From Code Search to AI Agents: Inside Sourcegraph's Transformation with CTO Beyang Liu

**Martin Casado** (0:00)
This is the first time in computer science I can think of where we've actually abdicated correctness and logic to it. Like in the past, it was a reach list, right? So maybe the performance is different, maybe the availability is different, but whatever I put in, I'm going to get back out. But now we're like, figure out this problem for me.

**Beyang Liu** (0:16)
You talk to some devs and they're like, I've never been more productive, but coding isn't fun anymore. That's one of the things that we're trying to solve for. It's like amazing new technology, it feels like magic. Never experienced anything like this before in my life. Then the narrative that was fun was like, this thing will just run our lives for us or it's going to kill us all.

**Martin Casado** (0:33)
Total annihilation.

**Beyang Liu** (0:34)
Terminator. There's just absolutely no danger that this thing's going to acquire a mind of its own and try to reach out to the computer and kill you.

**Guido Appenzeller** (0:41)
If you use this every day, this idea that this thing could take over the world, it's funny. Exactly.

**Beyang Liu** (0:47)
That narrative, I think, has largely been dispelled within our circles. But I think that it's taken on a life of its own in other circles, and it's made its way to some of the halls of policymaking in the US. This is the old adage of like, you know, do you blame it on ignorance or malice? I honestly don't know, but it is clearly like nonsensical and I think very much in the national interests to be still telling this story.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:15)
The United States invented the AI revolution. We built the chips, trained the frontier models, and created the entire ecosystem. For right now, if you're a startup building AI products, you're probably writing your code on Chinese models. Today's guest is Beyang Liu, one of the co-founders of Sourcegraph. Beyang is joined by a16z's Martin Casado and Guido Appenzeller to talk about the shift he's seeing on the front lines of software development today. Sourcegraph's coding agent, which has hit number one on the benchmark for merged pull requests, runs on open source models. Many of them are Chinese, not because of ideology, but because they work better for what the company needs. Here's the tension. Beyang studied machine learning under Daphne Kohler at Stanford. He spent a decade building developer tools. He knows the technology cold. And his view is that we're sleepwalking into a dependency problem. Not because Chinese models are dangerous, but because American policy has made it nearly impossible to compete in open source AI. We dig into why the Terminator narrative around AI safety might be our biggest strategic mistake, whether it's already too late to catch up, and what happens when the atomic unit of software isn't a function anymore, but a stochastic subroutine you can't fully control.

**Martin Casado** (2:29)
Beyang, thanks for coming. So the topic today is AI encoding, but I mean, I would say you're one of the world's experts on this. And so we would love to kind of do a deep dive in kind of how you view the problem, how you view the solution, of course, you're a co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph. Yeah. So we'll talk a bit about that as well. And of course, we've got Guido. Thanks for being here. And so maybe just to start, we can do a bit of a background on you. And then we'll just kind of dig into details.

**Beyang Liu** (2:54)
Yeah. So background, I've been working on DevTools for more than the past decade of my life. I started Sourcegraph about 10 plus years ago. Brought the world's first kind of like production legit code search engine to market and pushed that to, I think, a good portion of the Fortune 500 Prior to that, I was a developer at Palantir. And I guess now it's like the early days, right? That's where I met my co-founder, Quinn, and we were working on data analysis software. And a lot of large enterprise code bases that were kind of like drop shipped into. And realized that there was a big need for better tooling for understanding massive code bases. And then before that, I guess relevant now is, I actually did machine learning as a concentration when I was doing my studies. So, I did some computer vision research.

**Martin Casado** (3:38)
You know that?

**Beyang Liu** (3:39)
Yeah, under Daphne Kohler at the...

**Martin Casado** (3:41)
I didn't know that, you're actually an AI guy.

**Beyang Liu** (3:43)
Yeah, yeah, OGAI.

**Martin Casado** (3:44)
Dawson Angler, like, Tyler Stoff. I thought you were a systems... you talked like a systems guy.