I found and AI plugin that works

DISCLAIMER: Thins post is not sponsored, just sharing my experience.

I found an AI/LLM plugin that finally works for me. For you? Your Mileage Might Vary.

The tool is Augment.

I've been trying out Code Assistants, and getting extremely frustrated by them. They basically worked as a better autocomplete, but all chat functions got real frustrating, real quick.

The promise I was sold was that it could help me co-create code. And for me that was not a better autocomplete that breaks your code if you give it some free reign.

And for me up to this point, that was the experience. Clunky, breaking, extremely over eager and fundamentally dumb.

The hard part is not writing the code. And if “the help” is breaking things and adding work for me… Pablo not happy.

But, is Augment fundamentally different? For me, yes, in one central way:

It can run the tests! Iteratively!

The amount of ways in which it can break things is not only severely reduced. More importantly, the amount of times I have to tell it ‘you are wrong, you useless thing’ is severely reduced.

Now, I am sure the folks building it have made things so that in general it's better.

But the true game changer is being able to run tests.

It unlocks for me a speed in doing things that I didn't have before, I am still in the driver's wheel. And when I actually let go too much… I instantly regret it. But, I have, finally, a somewhat competent assistant that can do the tasks that ‘annoy’ me most: writing trivial code.

Granted, you need a really tight leash, it will try to do too much, a coworker was surprised that I had to tell it to only change X file every time, until I forgot and he changed 5 files at once.

But, it works good enough that for now it is a good experience.

A last forewarning I will leave you with. What our elders described as great ways of working: XP, always green specs, test first, small increments, etc. Are doubly true with this assistant. The steps might be a bit bigger, in part because the machine is overeager, in part because it allows for bigger ‘jumps’. But the principles still apply.