Why IDEs Won't Die in the Age of AI Coding: Zed Founder Nathan Sobo
Nathan Sobo has spent nearly two decades pursuing one goal: building an IDE that combines the power of full-featured tools like JetBrains with the responsiveness of lightweight editors like Vim. After hitting the performance ceiling with web-based Atom, he founded Zed and rebuilt from scratch in Rust with GPU-accelerated rendering. Now with 170,000 active developers, Zed is positioned at the intersection of human and AI collaboration. Nathan discusses the Agent Client Protocol that makes Zed "Switzerland" for different AI coding agents, and his vision for fine-grained edit tracking that enables permanent, contextual conversations anchored directly to code—a collaborative layer that asynchronous git-based workflows can't provide. Nathan argues that despite terminal-based AI coding tools visual interfaces for code aren't going anywhere, and that source code is a language designed for humans to read, not just machines to execute.
Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
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/
Full Video Episode
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction00:41 Transition from Cody to Amp03:18 The Importance of Building the Best Coding Agent06:43 Adapting to a Rapidly Evolving AI Tooling Landscape09:36 Dogfooding at Sourcegraph12:35 CLI vs. VS Code Extension21:08 Positioning Amp in Coding Agent Market24:10 The Diminishing Importance of Model Selectors32:39 Tooling vs. Harness37:19 Common Failure Modes of Coding Agents47:33 Agent-Friendly Logging and Tooling52:31 Are Subagents Real?56:52 New Frameworks and Agent-Integrated Developer Tools1:00:25 How Agents Are Encouraging Codebase and Workflow Changes1:03:13 Evolving Outer Loop Tasks1:07:09 Version Control and Merge Conflicts in an AI-First World1:10:36 Rise of User-Generated Enterprise Software1:14:39 Empowering Technical Leaders with AI1:17:11 Evaluating Product Without Traditional Evals1:20:58 Hiring
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe
Agent, take the wheel (Interview)
Thorsten Ball returned to Sourcegraph to work on Amp because he believes being able to talk to an alien intelligence that edits your code changes everything. On this episode, Thorsten joins us to discuss exactly how coding agents work, recent advancements in AI tooling, Amp’s uniqueness in a sea of competitors, the divide between believers and skeptics, and more.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
Retool – Assemble your elite AI team, arm them with powerful custom tools, and watch them make your to-do list disappear. Start for free or book a demo at retool.com/agents
Featuring:
Thorsten Ball – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
How to Build an Agent
Amp
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Building Zed's agentic editing (Interview)
Nathan Sobo is back talking about the next big thing for Zed—agentic editing! You now have a full-blown AI-native editor to play with. Collaborate with agents at 120fps in a natively multiplayer IDE.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
Heroku – The Next Generation of Heroku “Fir” is coming soon — Fir is built on a foundation of cloud native technologies and open source standards, ensuring portability, interoperability, and a vibrant ecosystem for your applications. Cloud Native for everyone, for the next decade and beyond.
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
Featuring:
Nathan Sobo – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Agentic editing
Zed’s leaked-prompts
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Zed's secret sauce (Friends)
The Zed text editor has come a long way since Nathan Sobo came on the show last year to tell us about this follow-up to Atom. Zed is open source now, has the underpinnings of collaboration built in, is beginning its journey toward full extensibility, is coming to Linux soon & shows serious promise if Nathan’s team can mix their secret sauce just right.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members get a bonus 47 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
Tailscale – Adam loves Tailscale! Tailscale is programmable networking software that’s private and secure by default. It’s the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other, wherever they are. Secure, remote access to production, databases, servers, kubernetes, and more. Try Tailscale for free for up to 100 devices and 3 users at changelog.com/tailscale, no credit card required.
Sentry – Launch week! New features and products all week long (so get comfy)! Tune in to Sentry’s YouTube and Discord daily at 9am PT to hear the latest scoop. Too busy? No problem - enter your email address to receive all the announcements (and win swag along the way). Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
Factor – 50% off Factor ready-made meals! Pick your ready-made meals, choose from 35+ fresh, never-frozen meals and 55+ add-ons, every week. Gourmet chefs prepare your meals, so you can enjoy more of your time to focus! Heat, eat & enjoy — No prep. No mess. Factor meals arrive ready to heat and eat in 2 minutes. Learn more at factormeals.com/changelog50
Featuring:
Nathan Sobo – GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Zed.dev
Goodbye Atom. Hello Zed. (The Changelog #531)
Introducing Channels for Collaboration
Zed is now open source
User themes now in Preview
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Goodbye Atom. Hello Zed. (Interview)
This week we’re talking with Nathan Sobo about his next big thing. Nathan is known for his work on the Atom editor while at GitHub. But his work wasn’t finished when he left, so…he started Zed, a high-performance multiplayer editor that’s engineered for performance. And today, Nathan talks us through all the details.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members get a bonus 14 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
Postman – Build APIs together — More than 20 million developers use Postman for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Featuring:
Nathan Sobo – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
zed.dev
Zed raises $10M for a code editor built for collaboration
The Changelog #241: The Story of Atom with Nathan Sobo
GitHub officially says farewell to Atom
Founders Talk #7: Henk Rogers / The Tetris Company
Prioritize enablers and blockers - linear.app
Zed’s language support
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Pow! Pow! Power tools!
Johnny and John welcome Thorsten Ball back to the show. This time we’re talking power tools! Editors, operating systems, containers, cloud providers, databases, and more. You name it, we probably talk about.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. They have an intuitive control panel, predictable pricing, team accounts, worldwide availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, and 24/7/365 world-class support to back that up. Get your $100 credit at do.co/changelog.
Algorithms with Go – A free Go course where panelist Jon Calhoun teaches you how algorithms and data structures work, how to implement them in Go code, and where to practice at. Great for learning Go, learning about algorithms for the first time, or refreshing your algorithmic knowledge.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Featuring:
Thorsten Ball – Website, GitHub, X
Jon Calhoun – Website, GitHub, X
Johnny Boursiquot – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
How much do we bend to the will of our tools?
vim - A terminal-based text editor.
tmux - A terminal multiplexer.
postgres.app - A postgres server for macOS.
psql - The default PostgreSQL CLI, configurable via ~/.psqlrc.
pgcli - CLI for postgres.
jq - Command line JSON parsing tool.
bolt db - A key value store written in Go.
bleve - A text indexing library for go
ngrok - A useful tool for exposing localhost apps to the web for testing things like webhooks.
Paw - A tool for testing APIs on a Mac.
Postman - Another tool for testings APIs, but works on all OSes.
modd - A tool for reloading code and running tests when it changes.
gotest - A tool for running Go tests with color output.
Github CLI - Github’s official CLI tool.
Getting Things Done - A time management method.
Trello - A task management platform.
Things - A todo app for macOS.
Todoist - A cross-platform todo app.
Notion - A cross-platform todo app.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Compilers and interpreters
Thorsten Ball and Tim Raymond join Mat Ryer and Mark Bates to talk about compilers and interpreters. What are the roles of compilers and interpreters? What do they do? The how and why of writing a compiler in Go. We also talk about Thorsten’s books “Writing an Interpreter in Go” and “Writing a Compiler in Go.”
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog.
strongDM – Manage access to any database, server, and environment. strongDM makes it easy for DevOps to enforce the controls InfoSec teams require.
GoCD + Kubernetes – With GoCD running on Kubernetes, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application. Scale your build infrastructure elastically. Learn more at gocd.org/kubernetes
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Featuring:
Thorsten Ball – Website, GitHub, X
Tim Raymond – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Mat Ryer – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Mark Bates – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Writing an Interpreter in Go
Writing a Compiler in Go
Plush
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
S7:E4 - What's a compiler? (Thorsten Ball)
So what exactly is a compiler? And how is it different from an interpreter? And do you even need to know any of this stuff as a developer? Thorsten Ball has all the answers. He's written two books on the topic and he gives us a newbie-friendly introduction to the world of compilers and interpreters. We've also got our fourth episode of Tales from the Command Line, where Scott tells us about the computer science professor who failed the entire class.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
ECMAScript 6
Kathy Sierra
Codeland Conf
Codeland 2019
Thorsten Ball
Thorsten Ball is a software developer and writer. He is the author of Writing An Interpreter In Go and Writing A Compiler In Go.
The Story of Atom (Interview)
Nathan Sobo, founding member of the Atom editor team at GitHub, joined the show take us all the way back to the beginning of Atom to learn where it came from, the founding team, the problem it solves, on through to shipping 1.0 and beyond.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Linode – Our cloud server of choice! Get one of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers for only $5/mo. Use the code changelog2017 to get 4 months free!
Hired – Get hired. It’s free — in fact, they pay you when you get hired. Our listeners get a double hiring bonus of $2,000.
Compose – Production ready, cloud hosted databases. Pick your flavor - MongoDB, Elasticsearch, RethinkDB, Redis, Postgres, etcd, or RabbitMQ. When you’re ready to sign up use our special URL compose.com/changelog to get 60-days free on Compose
Featuring:
Nathan Sobo – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Lambda the Ultimate
Chris Wanstrath
Corey Johnson
Github Atom’s Code-Editor Nerds Take Over Their Universe
Atom on Libraries.io
Treetop on Libraries.io
The super early version of Atom was built on Ace Editor
Atom: free and open source for everyone
Atom homepage
@atomeditor on Twitter
Atom on GitHub
Atom Flight Manual – Documentation for Atom, generated by nanoc, hosted by GitHub Pages
Atom Blog
Atom Forum
The Changelog #216: Electron and Cross Platform Desktop Apps with Zeke Sikelianos
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Creating a programming language
Thorsten Ball joined the show to talk about creating a programming language, writing an interpreter, why he wrote the book “Writing An Interpreter in Go”, how writing a language/interpreter will help you better understand other programming languages, building a computer from Nand to Tetris, and his thoughts on imposter syndrome.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Get one of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers for only $5/mo. Use the code changelog2017 to get 4 months free!
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform.
Backtrace – Reduce your time to resolution. Go beyond stacktraces and logs. Get to the root cause quickly with deep application introspection at your fingertips.
StackImpact – StackImpact is all about profiling and monitoring for Go. Laser focus on the performance of your Go applications.
Featuring:
Thorsten Ball – Website, GitHub, X
Erik St. Martin – GitHub, X
Carlisia Thompson – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Brian Ketelsen – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Writing An Interpreter In Go - In this book we will create a programming language together. We’ll start with 0 lines of code and end up with a fully working interpreter for the Monkey* programming language. Step by step. From tokens to output. All code shown and included. Fully tested.
The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
From NAND to Tetris
Go Advent 2016 blog series
Damian Gryski is now a /r/golang moderator
Take the 2016 Go User Survey — the goal is to create the best language for developing simple, reliable, scalable software. We are asking you to help by participating in a survey and if applicable, a company questionnaire.
From Coursera — Build a Modern Computer from First Principles: From Nand to Tetris (Project-Centered Course)
Ken Thompson - Reflections on Trusting Trust
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!