How to delete Windsurf Cascade history, and what you lose
one sealed file per conversation, in a directory that also holds things you want to keep
Each Cascade conversation is a single file, so deleting one is deleting one file. The catch is that the files are encrypted, so you cannot open one to see what it is, and they sit next to your MCP servers, rules and settings, which a broad rm takes with them.
Where the conversations are
| Platform | Cascade conversations |
|---|---|
| macOS | ~/.codeium/windsurf/cascade/ |
| Linux | ~/.codeium/windsurf/cascade/ |
| Windows | C:\Users\<name>\.codeium\windsurf\cascade\ |
The root, .codeium/windsurf in your home directory, is the one Devin Desktop's uninstall instructions name. Windsurf was renamed Devin Desktop and kept it. Each conversation is <cascade-id>.pb: a protobuf sealed with AES-256-GCM. The editor's own state.vscdb databases hold no Cascade transcripts on current builds, so there is nothing to clear there.
Finding the file for one conversation
The file name is the conversation id and the contents are ciphertext, so neither tells you which conversation it is. Two ways in:
ls -lt ~/.codeium/windsurf/cascade
lists them newest first by last write, which works when the conversation is a recent one. For anything older, deja can decrypt the files and search them. The short id it prints for a Cascade conversation is the start of the file name:
deja last --harness windsurf deja --harness windsurf "the migration we gave up on" ls ~/.codeium/windsurf/cascade/<id>*
How to delete it
Quit Windsurf / Devin Desktop first. Its language server keeps the Cascade directory open while it runs. Then remove one conversation:
rm ~/.codeium/windsurf/cascade/<cascade-id>.pb
On Windows, in PowerShell:
Remove-Item "$env:USERPROFILE\.codeium\windsurf\cascade\<cascade-id>.pb"
Every conversation is in its own file, so the rest are untouched. To clear all of them, remove the files and keep the directory:
rm ~/.codeium/windsurf/cascade/*.pb
Cascade's history list may offer a delete of its own. This page has not checked what that removes on disk, so it describes the file route only.
What else is in ~/.codeium/windsurf
Do not delete the whole root to get rid of conversations. Beside cascade/ it holds:
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
implicit/ | Implicit context trajectories, a different source from the conversations in cascade/. deja does not read them. |
brain/ | Plans and other Cascade state. deja does not read it either. |
memories/ | Your global rules, global_rules.md, which Cascade keeps in context. |
mcp_config.json | Your MCP servers. |
user_settings.pb | Settings. |
skills/, global_workflows/, hooks.json | Skills, workflows and hooks, if you or an installer added any. |
If the goal is that nothing of a conversation is left, implicit/ and brain/ may hold material derived from it. deja has no reader for them, so this page does not describe what they contain. Removing the whole root is what the uninstall instructions do: it resets Cascade, including your rules and MCP servers.
What you lose
A conversation you remove no longer appears in the Sessions window (devin-desktop --sessions) and cannot be continued. There is no trash: rm is permanent. Files Cascade edited in your project are not affected.
Keeping it searchable instead
deja reads Cascade's files, along with the other forty-one agents' histories on the machine, into one local index. It is searchable from the shell and readable by the agents themselves over MCP:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/main/install.sh | sh deja "Cascade conversation about the migration"
Nothing to switch on first: the files are already on disk, including the months before deja was installed. Indexing and search stay local, credentials are stripped as the index is built, and deja forget drops a session from the index for good. That also means deleting the .pb file does not remove the conversation from deja: if you want it gone everywhere, run deja forget --session <id> too. A conversation whose file you deleted stays readable under the Deleted tab of the screen bare deja opens, and o carries its context into another agent; deja does not write Cascade conversations back.
Where every agent keeps its history · Memory for Windsurf / Devin Desktop · The Windsurf format
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