Code Context is King: Augment’s AI Assistant for Professional Software Engineers, with Guy Gur-Ari

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Guy Gur-Ari, co-founder and chief scientist at Augment, a company using the full range of AI strategies, from autocomplete, to rag, to chatbots, to autonomous coding agents, to transform the practice of software engineering in large enterprise codebases. While our first episodes in the Software Supernova series looked at vibe coding platforms that allow anyone to prompt their way from zero to a proof of concept or basic app, Augment, which was founded in 2022, back when OpenAI's codex models and early autocomplete tools were still mostly just foreshadowing a very different way to code, is tackling a harder but potentially more economically transformative challenge. How do you 10x productivity for professional engineers who bring their considerable human expertise to bear on vast, messy, legacy codebases, which often have millions of lines of code spread across multiple projects that can vary in age, coding style, and underlying technical infrastructure?
Unlike personal projects where one can often simply copy an entire codebase into Gemini's context window, as Guy explains, the enterprise challenge requires serious technical firepower at all levels of the stack. So Augment has spent the last three years deeply exploring multiple different approaches to code understanding, and has ultimately developed a sophisticated, retrieval-heavy approach from the ground up. Their rag stack includes a custom-built vector database capable of real-time updates, proprietary retrieval models designed specifically for large codebases, code search that fires on every single keystroke for every single user, custom code generation models trained with a technique they call reinforcement learning from developer behaviors, and multiple different product paradigms for delivering code to users. All of which is intensively optimized for both accuracy and speed, and available across a number of the most popular development environments. The results are quite impressive. As you hear, Guy reports that he personally hasn't written a line of code in months. These days, the coding agent, which I had the chance to use in preview and which will be released to the public very soon, handles all of that, leaving Guy to focus on higher-level issues, including how he and the team can continue to improve the agent so that it can eventually run for extended periods, take on larger projects, and even go beyond explicit user instructions to infer and address unstated needs. The economics of the business are fascinating, too. Augment's pricing is pretty conventional today, with $30 and $60 a month plans. But Guy was quite candid about the fact that some powered users already cost them a whole lot more than that to serve. And especially as agentic workflows consume more and more compute, pricing in the AI space in general is very much a live question. It helps, of course, to design pricing that aligns company and customer interests, but it's less clear how best to do that, considering that enterprise customers also value stable pricing and predictable costs. The good news for Augment is that having raised some $250 million in investment capital, they do have some time and financial cushion to figure that out. There is a ton of technical depth in this episode, but arguably the most valuable part is Guy's super practical, down-to-earth advice for AI Builders. While he and the Augment team have repeatedly invented new technology to solve hard problems, he recommends starting new projects simply, by creating small evaluation datasets of just 10 to 20 high-quality, hand-labeled examples that you understand deeply and can quickly test new solutions against, and then optimizing for the speed of iteration by pursuing the simplest available strategies first, and then exhausting what's available in the market before building custom solutions in-house. All advice that, as regular listeners will know, I wholeheartedly endorse. Toward the end, I asked Guy if Augment is currently hiring junior engineers, and more broadly, what advice he has for today's early career engineers and CS students. His answer, I think you'll agree, reflects the current moment in the software industry. A sense of excitement and opportunity for the foreseeable future, but also a recognition that nobody can see the future more than two to three years out. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with friends or write a review, and we always welcome your feedback and suggestions, either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me anywhere you like. Now, I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the hard tech powering AI coding assistance for enterprise software engineers, with Guy Gur-Ari, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Augment. Guy Gur-Ari, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Augment, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Guy Gur-Ari** (4:45)
Great to be here. Thanks for having me on.