Agent, take the wheel (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

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 – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• How to Build an Agent
• Amp

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapters

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

2. Sponsor: Depot (00:01:13)

https://depot.dev

3. Start the show! (00:03:27)

4. How to build an agent (00:03:46)

5. You felt the AGI? (00:09:53)

6. Tool calling (00:13:18)

7. A basic algorithm (00:17:06)

8. Amp's angle (00:22:24)

9. The ampcode.com copy (00:31:45)

10. Sponsor: Retool (00:44:06)

https://retool.com/agents

11. Believers and skeptics (00:46:02)

12. The horse carriage (00:59:03)

13. The Vim identity (01:05:39)

14. Still well positioned (01:10:47)

15. Use AI to think better (01:13:12)

16. To the Vim folks (01:14:43)

17. Paint by numbers programming (01:20:22)

18. Open source impact (01:33:51)

19. An optimistic prediction (01:48:56)

20. Wrapping up (01:50:48)

21. Closing thoughts (01:52:08)

https://changelog.com/live