The "Normsky" architecture for AI coding agents — with Beyang Liu + Steve Yegge of SourceGraph

**Alessio** (0:06)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO and resident at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swix, founder of Small AI.

**Swyx** (0:16)
Hey, and today we're christening our new podcast studio in The Newton, and we have Beyang and Steve from SourceGraph, welcome.

**Beyang Liu** (0:24)
Hey, thanks for having us.

**Swyx** (0:26)
So this has been a long time coming, I'm very excited to have you. We also are just celebrating the one year anniversary of ChatGBT yesterday, but also we'll be talking about the GA of Cody later on today. We'll just do a quick intro of both of you, obviously people can research you and check the show notes for more.
Beyang, you worked in computer vision at Stanford, and then you worked at Palantir.

**Beyang Liu** (0:46)
I did, yeah.

**Swyx** (0:47)
You also interned at Google.

**Beyang Liu** (0:48)
I did back in the day, where I get to use Steve's system, DevTool.

**Swyx** (0:53)
Right. What was it called?

**Beyang Liu** (0:54)
It was called Grok. Well, the end user thing was Google code search. That's what everyone called it, or just like CS.
But the brains of it were really the kind of like Trigram index and then Grok, which provided the reference graph.

**Steve Yegge** (1:07)
Today it's called Kythe, the open source Google one. It's sort of like Grok v3.

**Swyx** (1:11)
On your podcast, which you've had me on, you've interviewed a bunch of other code search developers, including the current developer of Kythe, right?

**Beyang Liu** (1:19)
No, we didn't have any Kythe people on, although we would love to if they're up for it.
We had Kelly Norton, who built a similar system at Etsy. It's an open source project called Hound. We also had a Han Wen Nienhuis, who created Zucht, which is, I think, heavily inspired by the Trigram Index that powered Google's original code search, and that we also now use at SourceGraph.

**Swyx** (1:44)
Yeah. So you teamed up with Quinn over 10 years ago to start SourceGraph, and you were indexing all code on the internet, and now you're in the perfect spot to create a coding intelligence startup.

**Beyang Liu** (1:56)
Yeah, yeah. I guess the back story was, I used Google code search while I was an intern, and then after I left that internship and worked elsewhere, it was the single dev tool that I missed the most. I felt like my job was just a lot more tedious and much more of a hassle without it. And so when Quinn and I started working together at Palantir, he had also used various code search engines in open source over the years, and it was just a pain point that we both felt, both working on code at Palantir and also working within Palantir's clients, which were a lot of Fortune 500 companies, large financial institutions, folks like that.
And if anything, the pains they felt in dealing with large complex code bases made our pain points feel small by comparison. And so that was really the impetus for starting SourceGraph.

**Swyx** (2:42)
Yeah, excellent. Steve, you famously worked at Amazon.
Yep. And you've told many, many stories. I want every single listener of Latent Space to check out Steve's YouTube because he effectively had a podcast that you didn't tell anyone about or something. You just hit record and just went on a few rants.
I'm always here for a Stevie rant. And then you moved to Google where you also had some interesting thoughts on just the overall Google culture versus Amazon. You joined Grab as head of Ench for a couple of years. I'm from Singapore, so I have actually personally used a lot of Grab's features.
And it was very interesting to see you talk so highly of Grab's engineering and sort of overall prospects because...

**Steve Yegge** (3:20)
Because as a customer, it sucked?

**Swyx** (3:23)
No, it's just like we... Like, no. Well, being from a smaller country, you never see anyone from our home country being on a global stage or talked about as a startup that people admire or look up to on the league that you, with all your legendary experience, would consider equivalent.

**Steve Yegge** (3:40)
Yeah, no, absolutely. They actually didn't even know that they were as good as they were, in a sense. They started hiring a bunch of people from Silicon Valley to come in and sort of, like, fix it. And we came in and we were like, you know, OE could have been a little better, Operational Excellence and stuff. But by and large, they're really sharp. The only thing about Grab is that they get criticized a lot for being too westernized.