Guidelines for Chat
You can provide custom guidelines written in natural language to improve Chat with your preferences, best practices, styles, and technology stack.
About guidelines
Chat guidelines are natural language instructions that can help Augment reply with more accurate and relevant responses. Guidelines are perfect for telling Augment to take into consideration specific preferences, package versions, styles, and other implementation details that can’t be managed with a linter or compiler. You can create guidelines for a specific workspace or globally for all chats; guidelines do not currently apply to Completions, Instructions, or Next Edit.
User guidelines
Adding user guidelines
You can add user guidelines by clicking Context menu or starting an @-mention from the Chat input box. User guidelines will be applied to all future chats in all open editors.
- Select User Guidelines
- Enter your guidelines (see below for tips)
- Click Save
Updating or removing user guidelines
You can update or remove your guidelines by clicking on the User Guidelines context chip. Update or remove your guidelines and click Save. Updating or removing user guidelines in any editor will modify them in all open editors.
Workspace guidelines
You can add an .augment-guidelines file to the root of a repository to specify a set of guidelines that Augment Chat will follow for all Chat sessions on the codebase. The .augment-guidelines file should be added to your version control system so that everyone working on the codebase has the same guidelines.
Tips for good guidelines
- Provide guidelines as a list
- Use simple, clear, and concise language for your guidelines
- Asking for shorter or code-only answers may hurt response quality
User guideline examples
- Ask for additional explaination (e.g., For Typescript code, explain what the code is doing in more detail)
- Set a preferred language (e.g, Respond to questions in Spanish)
Workspace guideline examples
- Identifying preferred libraries (e.g., pytest vs unittest)
- Identifying specific patterns (e.g., For NextJS, use the App Router and server components)
- Rejecting specific anti-patterns (e.g., a deprecated internal module)
- Defining naming convensions (e.g., functions start with verbs)