Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
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Sep 25, 2025 
Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph, and Thorsten Ball, the lead engineer behind AMP, dive into the world of coding agents. They reveal their groundbreaking approach of shipping 15 times a day without code reviews. The duo debates the effectiveness of subagents and explores how AMP is reshaping workflows and team structures in software development. They also discuss the evolution of AI tooling, empowering users to craft their own enterprise software, and the critical need for agent-friendly logging practices. A fun and insightful look into the future of coding!
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Hacker Weekend Sparked AMP
- Thorsten and Quinn started AMP by ripping out Cody constraints and giving models broad tool access to iterate quickly.
- They treated AMP as a separate disruptive project to reset expectations and ship differently.
Prioritize Best Agent Over Broad Feature Play
- Focus on building the best coding agent rather than maximizing short-term adoption or model choice features.
- Prioritize moving fast, learning, and capturing the 10–100x improvements in agent productivity.
Ship Fast With Small Autonomous Teams
- Shipping extremely frequently enabled AMP to iterate and dogfood effectively while keeping core platform teams stable.
- Small autonomous teams that push main without formal reviews can move far faster in this era.