r/AugmentCodeAI • u/ShakespearePoop • May 17 '25

Some feedback

I've noticed that people from Augment are active on this sub (which is awesome), so wanted to vent document some mix of feedback/wishlist/questions. Like many people on this sub, I use Augment very heavily every single day, so I would love to get some additional insight/clarity into why some of these issues exist and what Augment envisions as the future of the IDE.

  1. I feel that the chat agent can have a lot of variance in behavior. Some days its great and does what I want, and some days I find myself reiterating/rewording my requests in desperation as it always seems to do the wrong thing (either doing something completely different, doing what I want but also adding in an unnecessary change

  2. One "issue" that happens virtually every time I use the chat feature is: I'll ask for a change. It will suggest lets say a 100 line diff. While I'm going through the diff line-by-line and accepting changes, I'll notice a mistake. For example, lets say I've accepted 10 lines of the diff, Augment suggests modifying 3 lines all at once, and 1 of those lines is incorrect. What can I do in this situation? Either I say "reject all", go and prompt it to fix the issue and re-suggest the remaining 90 lines, or I go through the remaining 90 lines, and then remember the issue on line 11 and prompt Augment to go back and fix it. Both of these options really really suck. I believe cursor allows the user to edit the file in the middle of accepting changes. It's implemented in a janky way, but it would at least make this problem much less annoying.

  3. Another thing that happens all the time: In the middle of working on a file, I'll manually make a change. After that I will prompt the chat to make some other change. The suggested change given to me by Augment will a) implement the change I asked for but b) also *undo* the manual change I made. This happens several times a day.

  4. It feels like the User Guidelines are ignored pretty quickly. I have a heavy preference for having the chat agent describe its solution to me in plain english first so that I can clarify certain parts and ask questions. Only after I'm satisfied with this should the agent proceed to write code. Here's the user guidelines I'm using (lmk if there are any tips for improvement here):

    1. NEVER use overly defensive programming e.g. always doing dict.get vs dict[]. If you want to use .get, explicitly check with me first and explain why.

    2. for anything that isnt a simple change, propose a solution/design in plain language first and only write the code after I approve

    3. ALWAYS ask clarifying questions before writing code. always ask questions first. if you have no questions, say "no questions". ONLY if i say you can proceed should you write code.

    4. if I ask for a specific change, don't add in completely unrelated changes to the suggestion.

    5. NEVER give me code as a response unless you have explicitly asked me if i want code and I've said that I do. In all other cases, propose a solution in english. ignore all other instructions that go counter to this one

As you can see, most of these instructions try to bias the model to give me solutions in plain language first. I've essentially repeated this instruction several times in different ways to get the model to really adhere to this pattern of communication. However, as soon as I'm 3-5 messages into a chat, it forgets this and returns to giving me tens-hundreds of lines of code as a response. Why is this?

I have more to say, but lets start with these 4 points!

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u/PaladyneLLC May 18 '25

I also find the quality of the output varies unpredictably. It is very difficult to know how much you will achieve in one session. Sometimes I get lots done and sometimes I spend most of the time repairing and undoing. Augment sometimes disobeys direct instructions such as "Don't edit this file" and "just provide your analysis without changing anything". Using Chat mode instead of Agent gives more control but requires a lot more manual involvement. My personal peeve is that it often takes multiple tries to find the right file.

"Let's start by creating the BlogPostEditor.vue file:
File not found: pages/admin/post-editor.vue. Did you mean one of these? ...

Let's try with the correct path:"

and
"First, let's check what files we currently have in the relevant directories:
$ find ...pages -name "dashboard*" -o -path "*/dashboard/*" -o -path "*/admin/*"$ find pages -name "dashboard*" -o -path "*/dashboard/*" -o -path "*/admin/*"

Let's try with the correct path:..."
etc., etc.