Windsurf is now Devin Desktop: what changed, and what to use instead
Cognition acquired Windsurf, renamed the editor Devin Desktop, and replaced Cascade with Devin Local. What that means if you were a Windsurf user, and when an AI agent team is the better shape.
If you searched for Windsurf lately, you found a different name. Cognition acquired Windsurf in 2025, renamed the editor Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026, and on July 1, 2026 replaced its Cascade agent with Devin Local. Same product line, new branding, and a new place in Cognition's lineup next to Devin Cloud.
What actually changed
Three things, and one thing that did not.
The name changed: Windsurf is Devin Desktop. The agent changed: Cascade is gone, replaced by Devin Local, which shares a brain with Devin Cloud. The vendor changed: what was a standalone editor company is now part of Cognition, so your editor, your autonomous agent, and your bill all come from one place.
What did not change is the shape of the tool. Devin Desktop is still an AI editor you sit in front of. It suggests code, refactors, and runs agent turns while you drive. If you liked Windsurf for that, Devin Desktop is that, with a different logo.
If you were a Windsurf user, your three options
**Stay.** Devin Desktop is a fine editor, and if your workflow is "I code, the AI helps," nothing about the rename breaks it. Your settings and keybindings carried over.
**Move to Devin Cloud.** If what you actually wanted was less driving, Cognition's autonomous agent takes a ticket and comes back with a pull request. It is a different product from the editor, and the right comparison there is Devin Cloud, not the editor.
**Add an agent team.** There is a third shape, and it is the one we build. JackHamr is a team of AI agents that each keep their own cloud machine and run a staged process: spec, plan, build, QA, review, deploy. You approve at the gates. It is not an editor and it does not want to be. It is the part that runs when you are not driving.
How to choose
The honest split: if your day is writing code, an editor with a good agent is the tool. If your bottleneck is everything around the code, the specs, the tests, the review queue, the deploys, that is agent-team work, and an editor is not the shape for it.
We wrote a full comparison with a row-by-row table: [JackHamr vs Windsurf (Devin Desktop)](/compare/windsurf). And if you are weighing the autonomous side of Cognition's lineup, see [JackHamr vs Devin](/compare/devin).
Either way, the rename is worth knowing about: searches for "Windsurf" now land on a Cognition product page, and half the third-party tutorials on Cascade are out of date.
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