Guy Gur-Ari of Augment Code on GPT-5's careful tool use and automating the software development lifecycle

Have fun out there.

Really quickly, let me tell you about Adio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. And we will be joined by our next guest from Augment. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Guy?

Great. Thanks so much for having me.

And that's his name, by the way, if you're listening. His name is Guy. I'm not just calling him Guy. Uh anyway, please introduce yourself and what do you do? What does your company do?

Yeah, so I'm Guy Gerari from Augment Code. I'm a co-founder and the chief scientist and we build AI coding assistants for large teams with large code bases and so you can use augment code to do question answering to do development to do refactoring to do migrations all the tasks that you do except that our product understands your large code base really well and so that means less prompting for you and uh faster and better results out of the agent. Today GPT5 launches. It's kind of a rising tide. Feels like it lifts all boats. Every company gets access to it. We've interviewed a number of companies that are building on top of GPT

around GPT4,

I guess. But but in general, uh how do you think you can use GPT5? Are there any pockets of value that you think you can uniquely take advantage of?

Yeah, great question. So we've been we've been triing the model for the past few weeks and what we found is that the GPT5 is a very thoughtful model. It likes to make a lot of tool calls. Uh it likes to ask clarifying questions of the user before starting to make code changes. Uh and so the place where I reach out for GP5 is typically if I need to make large changes or if I'm trying to answer a very difficult question about the codebase, I will let GPT5 take a crack at it. It will churn for a while making lots of tool calls just making sure it got it right and probably find all the different places in the code where it actually needs to make a change and so I will typically let it run in the background and come back to it and I will often get a high quality result out of it.

Are there any features or integrations that you're hoping GPT5 will roll out in the future? We talked to a couple people who were like like we want models that have access to as many tools as possible. Uh and and you can see with the MCP boom more people are trying to make their uh their services, their products accessible to these models. Uh is there anything that you see as um potential lowhanging fruit to just add to the capabilities? So I think for us we work hard on developing our own integrations and our own tools building them into the product rather than relying on um GPD5 or other model vendors uh to do so. We have worked closely with open AAI to improve the prompting around our tools so that the agent kind of works uh flawlessly. I think um the thing that would be very nice I think one of the previous guests mentioned a screenshot tool. I think that's a very yeah that's a very nice way to close the loop on front-end software development

just like we saw how on backend software development running the tests automatically really helps the the agent uh iterate until it gets to working code. Uh so I think having more support for screenshotting uh and things like that that close the front end gap would be very nice to see.

I I wasn't aware that that that that screenshots weren't flowing through. I feel like when I've when I've triggered uh operator, I'm getting a a view a web view into the website, but um I wasn't I I wasn't aware that that wasn't like being passed through easily in the API and you still kind of needed to build that yourself. Um what where else um we were just talking about this like um where are the biggest p pockets of value right now for AI coding tools generally? Obviously, everyone knows like the vibe coder who's just the designer who's learning how to use uh software for the first time. Then there's the experienced uh developer going from a 10x to 100x with better code completion. Then there's the enterprise that's uh you know maybe doing replatforming. Where else are the interesting pockets of value um that are maybe on the horizon to be unlocked with new models?

Yeah. So on top of everything you mentioned certainly the the inner loop of software development that's where we've spent most of our time at uh augment code developing product for um yes you can have a senior developer starting using agents starting to use multiple agents in parallel and unlock 10x or more productivity gains what we're starting to see now with our tools is the beginning of automating software development life cycle tasks so with with augment code we have a CLI tool now where you can take the full power of our context engine and the agent, the thing that really understands your codebase and you can start automating tasks in the background. And so we're seeing more and more developers saying, "Oh, this is great. Like, I can break out of the IDE now. I'm using the agent that's already familiar to me, but I'm starting to automate code reviews. I'm starting to automate incident response. I'm starting to automate um looking at production logs and automatically assigning tickets based on error logs that I'm seeing. all kinds of new uh uh automation use cases that we're seeing just because agents have gotten so good and kind of really understands your codebase.

Are there are there high stakes pockets of software engineering work that most of the AI tooling has kind of stayed away from? I'm imagining like the uh the the high stakes database migration. Where where is the the the kind of sticky um part of the industry? I was reading a blog post by someone who was doing like very advanced cyber security pen testing and they were saying like just the creativity of the models wasn't quite there yet to really come up with the to really act and embody like a white hat hacker who was going for a bug bounty but uh where where are the pockets of still like intractability where I guess if you are you know in the in the individual contributor you love just just you know coding from scratch that's where you want to stay for at least the next couple of months.

Yeah, I think still the attention of all the models we've seen and all the agents we've seen around making proper design and architecture decisions. Um, that's still high stakes and still the ability is not there because if you do complete vibe coding and you just let the agent go and do whatever it wants, in the beginning it looks amazing. The code works and it's all really good. But once you get to low tens of thousands of lines, the bad decisions that were often made around the design and architecture start to show up and development slows down. So that's where we still see a limitation of today's agents and where you still have to supervise the agent fairly closely uh in order to make sure that you don't get stuck later on. Uh perhaps this will change in a year but today I would say all these decisions that you make around how the code is structured uh still requires close supervision and still high stakes because it can really slow your project down if you let it go autonomously for long enough. Yeah,

that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

Thanks so much.

Cheers.

Let's check in with Tyler on the timeline. Tyler's manning the timeline. How are the vibes? Are there any new posts that have hit the timeline? Are we still in turmoil or has the narrative settled?

The vibes are are picking up a little bit. You're starting to see people post like, "Oh, this is something I made." Um, now you can see on Marina it's number one.

Wait, wait, wait. So, what's going on with the Poly Market then?

So, Poly Market is still uh still Google heavy. Yeah, I think I guess they're just pricing in a Gemini 3.

Okay.

Um, everyone's

I'm not exactly sure, honestly. I was actually very surprised to see that it was number one.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, maybe later we can show some of the posts.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That' be great.