I have put my money where my mouth is.
After trying out a variety of AI agent tools at work this month, I’ve splashed out for a personal subscription to Augment Code for my weekend side-projects.
From my recent experiences, the Augment context management engine really makes a difference in working with AI agents. I’ve used Claude Sonnet 4 with a variety of agent platforms (Copilot, Cursor, Augment, an internal GPT chatbot) and Claude seems to be most effective when paired with Augment’s context management and tool usage.
No, AI agents aren’t perfect. I stub out my functions and try to use descriptive TODOs paired with AI instruction files to give AI the best chance to succeed. Or I write a detailed requirement doc first for larger tasks. Yes, I still have to make tweaks when it’s done. But I can get done in 15 minutes what would take me a few hours to write by hand. I have it end each session by running and adding tests and updating the documentation.
AI speeds up my development workflows. When I have a limited amount of time to work on my fun projects, I can get more done with that time by adding an agent to the mix. We’ll see how it goes, but so far, I’m happy with the new tool!
(Working in a mix of Go and Swift code using Augment as a plugin in JetBrains GoLand. I’m writing Go CLIs to work with data and generate some Swift/SwiftUI code, and then I’ll drop back to Xcode for asset management and distribution for the end-product iOS app I’m writing. Trying to use Xcode as little as possible as I have gotten spoiled by JetBrains.)