You are probably used to getting a ton of features in every “Wave” of updates. This one is a little different.
Wave 5 has just one feature: Windsurf Tab.
In Wave 3, we added tab-to-jump, the ability for the passive predictive AI to move the cursor position. In Wave 4, we added tab-to-import, the ability for the passive predictive AI to add an import statement if a new dependency is used. In Wave 5, we are adding a significant number of latency, quality, and reliability improvements at both the model and system layers to make this an industry leading experience.
Given how the “Tab” key now controls a cohesive and powerful passive predictive experience, we have decided to bundle all of these interactions together as “Windsurf Tab.”
Windsurf Tab is especially magical because it is built on top of the same context that is used to power Cascade. Cascade is able to capture what happens in other surfaces such as the text editor, terminal, and clipboard. This way, there is fine-grained intent that can be automatically captured by Cascade without the developer’s explicit specification. Similarly, Windsurf Tab cohesively captures the fine-grained global set of actions, leading to some emergent behavior that no other solution on the market can do currently.
For example, context of what happens in the terminal is used as a signal to Windsurf Tab:
Or, maybe you copy something from the web, and just the fact that the information is in the clipboard can inform Windsurf Tab:
In fact, just like Cascade is aware of the actions done in the text editor, Windsurf Tab is aware of the conversations that have happened in Cascade:
Here’s the good news: everybody, including free users, get unlimited Windsurf Tab completions. The main difference is that paying users get a significantly faster and snappier experience.
We are not stopping anytime soon - we are continuing to actively invest in Windsurf Tab, so keep an eye out for some new magical interactions that will expand the range of what Tab can do, dropping in upcoming Waves near you.
Now, you might ask - why are we investing in Windsurf Tab when we have Cascade? A quick background might be helpful.
Cascade, our agentic experience, was the novel capability when we launched the Windsurf Editor back in November. The Windsurf Editor both allowed 1x developers to do 10x developer tasks and created a whole new category of “vibe coders” from people who did not know how to code. We love both groups of users, but because the latter group was enabled in a way never seen before, we sometimes got a reputation that we are not really the tool for professional developers:
The reality is, the Windsurf Editor is a tool built for professional developers, and while many people that are at the cutting edge recognize how Cascade outperforms Cursor and other tools on large, production codebases, we know that Cascade is only part of the story. The professional developer does not just fully “vibe code” with an agent. The passive predictive experience in the text editor is equally important to a professional developer - the ability of the AI to be able to suggest new code, or edits, or whatever next action needs to happen. And transparently, when we first launched the Windsurf Editor, we likely were behind on the quality of this experience:
The operative word there is “were“ behind.
With Wave 5, we believe that Windsurf Tab is the best passive predictive AI system on the market, and we are coupling it with Cascade, the best agentic AI system on the market. We don’t really care to distinguish Windsurf as the tool for professional developers or as the tool for non-developers. We just want the Windsurf Editor to be the best platform for anyone who wants to build anything.
Surf’s up.