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
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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.
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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!
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.
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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.”
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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.
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
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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!