‍Deep context awareness, accelerated migrations, and reduced bugs. With Augment, Codem Inc. efficiently modernizes complex legacy systems for their clients while enhancing due diligence capabilities.

The Challenge

Codem Inc., a technology transformation firm specializing in e-commerce, web development, and logistics, often tackles the daunting task of modernizing legacy applications for private equity clients. These applications are frequently over a decade old, monolithic, and lack proper documentation.

"A lot of these applications are 10-15 years old, sometimes older, and they're very monolithic. There's no microservices; they're not containerized, and that definitely makes it very challenging," said Marcelo Wesseler, co-founder at Codem Inc.

Understanding and migrating these complex codebases is time-consuming and resource-intensive. "In a lot of cases, there is nobody that actually has worked with that codebase before," Marcelo noted. Typically, migrating a semi-complex e-commerce stack takes about two to three months, including data migrations and full testing.

Why Augment?

Seeking to streamline these complex migrations, Codem Inc. explored Augment Code. Initially skeptical due to past experiences with other AI coding tools, they quickly recognized Augment's unique capabilities.

• Deep Context Awareness: Augment's deep codebase awareness outperformed other AI tools. "The biggest difference is that it's not like your typical AI coding assistant; it goes much, much deeper. Nothing has come close to what Augment does to fully understand what's actually behind the codebase."
• Efficient Codebase Understanding: Augment made it easier for engineers to grasp complex applications. "It makes their job a lot easier because Augment can understand these complex applications and start making modifications a lot faster."
• Enhanced Due Diligence Capabilities: For private equity clients, Augment's advanced code analysis enables thorough understanding of target companies' codebases and architectures, identifying scalability issues, security vulnerabilities, and compliance risks.
• Rapid AI POC Development: The platform allowed Codem to quickly develop sophisticated AI proof-of-concepts for clients, including machine learning models for customer behavior prediction and natural language processing for enhanced search functionality. "With Augment now, we've been able to literally implement AI POCs within weeks. That's been really kind of the most exciting piece of what we worked on in the last couple of weeks."

The Results

Implementing Augment led to significant benefits for Codem Inc.:

• Migration Time Reduced by Over 50%: "The typical migration of a semi-complex e-commerce stack takes about two to three months. Now, with Augment, we've been able to do this one specific migration in literally less than six weeks," Marcelo stated. "This has been truly a key aha moment and a game changer."
• Successful Architecture Transitions: The team successfully transitioned three legacy logistics apps to a microservices architecture, reducing the time required by 50%. They also streamlined the migration of a custom eCommerce platform to Shopify using Augment's automated code translation and integration capabilities.
• Cost Savings for Clients: The efficiency gains translated into financial benefits. "Now we can offer these migrations for a fraction of the price than it was costing before."
• Reduced QA Time and Bugs: Quality assurance phases were shortened. "We spend 20-30% of the entire project in the QA phase and in the testing phases. That part of the time frame has significantly come down."
• Enhanced Team Innovation: Augment has reenergized engineering teams by allowing them to focus on complex problem-solving rather than repetitive tasks, encouraging greater innovation through seamless integration into development environments.

About Codem Inc.

Codem Inc. specializes in delivering complex technology transformations in the e-commerce, web development, and logistics sectors, aiming to significantly reduce total cost of ownership for their clients. With approximately 80 engineers across the U.S., Singapore, and India, Codem focuses on high-end engineering, including architects, senior engineers, and automation QA experts. They partner with private equity firms and enterprises to modernize technology stacks, reduce costs, and unify applications on common platforms.

Industry: Software Development
Location: San Francisco, California
Team Size: 28
Languages, Frameworks, Libraries: PHP, Javascript, CSS
IDE: VS Code, IntelliJ