin Hou
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Hou: 99% of AI editor rules file contents will be automatically inferred
“We strongly believe that having a rules file, you know, we do allow users to add a rules file, we strongly believe that a rules file is a crutch. You know, by the end of twenty-twenty-five, 99% of the things that you're gonna put in a rules file will be interp…”
Kevin HouJul 28, 2025▶ 2:57:45🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Hou: Codeium inference costs 1/100th of competitors by avoiding third-party APIs
“It's that idea that our computation is one 100th of the cost of the competitors. We are not using APIs, and as a result, our customers and our users actually get 100 X the amount of compute that they would on another product.”
Kevin HouJul 28, 2025▶ 1:05:22🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)
Insight
Hou: Embedding-based retrieval is just a temporary heuristic for limited compute
“And so at Codium, we believe that this embedding based retrieval is the heuristic. We should be planning for AI first products, throwing large models at these problems so that AI is a first class citizen.”
Kevin HouJul 28, 2025▶ 1:10:50🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)
Disclosure
Windsurf aims to shift coding workflows from 80% agent to 99% agent
“And today, timelines are 80 to 90% agent, 10 to 20% human. But we're trying to build towards a future that gets the 99% agent and one percent human. We only want to ask the user for final approval.”
Kevin HouJul 28, 2025▶ 3:27:35🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Hou: Windsurf's SWE-1 achieves near-frontier model results at lower cost
“And we've been able to achieve near frontier model results at the fraction of the cost, and with a significantly smaller team.”
Kevin HouJul 28, 2025▶ 3:31:20🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Hou: Users choose SWE-1 at higher frequencies than Claude 3.7 and 3.5
“People are choosing SWE-ONE because it recognizes how they do work, not necessarily how to generate code. And it's contributing, actually, an even higher frequency than models like 3.7 and 3.5.”
Kevin HouJul 28, 2025▶ 3:31:45🕰️ The Oral History of Windsurf (ft. Varun Mohan, Scott Wu, Jeff Wang, Kevin Hou, Anshul R)
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