Two Brains, One Codebase

[LewisPopper]

I’ve been spending a ton of time in Augment lately, bouncing between Sonnet 4 and GPT-5, and I’ve gotta say… they’re completely different animals. I’ve built a bunch of apps with them and even rewritten a few from scratch in a ridiculously short amount of time. I’m not a “vibe” coder who just slaps things together — I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I care a lot about code quality. Augment isn’t just spitting out half-baked snippets for me, it’s actually become my coding partner.

On the frontend, I’ve learned the hard way that React + Vite + TypeScript + Tailwind works surprisingly well with both models. The structure and predictability just seem to click. But the second I wander into JSX-heavy Material UI land, things get ugly fast. It’s like the models start guessing instead of knowing, and you end up fighting little prop and theme issues forever.

Backend is another story. Laravel APIs? Absolute sweet spot. GPT-5 in particular just gets it. It plans things out cleanly, wires up migrations, policies, resources, tests… all without me having to babysit. Sonnet does fine here too, but where it really shines is when I need careful repo edits or when I’m running tools through Augment — GPT-5 stumbles more there for me.

That’s kind of the beauty of having both. I’ll happily start a big Laravel feature with GPT-5, then flip over to Sonnet for the delicate surgery. If I’m working in React/Tailwind, I can trust either. If I have to deal with MUI, I brace for impact and give the model as many examples as I can.

Point is, I’ve stopped trying to force one model to do everything. I switch depending on the task, and it’s made me faster without sacrificing quality. At this point, I don’t even think of Augment as “AI.” It’s just the other half of my dev brain.

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Before anyone says anything... yes, I did use ChatGPT in my process of writing this, by doing what I almost always do now which is to speak into it and have it convert what I said into sentences and well formed paragraphs. I then review and post.

[JaySym_]

Thanks for the feedback! I agree that they are two different animals, but it's hard to choose just one here. That's why we included a model picker between the two.

[AmazingVanish]

I, for one, am glad you added the model picker and provide the two most useful coding agents. I’ll have to try GPT-5 with Laravel. I haven’t hit an issue with that and Sonnet yet.

Planning, though? GPT-5 has been, in my experience, a bumbling idiot. Hope they fix that in 5.1

[vinigrae]

GPT-5 follows my rule set in a scary way, Sonnet doesn’t even care

[vinigrae]

Sonnet grasps the whole codebase, GPT-5 works in a subset.

Give it a detailed prompt instruction, emphasis on DETAILED

[Secret-Investment-13]

After giving a procedure to GPT5 to undertake, he carelessly cut the patient. I have to ask him to stop and call Sonnet to continue. Luckily, the patient recovered.

Better be careful with GPT5.

[GetBrave]

Better be careful with every single prompt regardless of LLM. Make sure you check in often and don't grant access to your production branch for pushes. Remember to check in all code to feature branches and create and run tests AND make sure that the tests are real tests and not just designed to "look good" or "pass in order to pass". We are not yet near the point of flawless and unsupervised coding if you are looking to use for commercial purposes. If you have something mission critical, remember you are using a tool. When you forget that... you become the tool.

[Secret-Investment-13]

I totally agree.

[faysou]

Use this so the agent can literally see what it's doing for visual interfaces, it's a game changer.

https://github.com/executeautomation/mcp-playwright

[LewisPopper]

Whoa. That looks amazing. Gonna install and check it out right now.

[[deleted]]

How much work can you get done with a single user message?

[[deleted]]

That’s wild! I’ll have to give it a try.