I tried Windsurf for the first time last week, and I had pretty mixed results. On the positive side, sometimes the tool would figure out exactly what I was doing, and it truly helped me. This was especially the case when when performing a repetitive action, like renaming something, or making the same change across multiple related files.
Most of the time though, it just got in the way. I'd press tab to indent a line, and it'd instead jump half-way down the file to delete some random code instead. On more than one occasion I'd by typing happily, and I'd see it had gone off and completely mangled some unrelated section without my noticing. I felt like I needed to be extremely attentive when reviewing commits to make sure nothing was astray.
Most of its suggestions seemed hyper-fixated on changing my indent levels, adding braces where they weren't supposed to go, or deleting random comments. I also found it broke common shortcuts, like tab (as above), and ctrl+delete.
The editor experience also felt visually very noisy. It was constantly popping up overlays, highlighting things, and generally distracting me while I was trying to write code. I really wished for a "please shut up" button.
The chat feature also seemed iffy. It was actually able to identify one bug for me, though many of the times I'd ask it to investigate something, it'd get stuck scanning through files endlessly until it just terminated the task with no output. I was using the unlimited GPT-4.1 model, so maybe I needed to switch to a model with more context length? I would have expected some kind of error, at least.
So I don't know. Is anyone else having this experience with Windsurf? Am I just "holding it wrong"? I see people being pretty impressed with this and Cursor, but it hasn't clicked for me yet. How do you get it to behave right?