Devin Desktop Review 2026: The Agentic IDE Formerly Known as Windsurf

What Is Devin Desktop?

Devin Desktop is Cognition’s agentic AI IDE, and until June 2, 2026 it was called Windsurf. Cognition pushed the rename as an over-the-air update: existing installs kept their extensions, keybindings, and settings, and windsurf.com now redirects to devin.ai. The product is the same VS Code fork underneath, but the rebrand came with real changes, not just a new name.

Cognition acquired Windsurf in July 2025 (Google separately hired the founding team in a $2.4B talent deal) and spent the following year folding it into the Devin product line. The June 2026 release finished the job. The local agent, previously called Cascade, was rewritten in Rust and renamed Devin Local. Cognition says the rewrite is meaningfully more token-efficient, which matters on metered plans. The Agent Command Center, introduced in Windsurf 2.0 back in April, is now the default view when you open the app.

What Sets It Apart

The pitch is an IDE built around managing agents rather than an editor with an agent bolted on. The Command Center shows local Devin Local sessions and cloud Devin sessions on one board. You can start a task locally, hand it off to a cloud Devin, and track both without leaving the editor. Spaces group sessions, pull requests, and files around a task (“fix the auth bug”) rather than around a folder.

Devin Local handles the classic agentic loop: it navigates the project, plans changes, and edits multiple files with a plan-first approach you can review before it executes. It supports subagents for parallel work. For straightforward tasks (adding features, fixing bugs, implementing known patterns) it works reliably; on sprawling multi-file refactors, Cursor’s agent has historically been more consistent, though the Rust rewrite is new enough that this comparison is still settling.

Model support covers Claude, GPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek, plus Cognition’s own SWE model family, which costs no credits to use. Devin Desktop also supports the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), an open protocol that lets third-party agents like Codex, Claude Agent, and OpenCode run inside the Command Center alongside Devin.

One subscription now covers both products. The Pro plan at $20/mo includes the IDE and cloud Devin sessions; there is a free tier with limited usage, a $200/mo Max tier for heavy use, and Teams pricing at an $80/mo base plus $40 per developer seat. Before the merge, Windsurf and Devin were separate subscriptions, so for anyone using both this works out cheaper.

The trade-offs: the community is smaller than Cursor’s, so there are fewer third-party tutorials and resources. The agent-first interface is a bigger adjustment for developers who mainly want fast inline completions. And the product has been through an acquisition, a 2.0 redesign, and a rebrand inside twelve months, which is a lot of churn even if each step has been coherent.

Who It’s For

• Developers who want one subscription covering both a hands-on agentic IDE and a delegate-to-cloud agent
• Teams already using Devin who want the same agents available inside an editor
• Developers who want plan-first agentic editing with first-party models that don’t burn credits
• Not ideal for developers who mainly want the snappiest inline completions, or who depend on a large community ecosystem

Sources

• Devin Desktop announcement
• Devin Desktop
• Pricing