Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
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What is Amp Code and why did Sourcegraph transition from Cody to Amp?
Hey everyone, welcome to the Laden Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernelibse. And today there's no Swix. He's in Europe with AI Engineer, but I'm joined by Quinn and Thorsten from SourceGraph. Welcome. Thanks. Great to be here. Great to be here. So we already had Origin of SourceGraph with Biang and Steve. So we'll put the link in there. And this was when you launched Cody. And today, I guess Cody is a brand that has passed, and I Of AMP. Let's maybe start there. Obviously, when you're CEO source graph. Thursday, what's your role, I guess, title. How do you describe what what you don't see is much easier.
I'm not gonna name my internal title, but I'm uh the dictator of AMP. Yeah, that's uh that's the internal title. Yeah. But uh it's it's um yeah I'm the lead engineer and one of the creators of AMP.
Yeah. So were you part of like the thumbs up, thumbs down on Cody brand? Like how did you get to AMP? Let's tell that story.
I mean, I'll start, you can jump in, but basically I came back to SoftScript February, and then this was when Cloud 3537 happened too. And then Quinn and I started hacking on, you know, what if we just take Cloud 37 and what if we give it just tools and let it go nuts, you know, like no constraints, no um a lot of the other stuff that we had in Kodi, which works for Kodi. To start trying this out, and we started a new project. And we were, you know, I remember first weekend SF where I would stand up in the middle of the room, like Quinn, you gotta you gotta see this. You know?
Like, this is crazy. And then he was like, Okay, let me try this. And then we went off from there, and then we realized relatively quickly that it's a different kind of product where Cody was very much first of its kind with Rack and assistant. Panels, assistant sidebar, but with you know a tool calling agent, where I define an agent as a model, a system prompt, and tools and tool prompts that go along with this, that you give a lot of permissions for. So it can actually see the file system, interact with the file system, or your editor. It's a different thing. And we realized we gotta handle this differently. We gotta reset expectations, we gotta tell users that it's a different thing. And they gotta use it differently in some sense and also that we cannot make it work with a twenty dollar subscription, which back then was seen as a you know offensive thing to say.
And now they're charging.
Yeah,
exactly. But now, you know, people are paying hundreds of dollars per month, which I've been saying this every day for the last two weeks. That's crazy to me still, like the how far we've come. So You know, this is just how it started. Like, okay, this is a different thing. We were astonished, surprised, amazed by what these models can do. So we decided let's reset expectations. Let's tell a new story. We can we have enterprise customers for Cody, but they have expectations. We have contracts. These are large contracts, long-running contracts. And you can't just say, Guys, here's a new mode, it costs whatever. How many much More, it works completely differently. You need to hold it in a different way. So in order to avoid this and to avoid being disrupted, you create the new thing that kind of disrupts the business on its own, you know?
Yep. That's I don't know.
Wanna add? Yeah. The only thing that matters is building the best coding agent. Nothing else matters because if you can build that, that's way bigger than anything else that came before. And to be clear, nobody has built that yet. We are getting better and better. But I think you've seen this treadmill of tools that you use as a dev. First it started with Copilot and then Cody. We were really good at chat rag and then Cursor and Windsurf showed that got a IDE Forks and partially agentic things could get better and better. And then, you know, the next generation AMP and Claude Code. And now you're already seeing people say, Oh, well, Codex is better than Claude Code. And there's not been any tool that has stuck with devs for more than uh six or twelve months or something.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Amp Code and why did Sourcegraph transition from Cody to Amp?
0:03–9:24
2
Why is building the best coding agent more important than any other feature?
9:24–18:54
3
How does Amp achieve shipping 15 times a day without code reviews?
18:54–30:28
4
What are the trade‑offs between a VS Code extension and a CLI for a coding agent?
30:28–42:09
5
Why are model selectors becoming less important for coding agents?
42:09–52:41
6
What common failure modes do users encounter with Amp and how are they addressed?
52:41–1:02:56
7
How does Amp handle version‑control, merge conflicts and async agents in an AI‑first world?
1:02:56–1:14:22
8
What are the hiring priorities and future roadmap for Amp’s team?
1:14:22–1:20:00
Speakers
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