Windsurf Killed the Chat Box

Windsurf is doing away with chat and ask modes. All agent, all the time, starting now.

The response you're supposed to have is: wow, bold move, what about the users who just want to ask a question without spinning up a full agent loop. And that's a reasonable concern if those users exist.

I haven't met them.

Every "ask" I've ever issued to a coding assistant was a question I needed answered before doing something — which is to say, it was the first half of an agentic task with the second half stripped out. The chat/ask split always felt like a product decision masquerading as an architectural one. Like offering a car in two modes: "driving" and "also driving but we're not calling it that."

I use repoprompt for actual questions anyway, because what I want there is a clean read on the codebase, not a context-switched agent that has to orient itself before it can answer.

Windsurf collapsing the modes just makes the product honest about what it already was.