---
type: raw-transcript
title: "I'm Addicted to Windsurf, Send Help"
youtube_id: ukhe1013Jpk
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukhe1013Jpk
slug: im-addicted-to-windsurf-send-help
published: 2024-11-27
duration: "0:19:33"
fetched_at: 2026-07-21
immutable: true
---

## Transcript

**[0:00:00]** it is not even a competition right now winds surf is hands down the best AI IDE it combines The Best of Both Worlds it's very easy to collaborate with it as a co-pilot but it's also able to perform a lot of long running and complex coding tasks as an agent and because of that I

**[0:00:18]** have a confession to make I am completely addicted to using the platform and in this video I'll show you how I've learned to use it to get some insane results everyone and their mother has been asking me where my wind Surf video is and I've been saving it till

**[0:00:33]** now so that I can have something really really practical to share with you from my experiences after using windsurf along with autod Dev for over 50 hours already I am not exaggerating and trust me I know that wind surf is only been around for a couple of weeks I've really

**[0:00:48]** become a super user of the platform and I'm going to show you how to do the same now let me be clear it is certainly not a perfect platform I still prefer autod Dev or bolt. new to build my initial front ends which by the way they pair

**[0:01:00]** very well with wind surf more on that later and you still need a lot of coding knowledge to really make something that is production ready but it is already Sav me hours and hours of time coding and that gives me the time to build on top of what it creates to make my code

**[0:01:16]** really really high quality it's funny because one of the biggest arguments against AI coding assistants like wind surf is they don't truly produce production ready code and thus you shouldn't use them at all but I seriously disagree with that because using something something like wind surf to lay the groundwork write some of my

**[0:01:33]** tests document some of my code that's what really gives me the time that I need to invest in creating the best of the best so with that being said let's dive into how to get the most out of wind surf overcome some of it shortcomings and really just build your

**[0:01:47]** projects and make them come to life as fast as possible so codium the creators of wind surf have done a very good job marketing the platform and really framing what makes it revolutionary and it can all be summed up in this one big bolded set at the top of the wind surf

**[0:02:01]** homepage that says it is built to keep you in Flow State and essentially what that means is you want a cohesive experience with the agent as you're using it to code so it doesn't feel like there are two very separate processes where you're writing your code somewhere and then when you need help you go to

**[0:02:17]** the agent and then you have to go back to your code you want it to all feel like a single experience so you can remain in that very focused flow state that is you know what developers really seek after for productivity and when really does that well so if I scroll

**[0:02:32]** down here you'll see they kind of outline what this looks like working with the agent and the co-pilot and yeah neat little diagram but also they explain it in a lot more detail in this link right here so if you click on learn more about AI flows they give this

**[0:02:45]** timeline here that describes what coding looked like a couple of years ago way back in 2022 and then what it looks like now with flows and so I'll go back up to the top here I want to explain this really quick because I think this really really neatly describes the benefit

**[0:03:00]** benefit of wind Surf and all the other AI Ides that are coming in this near future here um but yeah back in 2022 it was just manually coding that's what we see right here in this little timeline and then in 2022 co-pilots were introduced where you had AI help with

**[0:03:15]** little parts of your process like autocomplete in the code editor for example or helping you research a little bit before you go on to the next part of your code and so it wasn't very integrated but it was still helping a little bit at this point and then in

**[0:03:29]** 2024 we got to agents which is obviously a huge thing I focus on on my channel where you have large language models that are actually able to do things for you like generate code run commands interact with your knowledge base things like that well there's a couple problems

**[0:03:43]** with this first of all like they say right here sometimes you have unreasonable waiting periods you have inconsistent results and also it doesn't feel very integrated with your IDE when you have the separate place to go to interact with your agent but now we get to flows and this is what was introduced

**[0:03:59]** in November 202 24 this month currently by codium with wind surf you can see that the timeline here is completely synced between you and the AI agent so it's aware of all the changes you're making you're easily able to see all the changes it's making and it feels like a

**[0:04:15]** very integrated experience where you remain in flow you don't have the separate place for your code and the separate place for your agent you're constantly in communication with each other basically as a pair programmer with an AI agent and yeah it is just absolutely phenomenal so that's the

**[0:04:29]** benefit f a wind surf in a nutshell now we can dive into how to actually use this platform so the first thing I want to share is my general flow for building applications with AI because I don't just use winds surf as I said at the start of the video autod do and bolts

**[0:04:44]** still Excel more with creating the initial front end and so I'll build it out in Auto Dev or bolt like I'm doing right here work on it until it gets stuck because generally it does at some point even though you can go pretty far then I'll export it bring it into wind

**[0:04:57]** surf add in the finishing touches and then mid Lind back and in Wind surf as well because it generally excels at that especially with things like python coding and managing your databases and things like that so that's my general flow I still absolutely love autod Dev I'm going to keep pouring my heart and

**[0:05:13]** soul into the project but there is a place for wind surf as well and that's why I'm talking about combining them right now because that really is a huge opportunity and so yeah I got this little test app that I made as a demo here I can add an item here like yeah it

**[0:05:26]** works pretty neat I'll want to extend this a lot but once I do that kind get to the point where it gets stuck then yeah I just go over to code click on download get that zip bring it into wind Surf and then keep going there so really

**[0:05:37]** wonderful combination the example I'm about to show you the app I created with wind surf I made with Just Wind surf for the sake of this video but just know that this is generally my flow and it works very very well the sponsor of today's video is SEO writing a Cutting

**[0:05:52]** Edge AI power tool that simplifies the creation of SEO optimized content it'll help you create really high quality articles in just minutes with features like keyword optimization AI generated visuals automatic web research with citations and integration with WordPress for easy publishing and that's just naming a few SEO writing is perfect for

**[0:06:13]** you if you're looking to dominate search engine rankings and grow your online presence let me show you really quickly how easy it is to generate full articles in just minutes all right let's go ahead and make an article in SEO writing there's so many options here so you put

**[0:06:27]** in your keyword and your title I'm doing top 10 skills to learn in 2025 as an AI software engineer and then the core settings here you can change so many different things like the model you're using the article size you can say what level of reading comprehension you want

**[0:06:41]** for your article which is really cool you also have a brand voice let me show you this quick you can create a brand voice where you literally just paste in some of your own content and it'll describe what it thinks your brand voice is which this by the way is super

**[0:06:54]** accurate to me so I have that selected and then you include any details that you want here's where you specify AI generated images and YouTube videos that'll actually go and fine for you SEO keywords the general structure uh external internal linking super super cool and there's so many options for

**[0:07:10]** customization here connected to the web for research and citations Integrations having it published to a website so many cool things let's go back up to the top and generate this and so I'll be back once it is done generating and there we go look at that we've got our full

**[0:07:26]** article here with images and YouTube videos and tables everything's formatted really nicely this is the exact information I told to put on this is looking absolutely fantastic definitely give SEO writing a try it is super impressive I'll have a link to it in the description of this video and if you use the code co25 at

**[0:07:45]** checkout you'll get a 25% discount and it's a nice way to support my Channel all right so I've already created an application with wind surf to demonstrate all the tips and tricks that I'm about to show you now to become a power user on the platform it's just a

**[0:07:58]** very basic chat where the AI responds to the predefined message every time and I can manage conversation history just in local storage in my browser on the leftand side here so really really neat I didn't want to build this from scratch because winds surf is a very intuitive platform

**[0:08:13]** so it didn't really make sense for me to show you how to download it and get everything set up cuz it's very easy to do so I instead want this to be a very directed video focused on how to make you a power user on the platform so with

**[0:08:25]** that we can dive into tip number one hopefully this goes without saying but large language models can get very very confused when conversations start to get long and you'll see that a lot in Wind surf where it's doing a really good job but as you start to ask it for more and

**[0:08:39]** more changes it starts to hallucinate a bunch and you just think wind surf is an awful platform but it's actually because the conversation is just getting too long for cloud 3.5 Sonic and so the best thing I found to do in these situations where it starts to hallucinate is

**[0:08:52]** literally just go up to the top right here click on this very magical button to start a brand new conversation and so you do lose some of that conversation history with that context but this is the best way to just get rid of those hallucinations just re-explain a little

**[0:09:07]** bit here it's going to save you a lot of time even though you'd have to do that and it's going to stop hallucinating most of the time so definitely try this it saves me a lot of time next thing a lot of times it is very very tempting

**[0:09:20]** when you have wind surf build out your app and you see 10 different problems with it that you just start spamming it all inone prompt with all these things that you want it to fix and so as an example here let's just say you have all these requirements right here things

**[0:09:33]** that you want it to make to polish things up for you now this is not the way to go about it it takes a little bit of patience but it is much better to give it one request at a time otherwise it's going to confuse itself as it tries

**[0:09:47]** to fulfill all your requests at once even though it's an agent running behind the scenes with Chain of Thought it still messes up when you have a lot of requirements and so if you take all this and merge it down into just one thing start with that have it implemented make sure it

**[0:10:01]** corrects itself if it messes anything up and then move on to the next thing you're going to get much better results and that little bit of patience really pays off in the long run and ends up making the whole thing take less time one of my favorite features in Wind surf

**[0:10:15]** is before it makes any changes it asks you if you want to reject all or accept all and you can go within the specific files and accept or reject specific changes now the really important thing to know here this is a big deal is it actually implements everything in the

**[0:10:31]** code so it's not like you have to accept all or accept individual things for them to be there in the code and so what you can do is go to your app and test out these different changes like right here what I asked you to do is make it so

**[0:10:44]** that this title in the top left just goes to the first user message that I send and sure enough it did so I can test out this feature and then if I change my mind or it's not working then I can go and reject it so I can go back

**[0:10:56]** to wind Surf and just say oh this isn't what I wanted reject it and then ask it to fix whatever it did wrong and so you don't have to accept then test it then manually revert if it doesn't work it's all is handled within the reject button right there really really nice along the

**[0:11:11]** same lines it is really important to take advantage of the fact that you can accept or reject specific changes that it makes across different files the reason this is useful is a lot of times you ask it to do a couple of things and like I said you don't want it to have it

**[0:11:25]** do too much at once but if you have it do a couple of things sometimes it'll get everything right except one thing and so maybe you want to just reject that one thing before then clicking on accept all and So within a file right here let's say for example I don't like

**[0:11:39]** the loading indicator that it added I can reject this and then go down and reject this change but then I asked it to do another thing where it adds the title to the conversations and I want that so then I can click accept and then boom now it's done I've accepted and

**[0:11:53]** rejected everything so my accept all and reject all buttons also went away but that way I got to decide what I brought in and the agent knows what I rejected and accepted so I can ask it to correct the things that I rejected and it'll know what to do going forward another

**[0:12:09]** really neat feature within wind surf is you can call out specific files or functions to the agent so that it knows exactly what you're referring to when you want it to go and edit something specific or look at something specific and the way that you do that is just

**[0:12:23]** with the at right here so I can say at and then for example if I want to reference my hook right here use conversations I can say use conversations and then it pops up all these suggestions for me the two top ones being the file itself and then the

**[0:12:37]** use conversations hook definition actually within the file so this right here so I can reference the file or the hook itself click on one of these and then it's injected within the conversation so now I can say something like edit this to make it better and then boom it now knows exactly what I'm

**[0:12:53]** talking about so it's not going to hallucinate and edit the wrong files which it'll do sometimes so it's very important in general to get give it that kind of Direction here's the file I want you to edit or here's a file that I want you to create tests for that kind of

**[0:13:06]** thing if it isn't obvious already it is super important to be very specific with the large language model to guide it to get what you really want and that really applies to using AI in any way but especially in Wind surf just because of how much is really happening under the

**[0:13:20]** hood that direction is crucial to get the output you were looking for and a lot of my other tips have talked about really being specific but another area that is really really important is right off the bat starting the creation of your application you want to Define your

**[0:13:34]** text stack and be very specific about the programming languages and technologies that you want to use to build what you're trying to build and so I have an example here of a terrible prompt build me an API endpoint to manage users in my database this is not specific at all you have no idea what

**[0:13:50]** it's going to Output here what tech stack is going to use instead I have a better prompt here I'm telling it to use fast API and python for the API endpoint I'm telling it specifically what I want the API endpoint to do to change a user's email and postgress hosted with

**[0:14:05]** superbase being specific about the database and even being specific about the schema here it's important to give it all these details otherwise it's not really a co-pilot it's just kind of doing its own thing because you barely told it what you want so very important to be specific especially at the start

**[0:14:21]** all right the next tip that has saved me a ton of time and solved a lot of problems is actually to go and use 01 when wind surf is having trouble with clae 3.5 Sonet because clae 3.5 Sonet is fantastic but I actually think 01 is slightly better at coding it solves some

**[0:14:38]** problems that I can't with Sonet and so sometimes when I hit a snag in Wind Surf and it really can't seem to figure something out I'll go over to 01 and I'll even show you my kind of prompt template here I'll go over to 01 paste in my code just say like here's my code

**[0:14:52]** I'm trying to do XYZ but I'm getting this error and I'll paste in the error or whatever the issue is within wind surf I'll get the fix for it from 01 a lot of times it does better I'll go back into my code and correct it and then

**[0:15:04]** because we have this Flow State where the agent and wind surf knows all the changes I'm making I can then just continue right where I left off with those fixes with wind Surf and it saves so much time so the best way to make General broad stroke changes to your

**[0:15:18]** code base is obviously with the conversation window on the right hand side that we've been using so far but if you want to make directed changes and you know exactly which function needs to be updated and you want to reduce hallucinations there's a better way to do it what you can do is you can click

**[0:15:33]** on the function or class whatever that you want to change you can see that I have handle submit selected in the top middle right here and I can click on the refactor button and then there's a bunch of predefined options here or I can type whatever I want and it's going to use

**[0:15:46]** that as instructions to edit just the handle submit function so the context is honed in on this specifically so it doesn't have to search through my entire code base it's very focused that's going to give you better results so do this when you can and similarly if I click on

**[0:16:00]** handle submit again I can also click on explain and so this is another way if you're looking over code that It produced or even if you import a project for another person and you just want to help understanding a function you can do this as well and so now it's explaining

**[0:16:13]** to me just the handle submit function it's doing that very very well so yeah use these to your advantage to help you understand and change specific parts of your code base next up one of the things I mentioned at the start of my video is using wind surf to document your code is

**[0:16:28]** phenomenal and saves a lot of time because as a developer you do not want to skimp out on your documentation you have no idea when you're going to need it in the future when you go back to the project or bring on other people to work on your codebase or maybe you're already

**[0:16:42]** working with a team in that case is even more important and so yeah wind serve helps a lot with that so you can call out a specific function that you want it to document or you can just tell it in general to document this file or even the entire project if you want but the

**[0:16:56]** big thing that I've seen it do a lot is it will up upate your code along with adding documentation unless you tell it to not update the code in any way and it listens to this pretty well but it's very important to include this and so I'll just prompt it right here also it's

**[0:17:12]** worth noting that you can add a doc string so I can click on handle submit like I did in the last tip and click on ADD doc string but that's only going to usually add documentation right above the function but sometimes you want to have that doc string above the function

**[0:17:25]** but then also have certain comments within the code as well kind of like we're seeing right here so a general overview but then also calling out how specific features within the code works and so that's why I generally prefer to do it this way instead of adding a doc

**[0:17:38]** string but just keep in mind that that is available as well we can see right here that with my prompting it added all the documentation without changing the code at all and that's what you want when you're adding docs you usually want to do code cleanup and other things as a

**[0:17:51]** separate step now one thing that AI has always been very very helpful with is writing your tests and with wind surf that is no exception it saves a ton of time especially doing something that's really annoying for us developers but you really have to do it to have

**[0:18:05]** production ready code that you can consistently test so that things don't break and you're sure of that when you are making changes and when you write your tests with AI they're not always going to work right off the bat but they can help you set up a lot of that boiler

**[0:18:18]** plate especially when you're bringing in a bunch of libraries like just and the react testing library for a front end or if you're doing things with pie test in the back end there's some setup a lot of times that you have to go through documentation and figure out how to get

**[0:18:29]** everything working in your test environment and so it does a lot of that for you which saves you a lot of time and then you can go through and really tweak the tests to make it test what you want and to correct any errors that might come up but it still will save you

**[0:18:41]** hours and hours it is just crazy to me the kind of things that you can build with AI idees like wind surf right now and it's only going to keep getting better imagine this at some point probably pretty soon we're going to have a full agentic IDE running completely

**[0:18:57]** locally on our computer including the M it's going to have full access to everything on our computer it's going to be able to research Library documentation for us it's going to be able to fully deploy anything it builds and I'm sure a million other features as well and that is the day I am looking

**[0:19:12]** forward to and it's cool to see with tools like winds surf that kind of thing is actually Within Reach which is just fascinating to me so I would definitely recommend trying out wind Surf and giving it a shot I promise that you are going to be impressed and if you

**[0:19:26]** appreciated this video I would really appreciate a like and a subscribe and with that I will see you in the next video
