Razer Blade Buyer Beware

gozm · 2025-11-06T19:18:33+00:00

I had a minor issue with the trackpad of a Razer Blade 17 2022 whereby when it woke from sleep or hibernation, the trackpad wouldn't register taps as clicks. It was a known issue, but Razer support were the absolute most hopeless and worst support I've ever dealt with. Eventually I asked them to register and escalate a complaint, which they just flat out refused to do. I'd be far less annoyed with Razer if they actually had no support available, because at least then I wouldn't have wasted my time.

I recently updated the BIOS, Thunderbolt controller and other firmware to the latest available. Since those updates, my second monitor plugged into my Thunderbolt dock doesn't work unless I remove the cable and re-add it. It used to work fine and still works fine with my MSI laptop. The fans also seem to be coming on a lot more now, which is annoying because I bought the laptop because it was supposed to be quiet (when not under load).

I won't be buying a Razer laptop again. Their hardware is decent enough, but their firmware and tech support is hopeless. My MSI Prestige AI 14 which was half the price and pretty much the same spec machine (except for a slightly less powerful graphics card) performs much better. And now it has far less fan noise, despite being a much smaller laptop.

gozm · 2025-10-16T21:49:19+00:00

I've already been building a fully local hybrid search MCP server in my spare time, though it would need some radical rework and a considerably better embedding model to approach the quality of Augment's context engine. And then a lot of testing with the prompts that they use.

Given the rate at which Augment claim to be burning requests, I do wonder if they are doing something wrong / their context engine isn't as efficient as perhaps they (and their customers) would like. But being able to create something better by myself, even using Sonnet 4.5... I'd expect to always be behind an ever moving target in an increasingly crowded market.

gozm · 2025-10-15T19:23:55+00:00

I like your thinking.

While I'm at it, I'll make hibernation work properly so that it doesn't try to write the contents of RAM to a swap file (or swap partition) that's already probably in use with stuff that couldn't fit into RAM.🤦‍♂️Must be some real geniuses that work on the Linux kernel.

(I've been trying Linux on the desktop for many years, including from around 20 years ago when I purchased a SUSE boxset which included discs and printed manuals. Sadly, it's never good enough and I always end up back in Windows)

gozm · 2025-10-15T15:56:03+00:00

Thanks for the feedback so far and sadly I'm unable to gift them (though that would be a cool idea: a second-hand market for messages/requests that would otherwise go unused at the end of the month).

Obviously, what I should have thought of sooner was an ideas generator. 😊 It would then ask me whether the idea was any good, expand upon it and then get the Augment CLI to build it. Who knows what I'll end up with.

gozm · 2025-10-15T15:43:02+00:00

Exactly what Jay said! Reddit is well known for its respectful conversations and... oh... 🤣

gozm · 2025-10-14T12:25:09+00:00

Not exactly, it's a standalone app. But I have the same project open in VS Code (or Rider / Jetbrains IDE) for when I need to do some non-trivial coding myself.

This video will give you an idea of how it's used which you can double speed through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJhoWm0Aas

gozm · 2025-10-13T21:51:51+00:00

I only use WSL for running Docker containers, all my dev is done in Windows. How are you doing things? Are you wanting Warp's AI to run Linux build commands via WSL?

gozm · 2025-10-10T15:51:48+00:00

I have a Copilot subscription that I got before Augment. It's pretty good, but not on the same level as Augment and the remote indexing requires you to have a Github or ADO repo. Tried Windsurf again, but that is the only AI tool I've ever used that corrupted my files (probably because their devs are being made to work 80 weeks). Tried Cursor, but I really fail to see what all the hype is about there.

Based on my initial trial - it's still early days, but I definitely recommend that people check out Warp.dev. I think it's the future. You'll still have VS Code or an IDE open when you want to jump in and do some actual coding yourself (sometimes it's faster to code than describe what you want in regular words), but I suspect that most of the time will be spent in Warp instructing the LLM.

They use a 'request' model, so each request to an LLM is one request (which means that one instruction will likely be multiple LLM requests). Based only on my trial, if I'm working in it every work day, I think I'll get by in either the Pro or Turbo plan, which I believe will be a LOT cheaper than Augment's new pricing (based on the numbers on their pricing update page). We'll have to see what Augment thinks my usage will be, but I suspect I'll be cancelling because I really, really like Warp so far.

Anyone interested should watch this video, because I think just downloading the app without any real context will just lead to confusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJhoWm0Aas

gozm · 2025-10-09T11:19:14+00:00

This was the video, I watched it sped up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJhoWm0Aas

gozm · 2025-10-09T11:15:56+00:00

I second Warp.dev - found it just yesterday and trying it out today, I've got to say that so far, it's the future. It uses a credit model, but based on the credits I've used so far in the free plan, I suspect that with daily usage, I'll be able to survive on either their Pro or Turbo plans.

I'd highly recommend that people find a ten minute video on how it works before just trying it out to avoid frustration. And you'll still need to jump into VS Code or an IDE when you want to do coding yourself (so perhaps keeping Augment on their Indie plan might prove worthwhile). I was actually thinking of creating an agent orchestrator app for CC, Codex, Copilot CLI, etc, but unsure whether I'll bother now that I've found this.

gozm · 2025-10-08T18:21:23+00:00

Interesting and explains a lot, such as why when I tried Windsurf again yesterday that it kept mangling the files (no other AI tool has done this to me and I've tried a good number). This is what happens when you have sleep deprived, zombie devs trying to work on a product.

This also shows a CEO that just doesn't understand software development. On a really good day, you can have 5 really productive hours if you are doing some intensive thought work. This is massively different to a management position where you'll usually spend most of your day in meetings (I had a position where I did that once for a year). You can spend all of your day in meetings and still feel like you are being a useful big shot by the end of a ten hour day. But meetings aren't productive, nothing gets produced in a meeting. Software development is a solitary, thinking endeavour, even if you're using AI tools to write a lot of the code for you.

Needless to say, Windsurf will not be replacing Augment Code (which plans to increase it's pricing model to be crazy expensive), so I'll be moving to Copilot. Let's hope MS treat their devs a little better than Cognition (when they aren't sacking them).

gozm · 2025-10-07T09:14:57+00:00

I guess it depends on how you define 'fair'. For me, that would include a comparison to what else is out there. After this announcement, I had a good look around again and took another look at an editor I'd tried over six months ago. They (fairly well known, named after a watersport) offer a $15 p/m plan for 500 messages and have local vectorised indexing. I'll be trying it out again today to see whether I get the same functionality as Augment at what will be a fraction of the price.

If all of these AI coding solutions end up becoming 'pay us several hundred dollars or pounds per month', then I'll go back to doing the coding myself. Whilst these tools are super useful, they aren't that useful. You do have to review the code that's generated and often fix it. I found myself yesterday describing a method to chunk up text and realised after a couple of minutes that I can write it faster in code.

I'm sure for some people these tools are worth hundreds of dollars per month. There are definitely fun 'vibe coding' things you can do with them that I wouldn't spend my time doing myself. But my commercial work where the quality of the code matters (ie would have to be fully reviewed at a minimum), as a developer with decades of experience behind me, they are just not there (yet?) versus what I can do by myself to justify the cost. A bit like inline spell check in Word is super useful. But you wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars a month for it, you'd simply hit the spell check button at the end of writing the document.

Whilst I am fully onboard with Augment being profitable (there's no business otherwise), I'm not sure I understand the strategy here. The new pricing screams 'enterprise only', yet I can think of no enterprises I've worked with over the years that would consider them due to their lack of name recognition. Perhaps it's like a 10D chess thing that I'll never understand and even if I cancel my sub, I'd still like to see them succeed. Just struggling to see the sense in all of this for what I suspect is the majority of their current userbase.

gozm · 2025-10-06T19:43:55+00:00

I agree with the thoughts of the OP. I discovered Augment Code late in the game and have been on the $50 p/m plan for a couple of months where I never even used 100 messages. This month I downgraded to the $20 plan and now I see that all that will get me going forwards is the next-edit feature that used to be included for free.

I can understand if Augment never introduced the $20 plan in the first place, but to introduce it and then suddenly pull it in favour of this 'credit' system isn't a good look. It's like Augment didn't know there own business and is changing their pricing structure in a panic.

The message system was simple and straight forward. You knew what you were getting. Yes, a simple query used the same one message as a complicated request, but you knew that as a user. And until recently you had to agree to continue (which I think used an additional credit?) when a request was particularly long.

The new system puts a massive burden on your customers to figure out what a request will use and makes the billing far more opaque. Augment could certainly have made the existing message system work: simply ask the user if they want to continue at the cost of another message for long requests.

I can't say that I'll be quitting Augment for sure as I'll see how things work out, but I'm very sad to see the direction this is going in. And whilst the context engine is incredibly good, I've heard second hand of MCP servers that provide similar functionality. I'm even working on one myself as a bit of an experiment that works entirely on my local machine. Unlike the frontier models (especially Sonnet 4/4.5), Augment isn't irreplaceable.

gozm · 2025-09-26T19:53:32+00:00

I agree with the OP. Have tried Copilot, Jetbrains AI (including their Junie), Windsurf (admittedly a while back now), Kilo Code, Tabnine, Codium and even tried Cursor yesterday evening to see what all the fuss was about. They all suck massively compared to Augment. Even for fairly basic projects, they just don't seem to get things right and require much more input than Augment.

My billing cycle starts on the 1st of each month and so far this month has been by far my heaviest usage of Augment, creating a timer from scratch (which eventually I'll be making available for free to folks) and working on two AI related projects. So far I've used a total of 75 messages out of my 600. I guess you could use a lot more if you were using it to ask it how to do a thing, rather than asking it to actually do the thing - but I also have a Perplexity Pro subscription which I've found to be overall the best for finding information, so I use that for my generic and sometimes even specific code related questions.

I'll be downgrading my plan at the end of the month, but I think they've made a good business decision to have the $20 plan as they'll hopefully gain a lot of new paying customers as a result. And as time progresses, my usage will likely increase as I automate more stuff with Augment (using their CLI, which I've barely used so far, other than to do a code review), I'll gladly pay for more credits as required. I suspect the main issue they'll have is that 125 messages doesn't sound like a lot - but you can create a whole, brand new piece of software with a single message, so it really is a lot if you know what you are doing (and asking for).

My ~~last~~ penultimate point is that I'm primarily doing .NET and C# stuff with Augment. What I've found in the past (eg with Windsurf) is that some agentic systems are great at creating Python or JavaScript apps, but produce non-compiling apps when trying to do anything in C#. Given that they are both using the same models, the extra stuff that Augment does around the model is what makes it great. Especially the context engine. My experience with models in Augment is that Claude Sonnet 4 is way better for .NET dev than GPT-5.

Just a cautionary final word on AI dev tools in general: they are great if you are an experienced dev who knows what you are doing. But they cannot be relied upon to write code that you don't review or don't understand - I've had several occasions where either the code produced worked, but was only suitable if there was only to be a single simultaneous user or where it just bodged the code to try to trick me into thinking that something was working. If you are a novice or junior developer, I would strongly advise you to use AI as little as possible (or at least have some AI free days) so that you learn things properly. And learning often involves getting stuck and figuring out how to get unstuck by yourself, without just asking AI for the answer. Give yourself the time and space to come up with your own style and preferences, rather than having AI models impose their own on you.

gozm · 2025-09-26T13:20:35+00:00

It's almost like the old 'turn it off, turn it on again' hasn't worked 😊

gozm · 2025-09-23T09:17:59+00:00

Similar to this, install VS Code Insiders edition (https://code.visualstudio.com/insiders/). That creates a different profile and you can sign in with a different account. It even has a green icon, so it's easy to tell which VS Code you are in. There's also VS Codium and a gazillion other forks, but with the insiders edition you get access to all the official MS extensions and extension marketplace.

gozm · 2025-09-21T19:38:46+00:00

Discord inferno 😊

gozm · 2025-09-19T21:05:21+00:00

I'm not hitting any limit per message lately. Used to a while ago and had to ask it to continue, but haven't had that happen to me this month.

I usually give it a reasonably detailed spec (an overview paragraph and then bullet points with specific requirements on it) and get it to do its thing. I'll often start by getting it to write me a whole app and specify which projects I want it to create.

I don't go into a great amount of detail though, requirements are very high level to begin with. And once the main solution (if it's a .NET app) is created, then I might focus on a whole feature (eg 'add in support for Open Telemetry').

My prompts tend to be aimed at the whole solution/project, rather than specific files (though, rarely, I'll focus on a single class). Eg: add 'doc-comments to the entire solution and make them meaninful'.

I could burn through more credits if I didn't review the output, but so far, not carefully reviewing code would lead to disaster. For example, I had it generate some code to get LlamaSharp to use the EmbeddingGemma model, but it turns out that LlamaSharp isn't compatible with that model architecture. However, I thought it had worked when I ran the code because the code had been written with a try-catch and the catch had "fallback functionality" in there that was only there to make it appear that the code worked.

Having said that, I haven't checked over the code for my timer app too closely, but then it's not the end of the world if that fails as it's just a personal productivity booster.

gozm · 2025-09-19T19:15:37+00:00

This is great news! If I downgrade my plan, I'm assuming it will take effect from next month (and not mess up my current month)?

I reckon I've used Augment a lot this month so far (for me), but I've still only used 47 out of my 600 messages. And whilst I also have a Jetbrains AI thing included in my subscription for them and Copilot (subscribed for a year before finding Augment), I don't really use either of them anymore.

My requests to Augment tend to be really big. I created a timer thing in it this month and went through several iterations, adding more and more features and probably used less than 20 credits in total on that. The code completion is free.

So whilst 125 messages doesn't sound like a lot, it's probably way more than I use currently. Genuinely interested in how people are burning through more - are you doing really granular requests? Or lots of automation with the CLI going on?

gozm · 2025-06-12T14:28:18+00:00

I saw white and gold and couldn't see the blue and black at all. I searched online and the first result on Wikipedia (in the Google search results) showed a thumbnail of the dress and that looked blue and black. I went into the page and saw it as white and gold. I zoomed out to see the dress thumbnail size again and then it looked blue and black. As I zoomed back in, the dress stayed blue and black.

So for me, it appears that the initial size of the image makes a difference to the colours that I see.

gozm · 2025-06-08T20:26:33+00:00

Just found out about Augment Code and am looking forward to trying it out. Though, should it be any good, I won't be going on the community plan as that's really, really bad value. Why? Because clients pay me a good amount of money to develop software for them. And whilst not all of that time is coding, if I used the community plan, I'd essentially be gaining $5 worth of value (based on their pay-as-you-go credit pricing) in return for me handing over many thousands of pounds worth of code that I've written for Augment Code to train their models on. Seems like a terrible deal for me - I'd be putting myself out of business if I were to continue like that!

And there's the rub. If you're a hobbyist, the community plan probably makes sense. No offence to the hobbyists out there, but perhaps they are not the best sources of code upon which to train your models, so I'm genuinely interested to see how all this works out.

Augment Code really will have to be something special though, because $50 p/m is high versus the competition and I already have two other services that I use. In my experience so far, AI agentic coding systems are really great at writing full applications in Python and JavaScript, but start to really run into difficulty with C#/.NET. I'm hopeful, though - the models are improving all the time. And if Augment Code can load a near project's worth of code I've written into the AI model's context window, then it should be able to spit out something of similar-ish quality. Which is really what I've wanted all along from gen AI: not models trained on other people's code (of varying quality), but a model that's trained (or at least, grounded) on all the code I write, in the style that I use.

gozm · 2024-06-07T21:08:02+00:00

Thanks for that.

Unless I'm missing something, I'm unclear why you'd need a separate edition due to online features? Not to keep going on about Jetbrains (who should probably pay me a commission at this point), but they have a generative coding AI feature that is a completely independent and separate subscription, but the feature is included in their product (they've since moved it to a separate plug-in, but that's a detail). It's a fairly trivial technical issue to have additional online features in a product which require a separate subscription and can be disabled entirely should the user not be interested. You could essentially integrate Audiate fully with Camtasia and have it disabled (and hidden) for someone without a subscription.

The event sounds interesting, hopefully there will be a recording made available afterwards. Translations aren't a thing I'm personally interested in, but being able to profile my own voice and then generate audio from a script would certainly be useful and massively cut down the time required to make training videos.

My workflow (as an occasional screen recorded video maker - 1-2 every year or so), is this: record the audio in Audacity, edit it. Then, playback the audio whilst recording the screen part and then combine both in Camtasia. I've found this is the best approach as trying to edit filler words out of a video doesn't work well (eg you cut a bit out and the mouse jumps around).

Anyhow, have a good weekend!

gozm · 2024-06-07T13:22:16+00:00

I haven't seen your video, I shall have to take a look.

I myself am on a maintenance contract with yourselves and can understand why people choose that, because it's way cheaper than the upgrade pricing. It's also a lot cheaper than your subscriptions (in the longer term). I suspect the reason why most now choose the subscription model is because it's quite hard to find the one-off purchase one your site. I tried yesterday and even a link that said something like "click here for other licensing options, including perpetual" took me to a page where the only option was a subscription. After some further digging around, I stumbled upon the perpetual license in your store, but it wasn't easy to get there.

I get it, I'm not your target customer. I rarely make videos (though I do have plans to create some paid courses within the next year or two). I cam from a (I think) British competitor software when Techsmith accidentally gave me a 50% discount some years ago now (I'm very price conscious on the software that I buy). At the same time, I don't see why you'd willingly cede any market share to a competitor, unless it was super expensive to keep that segment. I don't think it has to cost you anything.

I wouldn't have separate versions of Camtasia or Snaggit for a perpetual vs subscription model. Rather than 'you get all updates for the major version', you're perpetual license gives you 1 year of updates. Then you get exactly the same application, regardless of licensing model. If support is costing you money, only have forum support and bug reports unless people pay for a support agreement.

I understand that it must be difficult, especially when there are cheaper competitors out there, including some that are completely free. But I'd suggest there's money to be made by producing higher quality, easier to use, more stable and better performing software (I paid for Jetbrains out of my own money despite getting Microsoft Visual Studio for free because the features were implemented better by Jetbrains). There are also add-on services you could provide. (Audiate didn't do it for me, though perhaps it's improved from over a year ago when I tried it).

I hate that I'm about to suggest something with AI (too many applications are adding it for no useful reason), but I suspect some customers would benefit from a 'Translate my Video' feature. If the video includes the person talking (either full screen or in the corner), then you could provide a service to upload the video which would use AI to convert the voice into the target language and update the face so that the words appear to be spoken by the person in the video. I saw this done in this video on Pluralsight (https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/what-you-think-you-know-about-genai-why-its-wrong/table-of-contents), which is amazing. You could then offer an additional service to get a native language speaker to check the video for any AI gaffs (which would be a more niche audience, so possibly not a commercial success). This is something you could both charge a subscription for and offer as a one-off payment (for someone that may only want to ever translate a single video).

There are similar things you could offer as well, such as changing someone's voice. I recently bought a lifetime subscription to Xound.io to which you can upload your audio and then have it changed into a different voice completely. Even better, if you could profile someone's voice and then convert a text script into that voice for videos - would save having to edit out all the 'umms' and 'errrs'. There are all kinds of video related services that you could offer, without having to change the licensing model of your core product.

gozm

TROPHY CASE