Augment Code: An AI Coding Tool for ‘Real’ Development Work

I’ve been working in Visual Studio Code with Copilot running, just for the completions. But I’ve found them to be fairly solid — a bit like a junior dev who has an idea what you might want to write next. We know LLMs are able to intuit based on a large sample of examples (we are never quite as unique as we think), but beyond that I have seen plenty of evidence that my digital junior has understood the context of the problem beyond simple pattern matching. While the standard of the code is basic, that actually doesn’t matter. From an agile perspective, it allows me to move on quickly.

Augment Code describes itself as “the first AI coding assistant built for professional software engineers and large codebases.” In my last post I looked at Bolt, which is aimed squarely at boosting non-professionals. So this post is weighted more appropriately towards working developers, doing what Augment Code calls “real work.”

Unusually, Augment was quick to point to their Visual Studio Code extension, and made it clear what the process was. This is too often left to discovery.