Changelog Interviews

Exploring with agents

15 snips
Apr 24, 2026
Guest
Amelia Wattenberger
Amelia Wattenberger, designer and data-visualization veteran now building Intent at Augment Code, explores how agents are changing developer tooling. She traces the arc from autocomplete to chat to UI. They debate workspaces as the core primitive, one-worktree-per-task tradeoffs, agent orchestration patterns, and why prototyping feels easier while finishing gets harder.
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INSIGHT

Developer Tooling Evolved Back Toward Purposeful UIs

  • The evolution of developer tooling moved from autocomplete to chat to CLI and now back to UI apps.
  • Amelia traces Copilot's autocomplete roots through chat/agents and predicts a UI replatforming around higher-level primitives.
ANECDOTE

Early Copilot Users Realized It Was More Than Autocomplete

  • Amelia joined GitHub Next just before Copilot launched and helped with the launch and early user reactions.
  • Early users called it better autocomplete, but after a day or two they felt it was fundamentally different and transformative.
INSIGHT

Agents Shrink Prototyping But Make Finishing Harder

  • Agents compress early work so prototypes appear much faster than before.
  • Amelia observed the first ~70% of a project can be produced quickly, leaving the last 30%—polish, integration, and finish—as the new bottleneck.
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