This free, video-based, course from DeepLearning.AI is about coding assistants and in particular Windsurf. It shows how we can leverage such tools to become much more productive.

Windsurf is an AI-powered agentic IDE that took the industry by storm, being heralded as one of the best coding assistants, at par or even better than Cursor.

IDEs nowadays are becoming AI powered, the ultimate programmers' sidekick. The promise is to render you a 10x developer by making you more productive. How do they do that?
By enabling code completion and code generation, dissecting codebases for better understanding and the like.

Newer IDEs like Windsurf and Cursor, are being AI powered from the ground up while in the case of older, more established, IDEs like Jetbrains Intellij or VSCode, AI is being sprinkled on top. We've looked at both approaches recently in "JetBrains Junie - An AI Coding Agent" and "Eclipse Adds AI To Theia".

Windsurf is one of the newest counterparts that is built from scratch for AI and is actually a fork of VSCode just like Cursor. While it might be straightforward to use it, there's always tips and tricks and optimal ways to achieve maximum productivity. Thus this new course by DeepLearning.AI, "Build Apps with Windsurf’s AI Coding Agents" walks you through creating applications using the IDE and its enhanced features.

In it you’ll:

• Learn how to get started with Windsurf, and build your first app (a snake game) in a couple of minutes.
  
  
• Look at the evolution of AI coding assistants, from simple code suggestions to agentic systems that collaborate with developers.
  
  
• Use an AI agent to analyze and resolve issues in Javascript code.
  
  
• Use Windsurf to analyze and understand a large, old codebase and update it to the latest versions of the frameworks and packages it uses.
  
  
• Use Windsurf to build a Wikipedia data analysis app — retrieving, parsing, and analyzing word frequencies.
  
  
• Learn tips and tricks such as command, autocomplete, @mentions, and explain functionalities to maximize your interactions with the overall AI system as you build a full-stack app to visualize the data of your Wikipedia analysis app.
  
  
• Leverage the multimodal capabilities of the AI agent to increase your development velocity with an example in which you upload a mockup with sketched-out reference UI features to add new functionalities to your app.

The focus is of course on Agentic AI not just simple autocompletion tasks. What does that mean? We've looked at Agentic AI recently in "Potpie - Agentic AI On Your Codebase", where we found that agents can do all of the following:

Codebase Q&A Agent
Answers questions about your codebase using the knowledge graph and code analysis tools, from specific functions to overall architecture.

Debugging 
Analyzes stacktraces and errors to provide debugging directions helping you you iteratively find the root cause of issues.

Code Generation Agent
An agent specialized in generating code for new features or fixing bugs.

Windsurf integrates such functionality inside the IDE.

The course is 12 lessons long comprising of very short up to 10 minutes long videos. So like in an hour you'll understand how to use the tool effectively. Well spent time!

More Information

Build Apps with Windsurf’s AI Coding Agents

Related Articles

JetBrains Junie - An AI Coding Agent

Eclipse Adds AI To Theia

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