The Promise vs. Reality of AI Agents

Every engineering leader wants to multiply their team's impact. Software agents promise to turn every engineer into a tech lead, commanding a team of autonomous AIs that handle the most tedious, repetitive and unfun tasks. But there's a critical gap between promise and reality … 

When agents misunderstand our intentions, fail to complete tasks, or worse—break existing systems—they become a liability rather than an asset. As Spiderman’s uncle said, “with great power comes great responsibility” — for software teams managing repositories with thousands of files and millions of lines of code, anything less than expert-level performance is a non-starter.

Why Context is the Missing Ingredient

For software engineering at scale, context isn't just helpful—it's essential:

• Architectural consistency: Ensuring new code aligns with the existing system design, dependencies, policies and best practices. 
• Code reuse: Adapting existing software rather than introducing ever more redundant logic.
• Root cause analysis: Isolating failures across complex interdependent systems.
• End-to-end implementation: Updating documentation, tests, scripts, etc. alongside proposed code changes.
• CI/CD troubleshooting: Resolving complex build pipeline issues. 

While most AI coding assistants excel at generating greenfield code, they fall short when working within large, established codebases—precisely where most enterprise engineering time is spent.

Augment Agent: Built for Software Engineering

Augment was founded in ‘22 to help developers tame the complexity of crafting and evolving large, complex codebases, a focus that remains unique today. The Augment agent is the next quantum step forward in functionality. Our agent architecture has been proven with best-in-class results on SWEBench, an industry benchmark for software engineering capabilities. But more impressively, we've bootstrapped our implementation—The Augment agent wrote the majority of our tooling integration code and tests as well as made significant optimizations.

Thousands of developers have been leveraging early access to our agents for the past couple of months. Now, we're making the Augment agent available to everyone.

What Engineering-Grade Agents Require

We've built Augment's agent platform to deliver the capabilities you'd expect from your most trusted senior engineers:

Deep Codebase Understanding

Our agents don't just see files—they comprehend your entire engineering ecosystem: codebase history, documentation, tickets, engineering conversations, screen captures, UI designs, and code reviews. As agents take on harder tasks autonomously, expertise is even more essential. Models are already good enough to make use of these varied data sources, but the coding AI must be judicious about delivering just the right context for the job at hand. (For any meaningfully sized codebase, there is no hope of passing all of it as context.). After three years of R&D, Augment delivers precisely the right context for each task, finding the subtle "devils in the details" of your multi-million line repositories.

Adaptive Learning

Augment agents learn your work habits, preferences and style over time, making their contributions increasingly aligned with your aspirations. Such memories can be added automatically by our agents, by clicking the remember button, by directly asking your agents to remember something, or by editing the memories files directly. (This capability is similar to work we did to help Augment understand human intent within Next Edit.)

Seamless Tool Integration

Our agent framework supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and includes native integrations with leading developer tools like Web search, GitHub and Linear. Unlike client-side solutions, our cloud-based integrations can be securely shared across your entire team.

Flexible Guidance from your IDE  

Augment offers two distinct operating modes:

• Manual mode: The agent pauses when it needs to execute commands or access integrations, allowing you to review and approve each action.
• Auto mode: The agent implements the entire plan independently, editing files, executing terminal commands, and accessing external tools automatically.

Easy Rollbacks

Augment automatically creates snapshots of your workspace as an agent does its work. This enables continuous progress while you review changes, with simple one-click reversion to any previous checkpoint.

Consistent View of Changing Software

When multiple developers or agents are working on the same codebase, Augment continuously adjusts its real-time index of your repository to incorporate the latest changes, ensuring everyone sees precisely the right version of the software (i.e., humans and agents working on a particular branch see different code than those not in that branch). 

Beyond Code Generation to True Software Engineering

While our competitors are focused on the vibe coding/0→1 end of the spectrum, Augment addresses the more challenging reality of software engineering in large codebases. Most AI coding tools excel at generating standalone code snippets or greenfield projects, but fall short when facing the complexity inherent within existing systems. Our customers report that Augment agents excel particularly in complex scenarios like:

• Implementing changes that span multiple services and repositories
• Adapting legacy code to new requirements
• Accelerating debugging of issues that cross system boundaries
• Ensuring comprehensive test coverage for critical system components

The Path Forward

There's undoubtedly a learning curve with agents, but as they acquire broader context, learn, and benefit from improving reasoning capabilities in underlying models, they will transform every aspect of software development. For the software engineering of large codebases, the best way to get started is to give an agent an incremental, well-defined task and build up from there. 

AI is already driving the creation of new software, but more importantly, it is now poised to impact our existing large software systems by improving quality, enhancing features, and bringing joy to the toil of software engineering. Augment is leading that journey, and we welcome you to join us!

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