Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes

Quinn Slack (CEO) and Thorsten Ball (Amp Dictator) from SourceGraph join the show to talk about Amp Code, how they ship 15x/day with no code reviews, and why subagents and prompt optimizers aren’t a promising direction for coding agents. Amp Code: https://ampcode.com/ Latent Space: https://latent.space/ 00:00 Introduction 00:41 Transition from Cody to Amp 03:18 The Importance of Building the Best Coding Agent 06:43 Adapting to a Rapidly Evolving AI Tooling Landscape 09:36 Dogfooding at Sourcegraph 12:35 CLI vs. VS Code Extension 21:08 Positioning Amp in Coding Agent Market 24:10 The Diminishing Importance of Model Selectors 32:39 Tooling vs. Harness 37:19 Common Failure Modes of Coding Agents 47:33 Agent-Friendly Logging and Tooling 52:31 Are Subagents Real? 56:52 New Frameworks and Agent-Integrated Developer Tools 1:00:25 How Agents Are Encouraging Codebase and Workflow Changes 1:03:13 Evolving Outer Loop Tasks 1:07:09 Version Control and Merge Conflicts in an AI-First World 1:10:36 Rise of User-Generated Enterprise Software 1:14:39 Empowering Technical Leaders with AI 1:17:11 Evaluating Product Without Traditional Evals 1:20:58 Hiring