Windsurf: Cascade Hooks Cloud Config & Skills Discovery
WindsurfWindsurf's February 12 release brought two significant improvements for teams and enterprise users: cloud-based configuration of Cascade Hooks via the team dashboard, and support for loading Cascade skills from the .agents/skills directory. The hooks cloud config allows team admins to centrally deploy pre-prompt and post-response automation rules to all team members without requiring local file management.
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Enterprise-Grade Cascade Automation Gets Centralized Management
The v1.9552.21 release on February 12, 2026 delivered two notable improvements aimed at teams using Windsurf in professional and enterprise environments: centralized cloud configuration for Cascade Hooks, and expanded discovery of Cascade skills.
Cascade Hooks Cloud Configuration
Cascade Hooks are lifecycle automation hooks that fire at specific points in a Cascade session — for example, before a prompt is sent (pre_prompt hooks) or after a response is generated (post_cascade_response hooks). Teams have used these hooks to enforce compliance rules, trigger audit logging, sanitize sensitive data before it reaches the model, or automate post-session workflows.
Previously, deploying hooks to a team required distributing configuration files through MDM (Mobile Device Management) tools or manual installation on each developer's machine. With the February 12 release, enterprise teams can now configure Cascade Hooks directly through the Windsurf cloud dashboard under Team Settings. Hooks configured in the dashboard are automatically pushed to all team members and loaded when Windsurf starts.
This release also added tracking of triggered rules in the post_cascade_response hook via a new rules_applied field, giving teams better observability into which hooks are firing and when.
Skills from .agents/skills
Cascade skills are reusable instruction sets that define how Cascade should approach specific tasks. With this release, Windsurf added support for reading skills from the .agents/skills directory in a repository. This is in addition to other locations Cascade already checks, giving teams a more standardized, repository-level location for organizing and sharing skills across projects.
Additional Improvements
The release also addressed several reliability issues including fixes for post_write_code hooks to correctly handle all code editing tool formats, fixes and improvements for MCP server resource loading, and Plan Mode now supports automatic switching back to Code Mode when implementing a plan.