Cascade
Also known as: windsurf cascade, cascade agent, cascade agentic system
Most AI coding assistants are reactive: you ask, they respond. Cascade tries to be anticipatory. It watches what you are doing in the editor, which files you have open, what your terminal output says, and builds a running context model. When you give it a task, it already knows a lot about the current state of the project without you needing to explain it.
This continuous context tracking is what Windsurf means by 'stays in the loop.' In practice, this matters most for coordinated multi-file changes where the agent needs to understand the relationship between files you have been working on. Users report that Cascade handles these changes with higher first-pass accuracy than editors that start fresh each time you open the chat panel.
Cascade is proprietary to Windsurf and not an open standard. It represents one bet about what the future of the AI code editor looks like: the assistant as a persistent collaborator that observes and learns from your session rather than a tool you invoke for discrete tasks. The counterargument, from Zed users and terminal-agent advocates, is that you should understand and control what context your agent has rather than letting it observe everything automatically.