New course to bring you up to state-of-the-art at using AI to help you code: Build Apps with Windsurf's AI Coding Agents, built in partnership with WIndsurf (@codeiumdev) and taught by @_anshulr!
AI-assisted IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) make developers’ workflows faster, more efficient, and much more fun. Agentic tools like Windsurf are more than just code autocomplete—they are collaborative coding agents that help you break down complex applications, iterate efficiently, and generate code that spans multiple files.
Although a lot of coding assistants share the same underlying large language models for planning and reasoning, a major point of distinction is how they handle tools, keep track of context, and stay aligned with your intent as a developer.
For instance, if you make modifications to a class definition in your code and make the same modifications to other classes in the same directory, you might tell the AI agent "Do the same thing in similar places in this directory." Here, tracking your intent means understanding that “the same thing" refers to that recent edit you just made, which must be followed by appropriate search and tool-calling to implement…
context window — The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.
Why it matters
What separates coding agents is context windowThe maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.Full definition → and intent tracking rather than the model underneath; this shows the mechanics and where those mechanisms break down.
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