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Sounds very cool.

I wanted to try this out, so I opened Windsurf for the first time in ages and clicked the "Upgrade Available" button, which sent me to: https://windsurf.com/editor/update-linux

  Did you install using apt or apt-get? If so...
  
  1. Update package lists
  
  sudo apt-get update
  
  2. Upgrade Windsurf
  
  sudo apt-get upgrade windsurf

Whle `apt-get upgrade windsurf` will technically upgrade Windsurf, instructing users to run a command that will attempt to upgrade all packages on their system is nuts when the command is provided in a context that strongly implies it will only upgrade Windsurf and has no warnings or footnotes to the contrary. Good thing I didn't ask Windsurf's agent to ugprade itself for me, I guess.

EDIT - I don't want to detract from the topic at hand, however - after upgrading (with `sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade windsurf` :)) and playing around a bit, the Codemaps feature indeed seems very nifty and worth checking out. Good job!

A few things to point out after reading and thinking about this:

- Another AI firm building products focused on Fortune 500 scale problems. If you're not at a F500, this tool isn't necessarily a good fit for you, so YMMV.

- static analysis tools that produce flowcharts and diagrams like this have existed since antiquity, and I'm not seeing any new real innovation other than "letting the LLM produce it".

They say it's ZDR, so maybe I don't fully understand what problem they're trying to solve, but in general I don't see the value add for a system like this. Also onboarding isn't necessarily just presenting flow charts and diagrams: one of the biggest things you can do to onboard somebody is level-set and provide them with problem context. You COULD go into a 30 minute diatribe about how "this is the X service, which talks to the Y service, and ..." and cover a whiteboard in a sprawling design diagram, or you could just explain to them "this is the problem we're working on", using simple, compact analogies where/when applicable. If the codebase is primarily boilerplate patterns, like CRUD, MVC, or Router/Controller/Service/DB, why talk about them? Focus on the deviant patterns your team uses. Focus on the constraints your team faces, and how you take the unbeaten path to navigate those constraints.

I really think more people should give Windsurf a go. It's really good. I'm a senior engineer and do a mix of agentic and regular coding and I really think people are looking past Windsurf.

As the conversation shifted towards Cursor vs Claude code vs Codex people seem to have stopped mentioning it which is a shame.

Source: user for 12 months - not a shill.

Codemaps was a very pleasant surprise when it showed up.

A feature like this isn't useful because knowing what connects to what, dependencies, etc. means nothing without business context. AI will never know the why behind the architecture, it will only take it at face value. I think technical design docs which have some context and reading the code is more than enough. This sits in the middle ground where it lacks the context of a doc and is less detailed than the code.

this is the right way to try and tackle this problem imo. too much focus in AI dev tooling has been on building "products" that only half work.

making codebases understandable to humans, and LLMs etc, is a better approach

self documenting, interpretable systems would actually solve a lot of dev churn in big companies

plus it's not like artifacts have to be limited to code once that's figured out

So it is the same thing when I ask Claude to build me mermaid charts of code flows? So no point in this tool?

Out of nowhere Cognition with a banging product. Probably not 100% yet but the idea is so good I'll be surprised if within 6 months all the other IDEs aren't copying.

(coauthor) happy to take any questions! see 1 min demo video here https://x.com/cognition/status/1985755284527010167

this is brainchild of cognition cto steven who doesn't like the spotlight but he deserves it for this one https://x.com/stevenkplus1/status/1985767277376241827

if you leave qtns here he'll see it

for people too lazy to download windsurf to try it, codemaps is also in deepwiki

example: https://deepwiki.com/search/how-do-react-hooks-work-under_7a...

this does a pretty good job of going in the weeds of how the useState hook works in react

Figuring out new codebases is definitely one of the most challenging and time-intensive things I have had to do in my jobs.

Looks an interesting enough feature to give Windsurf a try!

I really like this kind of applied statistical data infrastructure approach, feels much more natural than just raw text + immediate HIL

Great idea. I always end up having to tag the relevant files/abstractions anyways to avoid having the LLM produce duplicated slop, and something like this makes collecting this info much easier.

This looks awesome. I’m a very heavy Claude Code user (and Codex) in both the CLI and VS Code (and now in the web too!) and it’s quite infuriating when the agent just gets lost after context compaction and I have to point it to read CLAUDE/AGENTS.md (and update it if a lot of changes have been made)

I tried Windsurf a while back but I’ll definitely come back ASAP just to play with this and see how it does in a somewhat complex project I’m working on.

Kudos to the team!

this is amazing!