Windsurf enables collaborative software development agents with Claude

Windsurf, a leading AI coding platform, uses Claude to power their revolutionary AI-native IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and Cascade, an intelligent AI coding assistant that helps developers write better code faster.

With Claude, Windsurf:

• Reached hundreds of thousands of users within their first few weeks of launch
• Achieved high user retention with daily active users
• Processes over 100M tokens per minute
• Powers reasoning and planning capabilities in their Cascade agent
• Helped companies use AI to write nearly half of their code

Making development more powerful and accessible

Windsurf—with 800,000+ active users and 1,000+ enterprise customers—aims to transform traditional development tools. Their product combines a modern IDE with Cascade, an AI agent that serves as an intelligent coding partner.

"The goal was to determine the frontier—what was possible," said Anshul Ramachandran of Windsurf. "How can we let every developer dream bigger? How can developers go bigger, better, faster than they could before?"

Choosing Claude for powerful reasoning capabilities

Windsurf's background in ML infrastructure and years of enterprise experience uniquely positioned them to evaluate and implement AI models effectively. Through extensive work with large enterprises, they developed sophisticated systems for parsing and understanding complex codebases. These capabilities complement Claude's strengths and enhance its effectiveness.

"Understanding the codebase and improving that technology over time led to a 38% improvement in how often developers accept our AI suggestions," said Jeff Wang of Windsurf. The impact is significant: "In companies that install Windsurf, nearly half of all new committed code is written by our AI."

Windsurf chose Claude specifically for its ability to understand and reason about long sequences of development activity. Claude's extensive context window allows Cascade to maintain awareness of everything that's happened in a development session, using this history to make better decisions about what to do next.

"Claude powers some of the reasoning and planning parts of Cascade," said Ramachandran. "When a developer is working, Claude looks at everything that's happened in their session and figures out the best next steps, maintaining that full context throughout the conversation."

How Windsurf uses Claude to transform development

Windsurf transforms the AI coding experience by solving two fundamental challenges: speed and codebase understanding. While many AI assistants force developers to wait for responses, Windsurf's infrastructure expertise enables instant interactions. "Most AI systems make you wait around for results," said Ramachandran. "We made ours fast enough to feel like a real-time collaboration with the developer."

This speed combines with Windsurf's deep expertise in parsing enterprise-scale codebases, refined through years of working with large companies. Unlike typical AI assistants that struggle with complex applications, Cascade can effectively understand and work with production code. "Success with AI in production environments starts with understanding complex codebases," said Ramachandran. "Without that foundation, even the best AI models will fall short."

Driving explosive growth and user engagement

Integrating Claude has driven remarkable early adoption of Windsurf. Within just two days of launch, Windsurf reached 10,000 users, with numbers climbing into the hundreds of thousands by the end of week two. Most importantly, users aren't just trying the platform once—they're staying and using it extensively.

"At first, we were afraid people would try this out as a novelty or demo, but after looking at the data, we are seeing very high retention numbers and users keep returning daily."

The platform has value for experienced developers working on production codebases and coding newcomers. Some users are even dropping their existing IDEs to switch to Windsurf full-time, a transition the company hadn't expected. "We hoped to get there someday, but perhaps not on day two," said Ramachandran.

Equally validating is how their non-technical users have embraced the platform. "I had our recruiters who've never programmed try it. They started building games right away. It just worked," said Wang. "It gets all the right libraries, creates the files and folders, even writes the documentation. Anybody can be a developer with this."

Building the future of software development

Windsurf envisions a future where AI amplifies rather than replaces developers, enabling them to tackle bigger challenges and create more value. While the role of developers may evolve to work closely with AI, Windsurf believes this will expand rather than contract software development.

"Software development isn't about replacing people—it's about creating value. When you give organizations the ability to build more, they'll take full advantage of it," said Ramachandran. "AI won't reduce the number of developers. It will create more, working in partnership with AI to build bigger things faster."

Since launch, Windsurf has continued to enhance their platform and Cascade with more of Claude's capabilities, such as taking image inputs and leveraging Claude's multimodal features. Their vision goes beyond just improving coding efficiency—it's about democratizing software development and unleashing human creativity. By putting powerful AI tools in the hands of developers worldwide, Windsurf is helping build a future where anyone can turn their ideas into reality through code.