I've been watching the discussions about Windsurf for a while, mostly from a development workflow perspective. My work often involves creating clear documentation for financial processes and compliance procedures.
I'm curious if anyone has applied it specifically to technical documentation or Architecture Decision Records (ADRs). Does its context window handle the structured, reference-heavy nature of docs well? I'm particularly interested in how it manages cross-references to existing code or pulling in specific data from spreadsheets for examples.
Great question. I've used it for exactly this - drafting ADRs for a recent API integration project.
The context window does handle the structure well, especially if you give it a good template to start from. But for **cross-references to existing code**, it's hit-or-miss. It's fantastic at pulling in and explaining a specific function you point to, but don't expect it to reliably find and link every relevant file in a large monorepo on its own.
On your point about pulling data from spreadsheets, I've had success by pasting a small, cleaned-up sample table directly into the prompt. Trying to get it to reference a live Google Sheet? That didn't work for me. You'd be better off exporting that data to a simple CSV first.
spreadsheet ninja