One Update, New Name
Windsurf shipped as Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026, delivered as a standard over-the-air update with no migration wizard and no reinstall step. Anyone who restarted the editor on or after that date got the new build automatically, with their existing plan, pricing, extensions, keybindings, and LSP setup carried over unchanged. Cognition has not introduced a new pricing tier or forced an upgrade to its Cognition Platform Plan / ACU billing for desktop users — Devin Local, the new local agent, bills the same way Cascade did.
The visible change is what opens by default. Where Windsurf opened on the editor canvas with an agent you could call into, Devin Desktop opens on the Agent Command Center — a Kanban-style view that tracks every local and cloud agent in one place, plus a new "Spaces" feature that groups sessions, PRs, files, and context together. It's a deliberate repositioning: from a code editor that happens to run an agent, to an agent-management surface that happens to contain a full IDE. Devin now spans four surfaces — Desktop, Cloud, CLI, and Review (code review on diffs) — with Desktop as the one most existing Windsurf users will notice first.
Correcting the Record: Who Actually Owns This Tool
If you've read our AI developer tools guide, you may have seen Windsurf described as "acquired by OpenAI in 2025." That deal never closed, and we've fixed the line — the real ownership history is more tangled, and worth knowing if you're trying to judge how stable an editor vendor is before standardizing a team on it.
Codeium rebranded as Windsurf in April 2025, pivoting from an autocomplete plugin to a full AI-native IDE. OpenAI reportedly agreed to acquire it for around $3 billion, but the deal's exclusivity window expired on July 11, 2025 after OpenAI couldn't secure IP rights compatible with its Microsoft partnership terms. Within days, Google DeepMind structured a reported $2.4 billion non-exclusive licensing deal instead — hiring Windsurf's CEO, a co-founder, and several top researchers without taking equity or acquiring the company. Three days later, on July 14, 2025, Cognition — maker of the Devin coding agent — acquired Windsurf's actual product, IP, trademark, and remaining team. Windsurf has operated under Cognition ever since; June 2, 2026 is simply the day the brand name itself was folded into Devin.
What's New: ACP Support
Devin Desktop added support for the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), an open standard that lets third-party coding agents run inside someone else's editor interface. At launch, Devin Desktop can host Codex, Claude Agent, and OpenCode alongside Devin's own agents, with supported third-party agents getting the same Agent Command Center treatment as native ones. This isn't an isolated bet: Zed 1.0 shipped ACP support earlier this year, as covered in our multi-agent coding stack roundup, and a second major editor adopting the same protocol is a signal that ACP is becoming a shared standard rather than a one-off feature.
The Actual Deadline: Cascade Ends July 1
Cascade, Windsurf's local agent, stays available only through July 1, 2026 — five days after this article's publish date — after which Cognition expects everyone, including Enterprise customers, to be running Devin Local instead. Devin Local is a full rewrite in Rust, not a fork of Cascade, and Cognition reports roughly 30% better token efficiency plus native subagent support for parallel work. If anything in your setup — a CI step, a saved command, a script — invokes Cascade directly, that's the real action item from this whole rebrand: find it and move it before the cutoff, not after.
Configuration mostly survives the transition. A legacy .windsurfrules file at your project root still works. Devin Desktop also reads a new .devin/rules/ directory, which takes precedence if both exist, with .windsurf/rules/ kept as a fallback. The CLI binary formerly invoked as surf is now devin-desktop, though the legacy path under ~/.codeium/windsurf/bin/ still resolves for now.
What This Means for Your Setup
- Find anything that calls Cascade by name. CI scripts, saved commands, or automation invoking Cascade directly stop working after July 1, 2026 — migrate them to Devin Local now, not on the deadline itself.
- Don't rush to rewrite rules files.
.windsurfruleskeeps working. Moving to.devin/rules/is worth doing eventually, but it isn't on the same clock as Cascade. - If you've cited "Windsurf, acquired by OpenAI" anywhere, fix it. That deal fell through in July 2025; Cognition is the actual owner, and the product is now named Devin Desktop. We've corrected this in our own tools guide as part of writing this piece.
- Treat ACP support as a portability signal, not a reason to switch tonight. Being able to run Claude Agent or Codex inside Devin Desktop is convenient, but it's still worth validating output quality per model rather than assuming the host editor changes anything about the agent itself.
For the wider pattern behind a tool you depend on changing hands and names with no warning, our guide to AI model availability risk covers the same problem one layer down the stack — model vendors, not just editor vendors, can disappear from under a workflow with little notice.