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**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, exactly. But now, because the terminal's so versatile - you can deploy a coding agent in a huge number of places if it's in a terminal form, right? Because you don't have to install a graphical interface, you don't have to go through any of the loopholes you have to do... Or not the loopholes, but... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's clear you are. |
**Beyang Liu:** Because at the end of the day, you want to use something that's delightful, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I can gush about a lot, but I think just the animation of that orb initially was really cool... And I think it's changed over time. I can't tell, because I never snapped a perfect memory shot of it in my brain, but I think it's changed over time and it's gotten different colors, and maybe even... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. It's gotten better, and I do want to call out that -- so we just shipped a new terminal UI yesterday, as of this recording... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? Okay. |
**Beyang Liu:** \[27:59\] And it's actually using a new terminal UI framework that was built in-house, specifically for Amp. And one of the things that's immediately obvious if you use it is that there's no flicker. So we were using Ink beforehand, which is very popular, and frankly, a very great framework. But one of ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This date, just so everybody knows - we're recording on September 3rd. So yesterday was September 2nd. If you can't do calendar math, I did it for you there... I'm not sure if I noticed that the UI has changed much, but I have noticed the flicker, and I thought it was -- like anybody doing this, I d... |
And so this history to me is really important, and I've been collecting little text files, basically... Because I didn't realize - or I don't think everybody has your gumption, where "Hey, these threads, these transcripts are kind of important to spelunk if you're a week or so past", or what the true conversation was, ... |
**Beyang Liu:** Oh, I usually just say the user, or the human... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The user. Okay, cool. You know, me as the user, I've been collecting little prompts and little things that... Nothing major, but just things I'm doing frequently. I've come to this -- my usage pattern has gotten to this point where I feel like I need to define roles. Similar to how you'd build out a... |
**Beyang Liu:** \[laughs\] Yeah, I talked to a lot of users and a lot of people have some variant of that. It's almost like they've built up a library of prompts for specific task types. I think a lot of people have built up some sort of template for listing out -- it's a combination of like "Here's how to structure yo... |
\[32:18\] First of all, generate a plan at all, if you want to do a longer-running task. Generate a plan, here's a couple pointers about how to structure that... And then maybe there's a couple pointers about the codebase as well. We have introduced this thing called agents.md. I think it's pretty standard now across m... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, how do you feel about the user experience, the way a user interacts? So you said you interact with a lot of different users who have different ways, and all that good stuff... I've been working on a -- since I've been building my skills to be an agent babysitter, I've kind of come to this idea... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And so I've come up with this idea of Agent Flow. I would say the protocol is called Document-Driven Development, and the implementation is called Agent Flow. How do I get agents to understand how I want to flow with it? We vibe and we flow, and so I'm like "Okay, Agent Flow sounds kind of cool." I ... |
And then I think the additive to that, that really sort of solidifies Agent Flow for me - and you sort of mentioned it - was "How do you give it its list? How do you give it its direction?" And I just borrowed it from the great language of Python. They have PEPs, Python Enhancement Proposals. And they have a whole syst... |
And so I took the same acronym, PEP, and I just said "This is a Project Enhancement Proposal." And so for every new thing, every new idea I have, it begins as riffing or vibing as you would, but it's all about developing this document called a PEP. And the PEPs have numbers... So it could be PEP-0031. Maybe I'll need 1... |
\[36:20\] So once we're done with the PEP and we've done X, Y, or Z, not just the completion report inside that PEP, but more like "What did we learn that is now an institutional knowledge for you as an agent, or any other agents, or any of the team members I bring on later on?" Even internal blogs, or what I'm calling... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, I think that fits with the way that a lot of people use Amp, actually. I think the more sophisticated, intentional users have a very intentional design process, that often starts with the human generating a lot of tokens describing what they want. And the length of the complexity of the task that ... |
So that's a very intentional workflow, that -- there's a certain set of our users that are all about trying to do as much as possible in a fully automated fashion. And the ones that are trying to do that are essentially doing exactly what you're doing; they're trying to build this workflow around the human being, the p... |
I will say that that is an important set of use cases, and I find myself doing that from time to time... But there are a lot of other workloads that are -- I would say, me personally, I run threads using the workflow that you described, relatively frequently, but not necessarily every day. Because oftentimes, especiall... |
\[40:10\] I'd say if you look at most of my threads, most of them don't involve a specific plan generation step. It's more like "Hey, where's the part of the codebase that pertains to this, and can you give me an explanation of how it currently works?" And then I have this idea... "Help me think through a couple possib... |
So yeah, most of my workflows are probably somewhere between those two points along the spectrum. It's either very casual, still thoughtful prompts, but not following a specific structure... All the way to "I know exactly what I want, because this is very similar to something I've done before", or the feature is very c... |
**Break**: \[41:19\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think what you just described too is the exact way I work as well... And the way I would change, or maybe even suggest you to - and maybe you do this - is I'll what I call riff. I'll riff for a little bit with it. I'll explore. I might ask a question. I might ask it to help me think through some t... |
**Beyang Liu:** I love that, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And so I just kind of keep these PEPs as this constant - I don't want to call it a junk drawer necessarily, but it's a place to put something. I'll riff for a bit, I'll explore for a bit, but the moment there's clarity or any sort of visibility, I want the model to kind of put all the context we've ... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. Do you commit those to the Git repository, or are they in some temporary folder? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, right now it's not open source. I've wondered about that. Like, "Should all this be there?" And I feel like maybe as one of the earliest humans living in this almost three-year-old world, where this new phenomenon is on my command line, I almost feel a requirement to future humanity to commi... |
My agent flow, the way I described it at least, puts all this stuff not in the root, but in a folder called admin. One, I want it to be at the top of the stack when I look at my -- I still use Zed, I still use a code editor, but it's mostly a code viewer for me. I'm editing some things... I'm not doing a lot of coding ... |
**Beyang Liu:** Gotcha. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...all these different things there. Or even the role files. Those all live in the admin folder, which is sort of like me as the product owner, CEO of this directory, that is now a project, that's how I look at it. This is all admin stuff, and I put it there. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yup, makes sense. I like that. And I like having - it's almost like an audit log for how the code was generated. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Absolutely. |
**Beyang Liu:** And I feel like it might be an area of untapped potential there, because I think one of the things that would be helpful, especially if you're going back and reading it later, or if someone needs to review that code, is to see the audit trail of "Oh, okay, this was the plan that generated this code, and... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yup. |
**Beyang Liu:** \[48:11\] I feel like a lot of time in code review is often spent trying to piece together what the high-level intention was, especially if the person on the other end underspecified what they're trying to do. And so you almost have to play archaeologist a little bit, trying to piece together what the h... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I was moving so fast, I was like "I've got to capture this exhaust. I don't want to slow down and read it, but I want it to get created." So when I can slow down and think about some of these things, it's there. So the way I looked at these builder logs, essentially, was that they were the wha... |
In a builder log, I kind of want the agent, the developer, to tell me what they encountered along this journey. What thorns did they get stuck on? Where did they get cut? Where did they apply a band-aid? How did they apply whatever, and what were they trying to do? What were the blockers? What were the learnings in the... |
The knowledge base article is more like "how to use it, why we use it this way" kind of thing, whereas the builder log is more the journey of the developer during implementation. What are all the things that you encountered there? And honestly, it's been paramount, I think, to -- I don't want people to think that I'm s... |
So it sort of allowed me the ability to, when I want to keep making progress - because I feel like this stuff is just so... I don't want to call it addictive, but tantalizing. I've never been able to do this kind of thing at this level of X, 10X, 20X productivity level, ever in my life, right? |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. And I think one of the first wow moments or points of realization for me with Amp, too - this was very early on. It was back in probably April, or something. I had one of these weekend experiences where I was taking care of our kid... We have a two-year-old at home. So ... |
Whereas with the agent, if the thing that you're doing is within the capability of the agent, and you're able to remain at the high level, you can absolutely do this async thing where it's like "Okay, let me tell you what I want you to do. Let me give you some detail. Let me maybe give you some pointers for how to vali... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[52:11\] I love that sound. |
**Beyang Liu:** And it's almost Pavlovian now, where I will hear it and I'm like "Oh, it's time to go and check on what the status of that thread was", and we'll go see what the agent hath wrought and see if it's good or if it needs more adjustment. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I've found that Amp is the one that I can most easily set loose on a task. And I told you, I've described my PEP ways, and so everything that is long-running is not me prompting it necessarily. It is this riffing to a PEP that has clarity, it's got conviction, it's got pros and cons... It's go... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I don't know if we have -- we definitely do not have one weird trick that makes it work better in certain cases than others... All I can say is that we are very heavy dog fooders of our own product. Everyone on the team is using Amp to write probably north of 80% to 9... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** One thing I've done recently - and we can keep going deeper on how we use it if you'd like to; I'm having fun with this - is... I told you about the roles. And so rather than just define a good Go developer role, let's just call it, or a "I need to deploy to Linux, so I need a Linux platform enginee... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. |
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