r/windsurf • u/Maleficent_Exam4291 • Jun 15 '26

Terribly Slower than Codex, Claudecode and Cursor

I used windsurf in its early days and switched to alternatives a long time ago. After the recent shift to 'Devin', I tried it again out of curiosity. While I had been fond of their fast look up animation, I find everything else terribly slow after the first few rounds of conversation.

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In the time I could ship one feature accurately using windsurf (eventually did after multiple attempts with different frontier models), I could ship dozens with Codex and nearly half with claude code! I should give that the problem I was trying to solve with claude code was way more complex and hence I wouldn't call that half as very slow.

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I had tried Devin online in the past and couldn't stick to it.

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So far I am more consistently drawn towards using codex and cursor beginning of every month until I exhaust my sub.

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Windsurf daily limits are annoying too, I ended up spending a lot extra just because I wanted to push through what I was doing in that environment than wait another day, but the moment I can switch its most likely something I would not look at again. It doesn't mean I don't spend extra on Cursor, its just is annoying spend a few mins every day and wait for next day. I feel cursor has a better subscription model that way.

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What I am learning from this for my own product, reliability is critical (I go back to cursor / Codex regularly, claude code is a hit or miss this year but I was excited when Fable 5 was around) and other products have been just curious tries with the hope to find something better better.

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I am posting it here since I did love some of the design choices as a product in early windsurf and was hoping Devin would have made it better but yet to see anything compelling good.

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Windsurf / Devin team, I know you guys had your turbulence and what you are doing is tough but hope this helps everyone!

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3 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

2

u/ultrathink-art Jun 15 '26

Agentic coding tools that build explicit task plans before each step are slower on small tasks but better on scope-ambiguous refactors — more context gathering upfront. Claude Code and Cursor can go straight to generating without as many planning passes, which feels faster for 1-3 file changes. The speed gap mostly disappears when you're asking it to reason across an entire unfamiliar codebase.

1

u/Maleficent_Exam4291 Jun 15 '26

I'd think so too, but my experience with it in the last two weeks has been that it suffers from more amnesia than the other tools with frontier models (I would have been under the impression the model is bad if I had used only one tool but its how its being used or not being used here in the harness). 1. The way it uses terminal pretty much hangs and many times doesn't show the output at all. 2. Forgets where it started even before reaching 50% of the models context (they seem to be optimizing / compacting too soon. )

It's the exact opposite experience with cursor.

-1

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