I think that the idea of an agentic IDE is really interesting and I'm fully supportive of the transformative potential in this app and in the concept generally, breaking down barriers to entry for development and making programming accessible to far more people.
Equally, I think that large measures of realism are called for regarding the actual capability of AI to deliver on this promise at the moment, especially with regard to handling context, which is inherently challenging. I think that this creates a responsibility for those generating the first wave of these tools to market their products responsibly.
I began absolutely loving Windsurf and I'm still a big fan of the product and see its potential as vast. However, I think that it has seriously failed in its obligation to strike this balance and to provide a fair service to its users.
While the company's social media speaks of an endless train of feature additions and advancement, the actual experience of using this on a day-to-day basis, as evidenced also by the Reddit communities, is rather different to the marketing.
Personally, I found the product to be beset by an almost endless train of bugs that affect the ability to get anything done with it. At the moment, there's no completions happening on Anthropic, which has been the case many more days than not during the past few months.
Long-term, I now have very mixed feelings about this product and the company behind us Because I feel that my trust in their product has been to an extent taken advantage of. I hope that others move in to fill this space and are more transparent in their engagement with consumers, especially with regard to uptime and product availability.
Users should not feel the need to resort to bypassing official support channels to communicate the idea that the product is not available.
