Windsurf Ships Devin for Terminal: A CLI Agent That Runs Locally and Hands Off to the Cloud

Windsurf 2.1.29 shipped on April 28 with a new addition that extends beyond the editor: Devin is now available as a standalone terminal agent. All Windsurf users get access with their existing subscription, no separate Devin plan required.

The install is a single curl command:

curl -fsSL https://cli.devin.ai/install.sh | bash

How It Works

Devin for Terminal is a local agent. It runs on your machine with access to your codebase, tools, and environment, and it operates interactively rather than in a detached background process. The terminal rendering library is written in Rust, which is how Cognition can claim the binary is fast enough to run on a VT100. That is a marketing line more than a practical benchmark, but the point is it is lightweight.

The model selection is broader than the Windsurf editor currently offers. Devin for Terminal supports Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, and SWE-1.6 — the three strongest models for agentic coding work right now — through a unified picker.

Cloud Handoff

The feature that sets this apart from other CLI agents is the handoff mechanism. When a session outgrows your local environment, you can transfer it to Devin in the cloud. That cloud Devin gets its own VM with a browser, isolated test environments, video recording of what the agent does, and autofix for review feedback. The session state carries over, so it is not a restart — it is the same task, running somewhere else.

Cognition describes the use case clearly: local agents are for when you want to think, review, and stay close to the code. Cloud agents are for when you want to hand something off and come back to a finished PR. The terminal agent bridges those two modes in a single workflow.

Also: Devin Local Agent Inside Windsurf

The same 2.1.29 update enables a new Devin Local mode inside the Windsurf editor. It uses the same agent harness as the terminal version, and sessions are shared across both surfaces — start in the terminal, continue in the editor, or the reverse.

Cognition says Devin Local is up to 30% more token-efficient than the existing Cascade agent. The practical implication is longer effective sessions before hitting quota limits on the same plan.

Context

This is Cognition’s second major product move in April. Windsurf 2.0 launched on April 15 with the Agent Command Center and Devin integrated into the editor for the first time. That release was about managing multiple agents from within an IDE. The terminal release is about meeting developers where many of them already work, without requiring the editor at all.

Cursor already has CLI agent capabilities, and Claude Code runs entirely in the terminal. Adding Devin as a terminal-first option fills in the obvious gap in Windsurf’s product line. The cloud handoff capability is the differentiator — no other terminal agent has a built-in mechanism to transparently shift a session to a cloud agent mid-task.

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Sources: Windsurf Changelog, Cognition Blog