3 Principles from Windsurf That Will Transform Your Enterprise AI Agents

The AI Engineer Summit concluded a few weeks ago in New York. If you missed it, don't worry- I'm here to share key insights on AI agents that can benefit your enterprise!

Kevin Hou from Windsurf shared how they prioritized building agentic coding tools. Having recently incorporated Windsurf into my software development stack, I've noticed the thoughtful design choices that create such a seamless coding experience.

If you're exploring AI-powered workflows for your organization, these 3 principles from Kevin will be valuable:

Trajectories

AI agents should work in the background and anticipate your next steps. Windsurf accomplishes this through a shared timeline between the user and AI, giving the AI context about past actions and enabling it to predict future steps. Kevin envisions that future AI agents will predict 10-20 steps ahead. This creates an experience more like collaboration between colleagues.

What this means for you: If you already have AI tools working in your organization, consider implementing a shared context system so future AI assistants can support your teams seamlessly. This may require cross-departmental coordination to address appropriate context sharing and privacy considerations.

Meta-learning

AI agents should adapt to your workflow. Windsurf enables this by allowing AI agents to build a memory bank of user preferences, such as preferred tools and configuration settings.

What this means for you: Start experimenting with adding memory to your AI tools. Begin with a straightforward approach- incorporating "memory" as part of the context. This helps you validate whether the agent performs better with access to historical preferences and actions.

Scale with intelligence

AI is developing at unprecedented speed, and your AI tools should improve accordingly. Windsurf exemplifies this by evolving from a basic chat interface to sophisticated agents. Now, users can simply describe what they want to build without needing to specify which files to modify.

What this means for you: Even if AI tools aren't your core business, you can schedule quarterly "AI check-ins" with a specialist to understand emerging technologies and identify opportunities to upgrade your existing tools.

What are your thoughts on implementing AI agents in non-technical departments? I'd love to hear your experiences in the comments!