Evaluating Windsurf

I had dabbled with Cursor previously when I was creating some services in Python. Lately, I have been hearing about Windsurf especially about the Cascade agent. So, I decided to give it a try.

Objective:

Try and vibe code a simple front end app with a Dashboard with data from a database.

Tech Stack:

App: React + vite.js + TypeScript

DB: Clickhouse

Experience:

I probably spent more time deciding the theme I wanted than it took for Cascade to setup the project structure needed. The interaction has been pretty immersive and what Windsurf calls as "AI Flows". You can read about it here -> https://codeium.com/flows

For example, I had issues connecting running Clickhouse server natively and it debugged with me and suggested me to run via Docker and enabled connectivity. You can execute terminal commands directly via the Agent interaction.

One of the coolest things I saw is that I shared the shadcn theme / templates URL and it picked up all the components needed and updated and changed the order as needed.

The only place where i need to break away from Windsurf was to connect to the Clickhouse database instance via a native client and created table. I am pretty sure you can still do that with the agent as it helped created sample data records.

Also, note Windsurf allows several models to be used. So choosing what works - planning out and then fixing issues is required.

Outcome:

Observations:

1. Time taken: 2 hours (approx.)

2. Windsurf with Gemini 2.5 is pretty good at setting up project structure and what is required.

3. For some specific bugs, I switched to Claude 3.7. The combination is powerful enough to solve problems.

4. Prototyping has never been easier.