Windsurf: New Model Picker, Cascade Hook Transcripts, and MCP OAuth Auto-Login

New Model Picker with Family Grouping

Windsurf overhauled its model selection interface in version 1.9566.1009, replacing the flat list with a new picker that organizes available models into families. Each model family is presented as a group, making it significantly easier to navigate an expanding roster of AI models spanning proprietary and open-weight options.

Beyond grouping, the new picker introduces a hovercard UI that surfaces per-model configuration toggles — most notably controls for reasoning effort and output speed. These controls were previously less discoverable, requiring users to know which models supported thinking modes and where to toggle them. The hovercard makes these options immediately visible and accessible directly from the model selection step.

Windsurf also added model pinning, allowing developers to bookmark their most-used models for one-click access at the top of the picker. As Windsurf's supported model list continues to grow — now encompassing models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Zhipu AI, Minimax, and others — this organizational improvement meaningfully reduces the friction of switching between models mid-session.

Cascade Improvements: Transcript Hook and Team Visibility

POST_CASCADE_RESPONSE_WITH_TRANSCRIPT Hook

The February 24 release added a new Cascade hook type: POST_CASCADE_RESPONSE_WITH_TRANSCRIPT. This hook fires after every Cascade response and includes the full conversation transcript as part of its payload, enabling teams to build audit trails, logging pipelines, or compliance workflows on top of Cascade activity.

Unlike pre-hooks, which can block execution, post-hooks run after the action has completed — making the transcript hook suited for logging and monitoring use cases without affecting Cascade's response latency. This capability extends the existing Cascade Hooks system, which already supported pre- and post-action hooks for file writes, terminal commands, and other Cascade operations.

Team Settings Visibility

Cascade hook configurations are now visible on the team settings page in the Windsurf dashboard. Teams that have deployed cloud-based hook configurations can now inspect and verify their active hook setup directly from the admin UI without needing to check individual local installations. This improves observability for teams managing Cascade behavior centrally across many developer machines.

Additional Cascade Changes

Windsurf reduced the priority of Git commits in @ mention search results, addressing user feedback that commit SHAs were cluttering results when developers used @ to reference files, symbols, or other workspace items. A new windsurf.cascade.readClaudeCodeConfig flag was also added, giving teams the option to disable Cascade's automatic reading of Claude configuration files when this behavior conflicts with custom setups.

MCP Improvements: Refresh Button and OAuth Auto-Login

MCP Server Refresh Button

Windsurf added a manual refresh button to the MCP server panel. Previously, changes to MCP server configurations required restarting the IDE or waiting for automatic detection. The refresh button allows developers to apply configuration changes immediately without disrupting their workflow.

Auto-Trigger OAuth for HTTP/SSE MCP Servers

When adding an HTTP or SSE-based MCP server that requires OAuth authentication, Windsurf now automatically triggers the OAuth login flow rather than requiring users to locate and initiate the flow manually. This brings the MCP onboarding experience in line with how modern developer tools handle OAuth — a browser window opens, the user authenticates, and the connection is established without additional steps inside the IDE.

Windows Parsing and Startup Fixes

MCP server parsing on Windows received targeted fixes, addressing issues that affected certain server configurations on the platform. Startup reliability for MCP connections was also improved as part of the same release.

Platform Updates

Windsurf merged changes from VS Code 1.108, bringing the underlying editor up to date with the latest upstream improvements. A Windows update initialization path bug that could block the IDE update process was resolved, and Cascade startup reliability was generally improved. Linux ARM64 binary distribution continued to be available for this release, consistent with the ARM64 support shipped in the previous release series.