Flowing with agents (Changelog Interviews #658)

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Everything is changing. Adam is joined by his good friend Beyang Liu from Sourcegraph — this time, talking about Amp (ampcode.com). Amp is one of the many, and one of Adam’s favorite agentic coding tools to use. What makes it different is how they’ve engineered to it to maximize what’s possible with today’s frontier models. Autonomous reasoning, access to the oracle, comprehensive code editing, and complex task execution. That’s nearly verbatim from their homepage, but it’s also exactly what Adam has experienced. They talk through all things agents, how Adam might have been holding Amp wrong, and they even talked through Adam’s idea called “Agent Flow”. If you’re babysitting agents, this episode is for you.

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Featuring:

• Beyang Liu – GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Amp Code - (ampcode.com)
• YouTube.com/Sourcegraph

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapters

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: CodeRabbit (00:01:17)

https://www.coderabbit.ai

3. Start the show! (00:02:24)

4. It's a genie in a bottle (00:09:38)

5. How does Amp, Amp? (00:18:55)

6. Amp CLI is stunning (00:24:53)

7. CLI TUI edge cases (00:28:59)

8. Adam's shares his Agent Flow framework (00:33:11)

9. Sponsor: Depot (00:41:26)

https://depot.dev

10. Borrowing PEPs from Python (00:43:37)

11. The cost of Amp and using context properly (Adam holding it wrong?) (01:02:00)

12. Scratching itches wth Agents (01:06:18)

13. Raising an agent (01:25:01)

14. The pod on YouTube (01:31:12)

15. Speaking to AI resistors (01:46:12)

16. OSS hopeful (01:53:53)

17. Try them all! (01:58:45)

18. Wrapping up (02:02:27)

19. Closing thoughts and stuff (02:03:16)