This is incredible.
Windsurf just pushed several amazing upgrades to their IDE with their new Wave 12 update.
They recently got acquired by the company behind Devin — the incredible coding agent that called itself, “The first AI software engineer”.
And now with Wave 12, they’ve brought several features from Devin that made it so powerful and popular, to Windsurf.
These features will help us build much faster, making greater impacts with our codebase and focusing on what matters.
Less time spent on repetitive, mundane, low-level changes, and more on high-level thinking and design.
Incredible new “DeepWiki”
This amazing new feature helps you understand unfamiliar parts of a codebase much easier and faster.
Ever hovered over a function and thought, what the hell does this thing actually do?
Now when you Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Click on any symbol, Windsurf brings up DeepWiki — an AI-generated breakdown of what that symbol is, how it fits into the bigger picture, and even a summary of its behavior.
But it doesn’t end there: you can then feed that explanation directly into Cascade, so the agent understands your code at the same level you now do. It’s like giving your copilot context without typing a word.
Everything is connected.
Will make it much easier to work on a new codebase and collaborate with others.
Vibe & replace: find-and-replace on steroids
A new intelligent feature to make effortless changes to various parts of your codebase.
This one’s for when you need to rename a method or tweak an API call or or apply a pattern across your whole codebase — but you don’t want to end up breaking everything.
With Vibe & Replace you search for a term, like fetchUser, and then write a prompt describing how you want each instance updated — for example “rename to getUserById and update its arguments”.
Windsurf handles the heavy lifting, match by match. You pick between:
- Smart mode — more thoughtful, safer.
- or Fast mode — quicker, more aggressive.
Either way it’s regex with superpowers.
Easily make tweaks here and there and stay focused on the big picture.
Cascade upgrades: less clicking, more thinking
Cascade — Windsurf’s AI agent workspace — now has auto-planning baked in. No more manually toggling between modes. You give it a goal, it figures out a plan, and you review or edit that plan before it touches your code.
It also got better at working with long contexts, and the tools are snappier and more precise.
Dev containers + remote SSH
Invaluable new feature when working in containers and remote servers
Wave 12 adds support for Dev Containers over SSH. That means you can open a repo hosted on a remote machine inside a dev container and still use Windsurf like normal.
It basically brings the “works on my machine” experience to any machine.
Smarter tab autocomplete
Tab completion now feels way more alive. The suggestions are faster and smarter, especially when you’re working across multiple files. If you weren’t using it before, you’ll probably start now.
So much more
You’ll notice the new look right away — a cleaner, more focused UI across chat, Cascade, and the home panels.
Under the hood, they packed in over 100 fixes and performance upgrades. Stuff feels smoother and snappier all around.
Quickstart — try these:
- DeepWiki: Hover any symbol → Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Click → read, then click “Add to Cascade” to give it context.
- Vibe & Replace: Search for something like
foo(), then prompt it with “replace withbar()and update its args.” - Dev Containers: If you work remote, try “Reopen in Container” via the command palette — now works over SSH too.
With every Wave Windsurf moves closer to being a real engineering assistant that let’s us build much more than we we’ve ever been capable of.
Wave 12 isn’t just another version bump. It’s a real shift toward a more intelligent, less frustrating coding experience.