Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes

**Alessio** (0:03)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio from the O'Connell Labs, and today there's no swicks. He's in Europe with the engineer, but I'm joined by Quinn and Thorsten from SourceGraph. Welcome.

**Quinn Slack** (0:14)
Thanks. Great to be here.

**Thorsten Ball** (0:15)
Great to be here.

**Alessio** (0:16)
So we already had origin of SourceGraph with Bianca 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 now you have Amp. Let's maybe start there, obviously, Quinn, your CEO, SourceGraph. Thorsten, what's your role, I guess, title? How do you describe what you do? CEO is much easier.

**Thorsten Ball** (0:39)
I'm not going to name my internal title, but I'm...

**Quinn Slack** (0:42)
The dictator of Amp.

**Thorsten Ball** (0:43)
Yeah, that's the internal title, yeah. But it's... Yeah, I'm the lead engineer and one of the creators of Amp, yeah.

**Alessio** (0:50)
So were you part of the thumbs up, thumbs down on Cody brand? Like, how did you get to Amp? Let's tell that story.

**Thorsten Ball** (0:57)
I mean, I'll start, you can jump in, but basically, I came back to SourceGraph 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... A lot of the other stuff that we had in Cody, which works for Cody, let's just start trying this out. And we started a new project and we were, you know, I remember first week here in SF where I would stand up in the middle of the room like, Quinn, you got to see this, 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, you know, see the file system, interact with the file system or your editor. It's a different thing. And we realized we got to handle this differently. We got to reset expectations. We got to tell users that it's a different thing. And they got to use it differently in some sense. And also that we cannot make it work with a $20 subscription, which back then was seen as an offensive thing to say.

**Alessio** (2:22)
And now they're charging money.

**Thorsten Ball** (2:23)
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 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 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 dollars 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? That's, I don't know, want to add? Yeah.

**Quinn Slack** (3:14)
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're really good at ChatRag. And then Cursor and Windsurf showed that kind of IDE forks and partially agentic things could get better and better. And then, you know, the next generation, Amp and Cloud Code. And now you're already seeing people say, oh, well, Codex is better than Cloud Code. And there's not been any tool that has stuck with devs for more than six or 12 months or something.

**Thorsten Ball** (3:54)
Six months, yeah.

**Quinn Slack** (3:55)