Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
1496 snips
Sep 25, 2025 
Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph, and Thorsten Ball, the lead engineer behind AMP, dive into the world of coding agents. They reveal their groundbreaking approach of shipping 15 times a day without code reviews. The duo debates the effectiveness of subagents and explores how AMP is reshaping workflows and team structures in software development. They also discuss the evolution of AI tooling, empowering users to craft their own enterprise software, and the critical need for agent-friendly logging practices. A fun and insightful look into the future of coding!
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Ship Fast With Small Autonomous Teams
- Shipping extremely frequently enabled AMP to iterate and dogfood effectively while keeping core platform teams stable.
- Small autonomous teams that push main without formal reviews can move far faster in this era.
Started In VS Code Then Added CLI
- AMP launched first as a VS Code extension because it was easiest to ship and distribute via the marketplace.
- They later developed a CLI because many users preferred terminal workflows and it proved complementary to the editor UI.
Model Choice Is About The Whole Harness
- Don’t treat model selection as a checkbox; optimize system prompts, tools, and harness for each model instead.
- Expose models only when you can provide the best integrated experience for that model.