# Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer/amp-the-emperor-has-no-clothes
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer/amp-the-emperor-has-no-clothes.md
Podcast: [Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer)
Published: 2025-09-25T15:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.latent.space/p/amp-the-emperor-has-no-clothes
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/186621789/3444ee6ad3188f9b3cc76d78cb63a9f4.mp3
Processing state: processed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/latent-space-ai-engineer/episodes/amp-the-emperor-has-no-clothes
Duration seconds: 4813

## Resource

Quinn Slack (CEO) and Thorsten Ball (Amp Dictator) from SourceGraph join the show to talk about Amp Code, how they ship 15x/day with no code reviews, and why subagents and prompt optimizers aren’t a promising direction for coding agents. Amp Code: https://ampcode.com/ Latent Space: https://latent.space/ Full Video Episode Timestamps 00:00 Introduction00:41 Transition from Cody to Amp03:18 The Importance of Building the Best Coding Agent06:43 Adapting to a Rapidly Evolving AI Tooling Landscape09:36 Dogfooding at Sourcegraph12:35 CLI vs. VS Code Extension21:08 Positioning Amp in Coding Agent Market24:10 The Diminishing Importance of Model Selectors32:39 Tooling vs. Harness37:19 Common Failure Modes of Coding Agents47:33 Agent-Friendly Logging and Tooling52:31 Are Subagents Real?56:52 New Frameworks and Agent-Integrated Developer Tools1:00:25 How Agents Are Encouraging Codebase and Workflow Changes1:03:13 Evolving Outer Loop Tasks1:07:09 Version Control and Merge Conflicts in an AI-First World1:10:36 Rise of User-Generated Enterprise Software1:14:39 Empowering Technical Leaders with AI1:17:11 Evaluating Product Without Traditional Evals1:20:58 Hiring This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe

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## Transcript

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