It depends. For a class or a function, yes, I copy and paste. When I want a review of a larger project I am working on (2500 classes), I concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file and upload it to Gemini. Then we go over it. I've even uploaded the entire codebase and asked it to write documentation and it did an excellent job providing a framework for me.
"concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file" I think simonw has a tool that also does something like this? Edit- found it: https://github.com/simonw/files-to-prompt
I have found Repomix[1] to be a good and straightforward tool for the task.
As a daily full time Windsurf user, I can emphatically state that it is strictly inferior to multiple free/open source tools like Cline and Claude Code that work directly with Anthropic/OpenAI keys, no "flow credits" involved. Good on them for catching the enterprise market, but that's about all it is; an enterprise friendly wrapper for a second-rate VSCode extension.
Claude Code is basically unusable on Windows even with WSL.
It depends. For a class or a function, yes, I copy and paste. When I want a review of a larger project I am working on (2500 classes), I concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file and upload it to Gemini. Then we go over it. I've even uploaded the entire codebase and asked it to write documentation and it did an excellent job providing a framework for me.
It seems most people aren’t worried about handing their code over to LLMs. Why is that? Isn’t there a concern that they will just train on your code? What if you’re trying to build a business, is there a fear that your idea or implementation will just get stolen or absorbed into the LLM and spit out into someone else’s code base? Or do people just not care anymore because code is so trivial to generate that it’s not…
Most llms have a privacy mode, including windsurf, that state they don’t use your input for training. But I think your last sentence is key, code is hardly ever so unique that it’s super valuable by itself. Ideas can be copied easily. For most software, it’s the whole package: really tackling the user problem, with the best user experience, with the right pricing, training, enablement, support, roadmap, community, network effect, etc.
I use windsurf, have the largest plan and still need to top up quite a bit. So for me it has a price per task, sort of, because you are topping it up by paying another 10 dollars at a time as you run out. The plans aren't the right size for professional work, but maybe they wanted to keep the price points low?
> The plans aren't the right size for professional work I think there is a fundamental pricing misalignment between products that seek to do professional work being sold to people who want them to help with professional work. Another way: their pricing will likely make much more sense for a person whose coding skill is closer to zero (& who doesn't want to learn) than it will for a person who is looking for an AI ass…
For me it felt the opposite: pricing works for software engineers that carefully validate every line of code, that will ask for test and documentation. It doesn’t work for vibe coding where the user will just trial and error code generation until it works. You’re running through credits much faster this way.
"concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file" I think simonw has a tool that also does something like this? Edit- found it: https://github.com/simonw/files-to-prompt
I have found Repomix[1] to be a good and straightforward tool for the task. [1]: https://github.com/yamadashy/repomix
>Anything the requires me to use a different IDE is a non-starter for me. Windsurf is, ultimately, just an IDE extension. They shipped a forked VSCode with their branding for... some reason. But the extension is available in practically every IDE/editor.
Yeah, using VSCode is a different IDE Why do you assume everybody uses that? If the product can't be used with the infinitely hackable emacs or vim, that's a shortcoming of the product.
In the end that’s just a business decision: how much revenue can you expect from emacs/vim users versus users that prefer it integrated in an easily installable ide? I would choose to ignore the vim users expecting more revenue from a standalone IDE. You can’t cater for everyone.
In other words can you throw in some extra docs and code samples to get improved suggestions?
I have a project where the language - Lua should be cakewalk for most models but domain specific APIs are not in any LLM training set.
So my idea would be to throw in API docs and some illustrative code samples as context in a project. Maybe I could even throw in some typical architecture docs?
PS Been constantly using VS Code Copilot on multiple languages since technical preview in the summer of 2001
As an avid Windsurf user, I support this simplification of the pricing. In nearly all cases, I don't care how many individual steps the model needs to take to accomplish the task. I just want it to do what I've asked it to do. It is curious, however, that this move is coinciding with rumors of OpenAI attempting to acquire Windsurf. If an acquisition were imminent, it would seem strange to mess with the pricing struct…
Curious - what makes you pick, windsurf over other editors. I currently use Cursor but have seen more news about windsurf, especially after the recent news with respect to OpenAI. Do you find it better, worse, etc. And are there things it does better for you than other editors.
For me it was the awesome and more important free autocomplete that i used when it was still called codeium
Anything the requires me to use a different IDE is a non-starter for me. I can imagine it is a lot easier to develop these things as a custom version of VSCode instead of plugins/extensions for a handful of the popular existing IDEs, but is that really a good long term plan? Is the future going to be littered with a bunch of one-off custom IDEs? Does anyone want that future?
>"Free" as in [.....y]ou pay [...] Possibly the worst comment I've ever read on this site. And, by 'possibly', I mean 'most definitely'.
There's no such thing as "completely free" when it comes to LLM usage. Everyone knows that. But there are two different tiers of tools now. The "free" ones that use API keys directly, and the premium ones like Windsurf that operate on their own credit system. So yes, "free" is a meaningfully useful distinction here, in that you incur no cost for the tool itself.
Windsurf autocomplete is free. No credits or api keys.