go podcast() 093: Agentic engineering is here to stay with Thorsten Ball
Jul 16, 2026
Thorsten Ball, author and software engineer known for Go books and AI developer tools, talks about agentic engineering and building Amp. He describes early agent demos, how LLMs turn fuzzy intent into precise actions, and why agent-first tooling can replace old search and indexing patterns. He also discusses product trade-offs, ephemeral remote agents, and how developers should adapt as AI reshapes coding workflows.
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Author Delivers Signed Book To Neighbor
- Thorsten Ball described signing and hand-delivering a book to a local reader in his small German town.
- The unexpected proximity of a reader made the moment personal and memorable, showing continued engagement with his books years later.
LLMs Plus Simple Tools Replace Complex Indexing
- Thorsten Ball argues many coding-agent features (embeddings, apply-models) are unnecessary because powerful LLMs plus a few simple tools already solve search and code edits.
- He demonstrated agents using basic file tools (ls, cat, grep) that locate and modify code across repos without elaborate indexing.
Screenshot Annotation Demo Flips Live Buttons
- Thorsten recounts a demo where he screenshot a webpage, annotated two buttons, fed the image to an agent and told it to flip them.
- The agent read the image, found the buttons in source code, edited files, and showed the live site with swapped buttons.