What Windsurf Cascade is
The baseline, stated fairly.
Windsurf (formerly Codeium; acquired by Cognition AI — maker of Devin — in July 2025 for ~$82M ARR) ships two mechanisms: Memories, auto-generated by Cascade when it "encounters context that it believes is useful to remember"; and Rules, manually authored and version-controlled.
Memories live locally at ~/.codeium/windsurf/memories/ and are workspace-scoped.
How it actually works
Technical facts.
- StorageLocal only,
~/.codeium/windsurf/memories/
- Retrieval"Cascade retrieves them when it believes they're relevant" — algorithm not disclosed.
- Cost$15/mo Pro. Per docs: creating and using auto-generated memories do NOT consume credits — but they still consume prompt tokens.
- ScopeWorkspace-specific. Docs: "Memories generated in one workspace are not available in another."
- LimitationDocs themselves recommend writing Rules over Memories for anything you want reliably reused — implying auto-memories are unreliable.
Sources: Windsurf Memories docs