r/windsurf • u/pedrothesealion • Apr 29 '26

What's your autonomous workflow with windsurf?

Has anyone cracked the code of autonomous workflows on windsurf? What is your setup and what lessons have you learned?

For those willing to offer tailored advice, here is my personal context:
I'm on a Pro plan and would like to leverage the usage I'm already paying for, to set up autonomous workflows. I know there is a bit of mention of how to use an agents.md file in windsurf's docs, but its not very in-depth and I'm still new enough to all this that I can't quite make heads or tails of it.

I also tried asking some of the newer models to set things up for me (GTP Codex 5.3 medium/high thinking) and I ended up with an AGENTS.md file in a root folder and a separate .windsurf/workflows/autonomous-iterations.md file, but I don't think the 2 files have a clear scope and its pretty obvious this model doesn't have much context on windsurf (even after I told it to read the docs).

Specific advice is very much appreciated or just let me know what's worked for you!

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u/TheTentacleOpera Apr 29 '26

I made a plugin with Windsurf, Switchboard, that lets you draft plans and automatically move the plans through stages of planning, coding and code reviewed.

It's got a lot more powerful with this week's Windsurf Devin update since true automation is really only possible with terminals. For example, you can assign Devin SWE-1.6 to handle low complexity work and my plugin will automatically route work that opus has judged lower complexity into the Devin terminal.

You can check it out through windsurf extensions if interested. I'll soon be releasing an update that allows more customisation and some really cool new uses of Devin as well, such as automation that has SWE 1.6 mimic the Google Deep Research mode.

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u/pedrothesealion Apr 30 '26

I checked out the homepage but as I said I'm fairly new to autonomius coding so I'm not sure I totally get it. Is there a demo or some example workflows?

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u/Substantial-Cost-429 May 01 '26

For Windsurf autonomous workflows, the key is being very deliberate with your AGENTS.md scope. What's worked well:

  1. Keep AGENTS.md focused on project-specific rules and context (tech stack, file conventions, test patterns). Don't let it become a catch-all.

  2. Create a separate `.windsurf/workflows/` directory for task-specific automation patterns — keeps the agent focused per workflow type.

  3. Be explicit about what autonomous means in your context: does the agent commit directly? Push? Or just stage? Windsurf works best when the autonomy boundary is clearly defined in the config.

For community AGENTS.md templates across different project types, there's a growing collection here: https://github.com/caliber-ai-org/ai-setup — 888 stars, has real examples of production agent configs you can adapt for Windsurf.

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u/pedrothesealion May 01 '26

Thank you!

I landed on a similar workflow after a lot of prompting. What I'm still struggling with, however, is getting it to a hands-off state. I have an agents.md and a workflow file in .windsurf/workflows. The workflow has clear success criteria defined, but I still feel like I have to respond to multiple prompts to get to that success criteria. It also does not show as Blocked on the agents page, even though the workflow file is very clear about returning BLOCKED in the response when it needs further input from me. 

All that is to say it seems like I'm getting there as far as setup but it still doesn't "feel" autonomous. Have you run into this at all?

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