Augment

How Building with AI Can Double the Throughput of Your Engineering Team — Brian Scanlan, Intercom

May 15, 2026 · 21:49

Brian Scanlan of Intercom explains how treating Claude Code like a new hire—onboarding it to a 15-year-old Rails monolith, writing skills for every recurring task, and connecting it to production systems—doubled engineering PR throughput in under a year. By going all in on one platform instead of letting everyone choose their own tool, Intercom achieved a 17.6% automatic PR approval rate with SOC 2 sign-off, and its CI infrastructure collapsed under the volume. The key principle: give agents problems, not tasks. Scanlan recounts a security incident where Claude automatically pulled files, ran analysis, and handed back next steps in two minutes using a skill he didn't know existed. The talk emphasizes that all engineering work—debugging, testing, planning—should be agent-first, and that companies must invest in platform-level adoption and continuous skill improvement.

Mentoring the Machine — Eric Hou, Augment Code

Jul 24, 2025 · 19:06

Eric Hou, member of technical staff at Augment Code, argues that AI agents work best when treated as perpetually junior engineers requiring mentoring and context, not just prompts. He recounts a chaotic Tuesday where he parallelized three urgent tasks—a design system component, a staging emergency involving a gRPC library upgrade touching 12 services and 20,000 lines of code, and mentoring a new hire—using Augment's agent and Slack bot, completing in half a day what normally takes weeks. Hou quantifies industry inefficiencies: each interruption costs 23 minutes recovery, two-thirds of time spent maintaining code, totaling $300 billion annually. He prescribes a three-step organizational adoption: knowledge gathering (mapping Notion, Google Docs, GitHub; using meeting intelligence tools like Granola), gaining tool familiarity, and leaning in by sharing successful agent memories across teams. He demonstrates live creation of an agent personality during the talk, and concludes that solving knowledge infrastructure allows parallel exploration of prototypes, turning software development into a more scientific, data-driven process.

The Eyes Are The (Context) Window to The Soul: How Windsurf Gets to Know You — Sam Fertig, Windsurf

Jun 27, 2025 · 13:37

Sam Fertig, Deployed Engineer at Windsurf, explains how the AI coding IDE achieves its uncanny ability to predict developer intent by focusing on relevant context rather than merely expanding context windows. He breaks context into two pillars: heuristics (user behavior like cursor position, open files, clipboard) and hard evidence (codebase, rules, memories). The core challenge is generating code that fits existing codebases, adheres to personal and organizational standards, and remains future-proof. Windsurf optimizes retrieval quality over quantity, using techniques like embedding search, reranking, and AST parsing to balance latency and scale. Fertig also addresses privacy, stating that while code is sent to servers, data is not stored or used for training.