Windsurf, formerly Codeium, has announced Wave 7 of its Windsurf IDE, but interestingly, this update doesn’t add anything to its own IDE. Instead, it has released the Windsurf plugin for JetBrains to try to reach enterprises. Windsurf’s agentic AI, Cascade, is currently in beta on JetBrains and features core functionality so far, including Write, Chat, Legacy Modes, access to premium models, Terminal integration, and billing information.
JetBrains actually makes several IDEs based on its core code, which are aimed at different programming languages. Popular ones include IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm, and GoLand. The Windsurf plugin works on all of these, so everyone can benefit, no matter what they use. Windsurf claims this move is notable, so it deserved its own Wave. It also explained that its plugin is the only truly agentic experience on JetBrains IDEs.
Windsurf is not alone in the AI code tools market; a big competitor is Microsoft’s GitHub, which has GitHub Copilot to help people code. To try and cement a place for itself, Windsurf is expanding to support JetBrains IDEs because of its widespread use in the enterprise sector. The move will turn out to be brilliant if it manages to convert enterprises over to using the Windsurf plugin because once a tool is established, it’s hard to budge.
While the current plugin has quite restricted features compared to the Windsurf IDE, the company has plans to add features in future updates. It has plans to add Model Context Protocol (MCP), Memories, Rules, the evergreen toolbar, and Previews & Deploys. It also plans to bring the full ‘Tab’ experience later. You can learn more about these upcoming features on the Windsurf Editor page. https://windsurf.com/editor
It seems that JetBrains has been a good partner to Windsurf, as the latter said:
"We also do want to call out that the JetBrains team themselves have been fantastic partners in figuring out the optimal ways to bring the same UX we have on the Windsurf Editor to our JetBrains plugin, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with them towards our shared mission of bringing the best development experiences to every developer possible."
Regarding the rebrand, it makes sense, given the launch of the Windsurf IDE. At first, Codeium had a plugin for Visual Studio Code, but this is limited by VSCode’s APIs. After this, it launched its own IDE called Windsurf, which has native AI tools built in and gets frequent Wave updates. To help avoid confusion and misspellings of ‘Codeium,’ the entire company has been rebranded as Windsurf.
You can get started with the plugin by visiting these docs pages.
Source: Windsurf