Chris Messina

Windsurf ships beta preview of "Lifeguard", a tool to help you find and resolve bugs inside your IDE

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Now to figure out how to activate it...

(Spotted in their release notes).

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Marcello Cultrera

Hi Chris, to activate Windsurf Next and access beta features like Lifeguard, follow these activation steps:

- Open Windsurf IDE

Launch the Windsurf Editor on your local system or browser.

- Navigate to Settings

Click the gear icon or go to Settings > Experimental Features.

- Enable Windsurf Next

Toggle the switch for “Windsurf Next Beta” or “Enable Lifeguard Preview” if listed separately.

- Restart the IDE

Some features may require a restart or refresh to fully activate.

- Verify Activation

You should see the Lifeguard tool available inside your IDE typically as a sidebar or context-aware debugger.

The Lifeguard in Windsurf Next is an agentic IDE feature that autonomously helps developers detect and resolve bugs with contextual codebase understanding. But there are still risks mainly on context misalignment misreading the repo structure or naming conventions; especially in complex codebases.

Also - depending on what the SWE-1 models match you may find positive/negative flags, more bias oriented analysis on complex code.

It’ll probably take a few months to hit the kind of polish we saw with Replit’s Agent3 setup more recently.

In the meantime, it’s worth double-checking your database replication while monitoring the Cascade auto-scanning and code functionality as it may fail solid sandboxing before pushing live.

Chris Messina

@marcello_cultrera1 hmm, thanks! I still don't see it. When I search for "Life" this showed up:

Moritz Stephan

@marcello_cultrera1  @chrismessina should be rolled out to all next users now!

Sanskar Yadav

Looks like it might still be rolling out gradually?
Sometimes these new features take a few days to hit all accounts. Worth checking if there's a waitlist or if it's tied to particular tiers. The concept sounds promising though!

Moritz Stephan

@sanskarix this is rolled out to all Next users now!