Vibe-coding startup Windsurf launches in-house AI models

On Thursday, Windsurf, a startup that develops fashionable AI instruments for software program engineers, announced the launch of its first household of AI software program engineering fashions, or SWE-1 for brief. The startup says it educated its new household of AI fashions — SWE-1, SWE-1-lite, and SWE-1-mini — to be optimized for the “total software program engineering course of,” not simply coding.

The launch of Windsurf’s in-house AI fashions could come as a shock to some, on condition that OpenAI has reportedly closed a $3 billion deal to acquire Windsurf. Nevertheless, this mannequin launch suggests Windsurf is attempting to broaden past simply creating functions to additionally creating the fashions that energy them.

According to Windsurf, SWE-1, the most important and most succesful AI mannequin of the bunch, performs competitively with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Professional on inner programming benchmarks. Nevertheless, SWE-1 seems to fall in need of frontier AI fashions, reminiscent of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on software program engineering duties.

Windsurf says its SWE-1-lite and SWE-1-mini fashions will likely be accessible for all customers on its platform, free or paid. In the meantime, SWE-1 will solely be accessible to paid customers. Windsurf didn’t instantly announce pricing for its SWE-1 fashions however claims it’s cheaper to serve than Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Windsurf is greatest identified for instruments that enable software program engineers to write down and edit code via conversations with an AI chatbot, a observe referred to as “vibe coding.” Different fashionable vibe-coding startups embrace Cursor, the most important within the house, in addition to Lovable. Most of those startups, together with Windsurf, have historically relied on AI fashions from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to energy their functions.

In a video saying the SWE fashions, feedback made by Windsurf’s Head of Analysis, Nicholas Moy, underscore Windsurf’s latest efforts to distinguish its strategy. “As we speak’s frontier fashions are optimized for coding, they usually’ve made large strides during the last couple of years,” says Moy. “However they’re not sufficient for us … Coding just isn’t software program engineering.”

Windsurf notes in a weblog submit that whereas different fashions are good at writing code, they battle to work between a number of surfaces — as programmers typically do — reminiscent of terminals, IDEs, and the web. The startup says SWE-1 was educated utilizing a brand new knowledge mannequin and a “coaching recipe that encapsulates incomplete states, long-running duties, and a number of surfaces.”

The startup describes SWE-1 as its “preliminary proof of idea,” suggesting it might launch extra AI fashions sooner or later.