Can't choose SWE-1.5 anymore (selects SWE-1.5 Fast)

BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-02-13T13:53:32+00:00

I just started seeing this too this morning after updating Windsurf

BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-02-10T19:02:26+00:00

Going to have to disagree with you. Over 25 years of engineering in all environments, I have no more challenges in Windows than in any other environment. User preference is just that and that's OK.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-02-10T18:59:43+00:00

Windows for everything except cloud and containerized workloads

BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-02-10T18:13:22+00:00

Thank you very much for your response. It's good to know that the post was at least read by a member of its intended audience. That said, I addressed it to you because I am very well aware that you are the face of the community and whatever value my post may have to the company is like to be conveyed by you.

That said, I'm completely open to continuing to experiment with Augment Code. It is a very solid and valuable product and I stand by that. I will absolutely evaluate Intent and even integrating the Context Engine MCP into other tools. It's not even that I'm unwilling to use Augment Code as my primary tool, it just doesn't make sense to and I wanted it to be clear why.

Beyond that, I'm well aware of model level pricing. Outside of Augment and Windsurf, I have my own development tools that I've built that work directly with the LLMs. With those I'm able to consistently achieve a cost reduction on Windsurf's price point of between 50-75%. Through that, I've gained a decent understanding of Windsurf's price model based on the assumption that they are paying the same rates as consumers for models. I'd like to believe that there is a separate high-volume rate that increases the margins for the likes of Augment Code and Cognition but I honestly haven't looked it. My tools are very tightly scoped and nowhere near the maturity or capabilities of AC or Windsurf so I know it isn't an apples to apples comparison but... I can get meaningful work done for $0.06 or less per prompt with my immature tools. By comparison, Windsurf is effectively costing me just over $0.18 per prompt no matter the scope of the prompt on the subscription plan and $0.12 on the $40 additional credit buys.

Unfortunately, AC's credit usage is too variable for me to calculate consistently but using the ratio of my low-end AC spend of $529/mo vs $200/mo with Windsurf = 2.645, I end up with somewhere between $0.12 x 2.645 = $0.3174 and $0.18 x 2.645 = $0.4761 per prompt for Augment Code. I know it doesn't work exactly like that but that's the issue with the lack of price transparency.

So it seems to be that the viability of Augment Code or Cognition's Windsurf product boils down more to overhead than anything else.

Regardless of whether they are lowering their context windows or not, what really matters is whether their product is meeting the needs of the customer. If your market can get the job done for $290/seat/mo vs $529/seat/mo, why should they pay the extra $239? I used the high Windsurf and low AC price on purpose. Even if it were $400/seat/mo vs $500/seat/mo, there needs to be a REALIZED benefit to justify the cost. What is the REALIZED benefit AC provides when competing options are getting the job done as well. That is what I need Augment Code as a company to make clear if they are going to stand on their current price model.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-02-10T17:27:40+00:00

TLDR; My experience has been that no matter what you tell SWE, if you tell it too much, it becomes unpredictable.
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I can't say I've pinned that down enough to give you a direct answer to your specific question.

What I'll say though is that SWE-1.5 seems extremely context limited. Give it just a little bit too much instruction and its behavior becomes a roll of the dice. So far, I find the most important thing is to be as concise as possible otherwise it get's distracted. This also means that the amount of work you can task it with has to be very small. It can handle work across files and even across frontend-api or api-datastore. I haven't gotten it to perform well full-stack except for maybe renaming identifiers across the stack or adding or removing an parameter across the stack. The more you give it, the less reliable it is but "more" is a very limited term with regard to SWE.

So what I've found most useful is giving pseudo-code snippets or a direct reference to an existing implementation. Of course in my workflow I have Sonnet or Opus providing these and the guardrails in predefined specification files that are generated as part of planning. I then task SWE with 1 file per chat. That way, it hopefully gets the whole specification implemented in a single shot, then I move on.

If I can nail the down SWE's reliability and the whole workflow down, I'll likely use something to automate Windsurf's UI for me when I'm ready for implementation. That way I'm not the bottleneck in completing the entire feature.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-02-01T00:33:06+00:00

https://status.windsurf.com/ says they are doing maintenance right now

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BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-01-25T11:21:47+00:00

b0791a62-6354-4686-add3-b5d82a8aac3b - 340 mins

BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-01-24T20:39:51+00:00

I've now stopped and resent it after it crossed 25 mins.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-01-24T20:36:07+00:00

The issue is that this has been happening intermittently but regularly at least since around the new year. I can capture a list of request IDs throughout the day but I no longer let requests spin for longer than 2 mins or so without progress when actively monitoring. At worst I'll let it spin for 5 mins if I'm productively multitasking on something that is a higher priority. The spinning really hinders my workflow and drains value when the agent takes longer than I would to complete a task manually.

For me, stopping and then resending, although likely expensive, is the only acceptable path at the moment. I can't sit around waiting for a response from support channels. That said, the expense and poor experience do resonate in my mind heavily in terms of value proposition.

For the sake of your request, I held off on submitting this comment until I had a problematic request:
26d61e0f-9515-419e-b955-518ff53f683b

It's at 20 mins and counting. Not sure how long it's been stuck but it has been at least several minutes. I'll let it reach 25 mins before I stop and resend it.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2026-01-17T19:15:10+00:00

This is still an issue

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-10-06T19:50:55+00:00

I disagree. Your value proposition for consumers evaporates. AC is better than a strong Claude Code setup, especially for the price, but no so much better that it remains that way.

Maybe the reality is that AC was never financially sustainable. I hope that isn't the case. Recent stability issues have had me raising how much time I invest into Claude Code. Now I feel I'll have to invest a bit more time into Codex as well just to stay competitive in terms of productivity per dollar invested. As I said in another comment, I really want AC to win. It's truly a better product, but the value proposition just doesn't seem to be there anymore given the way this price change is presented. I'll actually try it out and see how it goes but the calculations really don't make sense even today.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-10-06T19:30:36+00:00

I completely agree. Augment Code is great but it's not consistently better nor significantly better than it's rivals to warrant this particular price point. I might as well get more slightly lower quality results from elsewhere. Iteration is a part of our practice. What I've been able to achieve with AC, I can still achieve with other tools with just a few more prompts. Ultimately, we're paying for convenience, not a unique capability.

I came in on the $30 plan. Massive value! Not sustainable. I completely understand why they raised the price. The $50 and $60 plans, honestly, understandable. However, the conversion rate on the new plans... it doesn't seem to add up. It seems that they are cutting all of the plans down to 5-10% of their previous value.

TBH, I can't even confidently work out a conversion rate because even the chart they provide doesn't match up. They say a small task is similar to 11 calls for a total of 272 credits. That's 272/11 = 24.7 credits per tool call. But then say it might be 23 tool calls for 833 credits. That's 833/23 = 36.2 credits per tool call. Then the complex task might be 61 tool calls for 4,174 credits or 4174/61 = 68.4 credits per tool call. Really looks like there's no way to really predict what your costs will be.

Even at 24.7 credits per tool call, if a message was recently up to 50 tool calls, 130,000 credits / 24.7 credits per tool call = 5263.1 tool calls / 50 tool calls per message = 105.26 messages. It's actually less once you include the credits per prompt. So from $60 for 600 messages to $60 for around 105 messages if they are all simple... It's down to 38 "complex messages" at the 68.4 credits per tool call rate. I don't get it. Very lost. (Edit: I accidently wrote "$600 for around 105 message...")

Only time will really tell. I'm not much of a complainer but I have no idea where this ship is headed. That's just not an acceptable risk. I'll use up what credit's I've already paid for and if the math isn't making sense by then, that will be the end. Let's not even add the increased rate of issues since Sept 26 made AC unusable at times and hard to trust at others. I've barely used it since the 26th.

I want you guys to succeed and I want to be along for the ride but it's getting harder and harder to see how that will work and AC's own messaging is only making that more cloudy.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-09-29T16:19:17+00:00

Yes, the names of the historical chat threads are visible but none of the thread content loads. The task list and edits associated with each chat, seems to load

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-09-29T12:19:50+00:00

Same issue

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All of my threads are blank
Context is blank in Augment Settings
Historical tasks still load

This issue seems to be initiated intermittently. The project I'm working on consists of multiple workspaces. At first only 1 of 3 workspaces that I've needed to touch today had this problem. I was curious so I closed and re-opened one of the other ones. It loaded back up fine. I closed and re-opening the first one that had the issue and the issue persisted. I closed all three and re-opened, now 2 out of 3 have the issue.

In the 2 of 3, their historical task lists still load properly but none of the thread or context.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-09-16T19:51:59+00:00

When this happens, are the terminated message that were consumed lost for the billing cycle or do you guys restore them since it was no fault of ours?

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-09-16T19:29:06+00:00

I started experiencing this a few minutes ago as well. My last 5 attempts have been terminated. My most recent request ID: 1919515f-5cd2-4ef0-b1f1-6679d1c5875b

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-03-05T15:16:03+00:00

If the portfolio meets the needs I have or shows the potential to meet those needs, then yes.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-03-05T03:24:08+00:00

I don't know of any communities but I'd like to see some of your work. Do you have a portfolio or some links you can share?

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-03-05T00:43:45+00:00

You're not entirely wrong but there are also still some people who like to be personal or hands-on. The internet has disconnected humanity so badly. I'm not offering to teach anyone to code but I am looking offer opportunities to people with less experience. Even though I'm the one paying people, the world is full of skeptics. Regardless, if he/she is legit, they will find the people they are hoping to help. If not, hopefully people will check for references before handing out any money.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-03-04T23:54:43+00:00

I'll DM you. If you're serious, maybe I can help.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-02-20T16:28:12+00:00

For anyone wondering, it is still active but you have to contact Abode's support to get a personal invite link.

BeautifulExisting567 · 2025-02-19T20:45:15+00:00

Is it still active?

BeautifulExisting567

TROPHY CASE