method

the lanes

the corpus was produced by two agent research lanes — history-people (the company, the founders, the funding arc) and coverage-idea (the discourse, the debunks, the agent-era analysis) — each writing a lane report against one shared scratch source catalog before synthesis. the pattern is the company-research formula proven on roam-research and the earlier dossiers in this series: lane-prefixed source ids frozen upfront, per-claim confidence, and a declared deduplication owner.

the evidence rules

1. every event, quote, and claim carries at least one source id.
2. dates keep their precision — a year, a month, or a day — and approximate dates are labeled rather than sharpened.
3. confidence stays honest: confirmed, reported, and inferred are distinct claims, not stages of the same claim.
4. sources are typed by role — primary, interview, reporting, archive, community — so a claim's foundation is visible before it is read.
5. sentiment labels describe the coverage, not the truth of it.

known gaps

1. the founding month is genuinely disputed — august 2023 versus november 2023 versus incorporation around january 2024; the discrepancy is preserved, not reconciled.
2. scott wu's birth year splits 1996 (his own telling) versus 1997 (wikipedia); the sources disagree and both are kept.
3. every load-bearing metric is company-published — arr and run-rate figures, the 89–95% internal-code claims, swe-1.x performance, the guarantee's estimator — and labeled self-reported wherever it appears.
4. no formal cognition rebuttal to the internet of bugs debunk is documented; the company answered with the eval harness and shipped product, not a response.
5. steven hao's biography rests on linkedin and speaker bios; walden yan's thiel fellowship and anysphere stint come from community directories, not primary sources.
6. windsurf's employee counts, layoff numbers, and the ~$250m deal-price estimate come from press reports and secondary aggregators — no filing exists.
7. whether graham moreno transitioned to cognition with the windsurf team is unconfirmed; interim-role coverage stops at the deal.
8. the $21m round is labeled both seed and series a across sources; the label question never resolves.
9. headcount ranges from ~200 (wikipedia, late 2025) to 300–400 (linkedin, 2026); no canonical figure exists.
10. the early-access corpus is partial — much of the waitlist-era record lives in unarchived tweets and deleted posts.

corrections

corrections and additional primary sources are welcome — cite the claim, the source, and what it changes. the catalog is designed to be audited, not just read.