How I Make Cursor 10x More Effective using Augment & Claude Code

I led tech for a startup that sold for 23 million bucks and I've been using AI coding tools daily since. I want to talk about how Augment's new task feature is very overpowered and probably shakes things up for a lot of companies. As a bonus, they gave me credits to give the audience which is really cool. So, we're about to cover three things. One, the details of this new task feature. two, how I think it's actually going to kill off a lot of the AI tools in the space, and three, we'll go through my workflow. Stick around to the end of the video to learn about the credits. Like many of you, I've been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tools and changes and updates that have been coming out, but I've found solace in sticking to a maximum of three tools. Cursor, Claude Code, and then augment's been a mainstay because of their context engine. If you want to learn more about that, I have other videos on my channel. But this new task thing saves me so much time. It is just great. So why does it still rip? Let's just show you. Let's say you have a set of tasks and you want to get really specific about them and you've maybe watched some videos on somebody using a cle tool or you've come up with your own prompts on how it maps to your Jira or your notion or wherever you're working out of. It might look like this. And this was like awesome two weeks ago. And you had to go in and make these very specific tasks. And you wanted to have as much specificity in there as possible. And you would prompt prompt prompt your way. Maybe you'd go over to Gemini and repo prompt because we need more tokens. You'd be optimizing for this. And this is like a decent example. And this is something that I built. I was that guy who built their own whole framework around this which is just cluge. And I said that when I built it, a lot of these tools will get replaced. And that's what's happening right now with what we're talking about. So, do you want this? And now you just have this. Oh, what's this little guy over here? It's bananas. What it does, and I'll show you in my codebase in a second, but a lot's happening in here. You basically have your task list, which you might have hid on the left side in one of these little notepads. I've seen people do that. I don't do that. You might have made a bunch of prompts and tried to fling yourself around and do it that way, but you don't have to do that anymore. You just have this right here. Now, there are ways to turbocharge it, of course. But this primitive, it's clear as day. Throw it in the IDE. That's brilliant. You can swap between file change mode, which if you're familiar with augment is when you see that running log of all the things that are going on, or your task manager. If I want to switch into task mode, I can do it in one of two ways. I can either go and manually type in the tasks. That's loser mode. No, it's not loser mode, but typically you'll have the tasks or the things that you think you need to do before you got to this step. So, if that's you, then you can literally just drop it into the chat and then you flip on auto and hit go and it will automatically separate those out for you. Now, the benefit of doing it this way is you can take advantage of the enhanced prompt. You always want to check the outputs of LLM. They are probabilistic geniuses. So, they might not nail it as hard as you want it to nail it. That's on you. Go read what the enhanced prompt thing does. Always read your outputs. It's just it's going to pay you in spades, but leverage it. So, you drop in whatever that task list you need to do here. That's step one. Step two is hit the magical icon. Let it do its sizzle. Let it work its sauce. And then it will actually give you even better context cuz context is king. Then you can send it off to the auto agent. It will get to work and actually create the list for you. So good example of this was I just did this and I was like I have to record a video cuz it's too good. It's actual sauce. What happened was I needed to beef up the schemas. You need Zod validation because your types don't exist at runtime, right? like you see the little errors and the squiggies if you're familiar with TypeScript, but you don't get that same thing when you're building an API and it's out in the world. So, what I needed to do was make these ZOD schemas for all the different routers, all the functionality that exists within VI, which is our private network of builders, a bunch of nerds. Basically, I wanted to bring San Francisco and that vibe onto the internet cuz I live in a tech desert. So, that's the community building a platform. That's what the routers are for. Needed the Zod schemas. Great. I don't want to write all those. And I know how to I can go I can do that, but I don't want to. And you don't want to either. You maybe write one of them, but no, you don't want to write all of them. So, in my case, I always pair it with sequential thinking. I think that's one of the best MCPs. If you're going to use an MCP, that's a good one. But I'll go ahead and I'll ask it specifically to make tasks for me. I obviously ask it to refine the prompt. And then you can see as I scroll down, you have the updated prompt. And then it goes and reads the directory. It's building the context around what it's about to deliver. Reading the lines, showing you what's going on, seeing that some of them are done, some of them are not. And then boom, add task 21. You can see if it updated any existing ones. So, it's doing all that right in front of you. And then we can get off to the races where I can literally just click run all tasks. It will go to completion. Couple other pro tips. When you have a lot of tasks, how do you deal with it? Well, they got filtering here, which is pretty nice. So, I can click on the little filter. Guess what? It does a filter. Could you Did Were you able to ascertain? Were you able to figure that part out? But yeah, you can filter it. And then also, if you want to kick it into new chat or if you just have so many that you want to kick it out into a markdown file, not sure, maybe you wanted to sync that with the GitHub MCP or integration, then you could. But yeah, those two very, very helpful. Now, side note, you see this cloud code. I want to talk about that, too, because I'm not just using one, right? Like I mentioned at the beginning of the video, I try to stick to three Macs. Cursor is the home base. It's still got the tabby thing. That's great. And then I have Claude Code, which is like, all right, let's jump in and let's rip around and have some fun in this. But I I got to say, it can just get you lost really fast because you get like excited about the fact that you have all these things. And I find that it burns through the context window too quickly and it doesn't have a grip on the code base like augment does. So while I just rode the dragon which was cloud code for the last few days like just literally trying to push it as hard as I could it caused a lot of bugs that skill issue probably a skill issue but no I mean it literally sim linked an envir an environment variable file to somewhere else and I didn't even notice it and then it didn't notice it either. it. I just find that this can be almost like less pointed and it knows more. It just seems smarter, that's all. What about cursor? Well, cursor I just think it's in a different bucket. I think maybe we're at a peak. Don't want to say it. I don't want to say it. I just find that every day that goes by, there's so much stuff that they have to be doing and I know they're orchestrating a lot of different models underneath the hood, but it's not nailing my use case for one area of coding, which is like actually doing the tasks. and I don't want to go and make these task lists and even little things like if you compare the way that like this can output stuff versus like this like it didn't I don't know it just doesn't nail markdown a lot of the time it doesn't have mermaid built in mcps are less reliable any cursor watchers this is great for you this is an opportunity this is you can transcribe this chuck it into the road map and throw remote agents on it just command e it right and so now let's get into the next segment we're at 11 minutes already. Wow. Here I am. I thought I was like the next star. I thought I was going to get through this a lot quicker, but I'm now I'm in Figma. Oh, here we go. Okay, if you don't follow me on X, I post once every 3 years, but these are pretty good memes, right? Cuz this is me. Literally, like that is me. I was like, I need a local LM and I have these seven prompt chains and they're tied to the AISDLC, which is the software development life cycle. And it's there's elements to it that still definitely make sense. I'm rethinking a lot of the stuff around this where the opus research agent is bananas and that should be used as part of specs and then some of the stuff from indie devdan I think is really good. I just need to simplify it. But yeah, this is what I'm wondering. What's this? What's going on here? Do we know do we know what's go how? Look at those eyes. I don't know. I didn't say it. You said it. Did you say it? So now let's talk about the AI tool extinction event. Yeah, of course, unfunded. But I think that there's something to be said with looking at these tools and being realistic. Let's be realistic together for a second. Who's going to win over the long term? I think it's the ones that have deep partnerships with foundational models, right? So, OpenAI first in the space, crushing it. I think Claude is way better at coding across the board. I think they're better at writing. So I've just I don't even find myself using chat GPT to be honest or any of their models at the moment besides transcription and embeddings that I should use Nomic but I think they're fine. When I look at a tool that does not have a deep partnership like Augment and Claude does for example that makes me not want to use it because then your pricing gets jacked up. You are not winning. Now I'm not going to name them. We don't name names here but you can think of them. And so you can go and augment all around if you're price conscious. That's the obvious answer because you get I want to say 600 chats for 50 bucks. So run the math on that. And the chat is literally the thread. Now Cloud Code, if you want to ride the dragon, it's 200 bucks. And it just seems like a bull in a china shop. I like it, but probably not as productive. You feel like you're being more productive, but yeah. And so comparing it to Cloud Code Max, the claw dogging problem. Yeah, I already talked about that nightmare. And so I was going to end this by just like walking you through another example, but I kind of want to just talk about how I'm thinking I'm going to work for two different work streams. What is a work stream, Parker? I don't know. It's a cool word that I just said, but it also means how you will go do a set of tasks for a given goal. So let's say if I'm going 1 to 1 n. Yeah, we're throwing n around. We're so mathematical. Then in this case, I would probably do the auggie context. So I'm asking a lot of questions about how I need to accomplish this task. Now for any workstream, it's the old it depends because if you don't know the codebase, like the back of your hand, you don't know the libraries, you don't know how things are done. I'm not really sure with state management cuz I'm new here. Then yeah, you're going to have to spend a lot more time up front. But if you do know it like the back of your hand and you're committing code to it daily, then you probably don't need a lot of deep research and auggie context questioning over and over. So you probably get away with a thread, especially if it's something that you've already built in a different project before. But I'd be going in a simple state like this. I'd be like, "Okay, so A is I go through the context and then B, I'm coming up with some sort of plan." And that's actually like maybe something like a PRD and then I can throw that PRD into AI/Specs and then I get into tasks and that's literally it. Now, this does not mention the fact that you should have augment guidelines. How about that handwriting? I had to take extra lessons on handwriting. I'm lefty. Okay, but can you play tennis lefty and righty? Probably not, man. That's tough. I'm tough. Okay, so this is something that I'd be doing where it's, okay, this is how we do data fetching. This is how we do state management. This is how we do our types. This is how our REST API layer works. This is how our TRPC layer works. All those things kind of get outlined. And they're additional artifacts. You can put them in the guidelines if you'd like. But I really think that the beauty of this is really just, hey, this is how I like to make PRDS. this is how I like to make tasks and this is where we store them all those things. Whereas if I were going 0 to one and again it depends but if I'm going 0 to one then I'm probably throwing in another step before that. So it's more oh opus for research. Now if you don't have that sorry you should get it. It's tight. Claude send me a shirt would you? But you could also use chat of course or Gemini. And this just is you doing research, figuring out what it is, your input for this. So let's do input equals your codebase. So you can literally just dump it in there and then ask a bunch of questions around, hey, here are the things that we want to accomplish around the problem. You can ask to steal me on it because you're probably coming up with a solution that's overkill, overengineered. You don't need to. So you can really do the mental jousting there. And then output would be the researched spec. So, it looks something like that, right? And then you go on to B, C, D. So, that's where I'm thinking currently as of June 18th. But, yeah, very excited about all the Auggie stuff. What about the credits, dude? Oh, wow. Yeah, my bad. Okay, so if you want the credits, make a comment below as to why you want to be using Augment. Give me a specific use case of how you plan on using it. And that's it. Literally, just comment it below and I'll pick those out by the end of the next week. See you. If you want to learn more about what we're doing with the engineers inside of VI with people from Microsoft in Google, love to be able to say that we have a new platform coming out. Price is going to double cuz it's not a little school emoji I'm your guru thing. It's like an actual like network with a bunch of tools in it that I'm excited about. So you can collaborate on projects in there. You can share different resources. We have a prompt library. There's going to be public access for some of it, too, for discoverability purposes and also just cuz I think it's a great way to build a brand. So, that's it for today. If you learned one thing, then you got to like the video so that more people see this. And then if you learned two things or you didn't learn anything at all, you should subscribe. All right, I'll see you in the next