DiscoverLatent Space: The AI Engineer PodcastAmp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes

Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes

Update: 2025-09-25
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Description

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

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Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes

Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes