After a long hiatus (nearly nine years), I’m back to blogging—inspired by the vibe-coding IDE Windsurf.
If you don’t know what vibe coding is, here’s a definition from ChatGPT 4.1:
“Coding in a flow state, guided by intuition and creativity, often with the help of AI tools.”
And if you’re not familiar with IDEs:
“An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a software application that provides tools for writing, editing, testing, and debugging code—all in one place.”
IDEs have been around forever, but what sets Windsurf (and its more established competitor Cursor) apart is their deep integration of generative AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and others.
Personally, I thought this trend was mostly hype - until the recent $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf by OpenAI piqued my interest. Despite my initial skepticism, I’m blown away.
I’m a relative novice at coding, so take my enthusiasm with a grain of salt. But perhaps my inexperience makes my perspective more valuable: if a tool like Windsurf can dramatically level up someone like me, it could change the nature of software development itself.
Here’s a quick summary of my experience with Windsurf to illustrate why I found it so compelling:
To set the stage, I hadn’t done any meaningful coding in many years. As a kid, I learned HTML and set up simple websites. Around 2012, I took classes on JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and Node.js and built basic apps. More recently, I’ve used my rudimentary coding knowledge as needed on landing pages and Shopify sites.
In 2015, I started a blog on Ghost because I thought it was an interesting Node.js–based alternative to WordPress, and I thought it would be fun to spin it up myself and host it on DigitalOcean.
By 2016, I became distracted by other things and stopped blogging. The site sat idle for years. I neglected to renew my domain, and my DigitalOcean payment method expired.
My first test for Windsurf was to revive my blog.
To revive my idle blog, I asked Cascade to migrate my Ghost export to Hugo. It guided me through installing Homebrew, Xcode Command Line Tools, and Hugo—running each command in my terminal.
Normally this setup would take an afternoon, but with AI it only took 15 minutes.
Within an hour, my content was migrated, a theme applied, my GitHub repo linked, and the site live on CloudFront Pages. When I hit snags, Cascade either fixed the problem in-IDE or gave precise GitHub or CloudFront instructions.
Even now, Windsurf Autocomplete suggests inline improvements. Most suggestions aren’t relevant, but the few that are save me real time—and the tool keeps getting smarter.
It’s never been easier to code, even with a basic understanding of programming languages. I was skeptical, but now I truly see the potential for generative AI to revolutionize human–machine interaction. Vibe coding is here to stay, and natural language is the future of coding.