Augment Code vs Claude Code vs Cursor vs Windsurf

Claude is probably the smartest of these tools, but using it makes me want to go back to Stack Overflow.

The web interface is fucking terrible. You copy code from your editor, paste it in a chat box, copy the answer back. Over and over. I tried their VS Code extension four times - first time it didn't install, second time it installed but didn't work, third time it worked for two days then started crashing VS Code on startup, fourth time I gave up. Just copy-paste hell forever.

The weird part is it actually understands code really well. I pasted our auth service and it immediately spotted a bug I missed. It can explain React hooks better than most of the tutorials I've read.

Good stuff

Claude 3.5 actually understands our codebase architecture. I threw our entire auth service at it - 800 lines with database schemas and Redis session handling - and it spotted a race condition in our payment processing that our tests missed. Also found a memory leak in our Redis cleanup that I'd been debugging for three weeks.

Annoying stuff

The rate limits hit when you're debugging production issues. You're in the middle of tracing a payment failure and get "message limit reached, try again in 5 hours." Great fucking timing when customers can't checkout.

Pricing nightmare

$20/month is bullshit marketing. Bill went from $47 in January to $380 in February when we were debugging that memory leak. No warning, just a credit card charge that made our CFO send some very angry Slack messages. Their usage calculator is useless - just shows "depends on usage" like that helps anyone budget.

Context loss

Mid-conversation it loses its fucking mind. You paste a stack trace from production, it analyzes it for 10 minutes, then suddenly "I don't have access to your code." I literally just showed you the entire error trace. This happened during our Black Friday deployment when we had customers hitting checkout errors. Perfect timing.

The worst part? It suggested storing credit card numbers in localStorage once. Our security team wanted to burn the internet down after that gem.

Claude could be brilliant with a real editor integration. Instead it's stuck in a chat box designed for asking about weather, not debugging production systems at 3am.

Augment costs the most but crashes the least, which is something I guess.

Actually handles big messy codebases

Our React/TypeScript project is a disaster - 15,000 lines of TypeScript, legacy PHP auth from 2019, and some jQuery crap nobody wants to touch. Augment indexed all of it without shitting itself. Found a Redis connection pool leak that was killing our staging server every Tuesday for three months. I debugged this for weeks before Augment spotted it in our connection cleanup code.

OK, fine, the context thing actually works. It doesn't just search for text - it understands how functions connect between files. Ask about a bug and it can trace from the frontend component down to the database query causing problems.

Fixed pricing

$250/month for the Max plan (their "$200-something" is actually $250 - classic enterprise pricing bullshit). But at least you know what the bill will be. No surprise charges when your team actually uses it during crunch time.

Terminal tool actually works

The CLI doesn't crash every five minutes, which is more than I can say for any other AI tool. Can ask questions from vim without opening another fucking browser tab. Found 12 database connections we weren't closing in our API routes - would have taken days to track down manually.

Actually finds real issues

During code review it spotted SQL injection vulnerabilities in our legacy PHP auth that Snyk missed. Found string concatenation in database queries from 2019 that could have fucked us badly. Also caught a race condition in our payment processing that only happened under load.

Enterprise stuff

Their sales team called us six times before we even tried the product. Classic enterprise software experience. But they have SOC2 compliance and other certifications that make our security team less grumpy. Can run on-premise if you're paranoid about sending code to the cloud.

Still pisses me off

Gets confused by Webpack output and suggests "refactoring" generated bundle code. Auto-generated GraphQL schemas make it completely useless - keeps trying to optimize machine-generated queries. The web interface crawls on projects over 10k files.

My take

Augment costs the most but crashes the least. No surprise bills, doesn't lose context mid-conversation, and won't suggest storing passwords in plain text. If you have a complex codebase and can justify $250/month to your CFO, might be worth the headache.

For simple projects or tight budgets, absolutely not worth it. But for production systems where downtime costs more than the subscription, it's the least shitty option.