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Nguyen Quoc Tuan Tuan PK
Nguyen Quoc Tuan Tuan PK

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How I Use Windsurf for Fast Prototyping and Codex for Multi-file Cleanup

At first AI coding felt magical.

Then my repo hit 40+ files.

Windsurf was still useful for:

  • rough structure
  • brainstorming
  • fast UI iteration But Codex became much stronger when:
  • files started connecting together
  • refactoring affected multiple modules
  • cleanup became more important than prototyping My workflow now is usually: Windsurf -> rough prototype Codex -> repo-wide cleanup/refactor Manual testing -> rollback if needed The larger the repo became, the more context management mattered. One thing I learned is that AI coding tools are not really competing only on code generation anymore. They compete on:
  • context handling
  • repo understanding
  • multi-file coordination
  • workflow speed I wrote a deeper comparison here: https://review.mssmileenglish.com/comparisons/cursor-vs-windsurf/ https://review.mssmileenglish.com/comparisons/cursor-vs-windsurf/

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