Product design question
How would you integrate Devin's autonomous capabilities into the Windsurf IDE?
- Windsurf
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Product integration design across two products with different autonomy models, testing how to combine capabilities without confusing the core experience.
How to approach it
- Clarify the integration goal: let a Windsurf user delegate a well-scoped task to Devin-like autonomous execution without leaving the IDE.
- Design the entry point: a clear action, like 'delegate this task', available on a ticket, TODO, or selected code region within Windsurf.
- Keep the delegated task running in the background while the developer continues other work in Windsurf, with a visible status indicator.
- Design the return flow: when the autonomous task completes, it appears as a reviewable PR or diff inside Windsurf, using the same review patterns developers already trust.
- Preserve Windsurf's core identity as the human-in-the-loop experience by making delegation an explicit, opt-in action rather than a default behavior.
- Define success as adoption of the delegate action among existing Windsurf users, and quality of delegated-task output measured the same way as Devin's standalone metrics.
What a strong answer includes
- Designs delegation as an explicit, opt-in action rather than blurring the products' distinct value propositions by default.
- Keeps the developer in their existing IDE context throughout, avoiding a jarring context switch to a separate tool.
- Reuses familiar review patterns (PR/diff view) for the returned autonomous work, reducing the learning curve.
- Proposes adoption of the delegate feature as a clean, measurable signal of integration success.
- Shows awareness that this integration should complement, not dilute, Windsurf's control-focused identity.
Common mistakes
- Merging the two products' interaction models by default, confusing users about which mode they are in.
- Not addressing how the developer reviews and trusts work that Devin performed autonomously.
Likely follow-up questions
- What types of tasks would you allow to be delegated first?
- How would you handle a delegated task that fails or produces poor output?
- How would you measure whether this integration is actually valuable to users?
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More questions from Windsurf
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop