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**Adam Stacoviak:** I got into this place where I'm like "You know what, I'm just tired of repeating myself the same things." It's kind of got a little boring. So I was like "Well, let me create a product manager role." And so now I've taught my product manager what I think I know, at least the way to prompt it... And ... |
And so when I had defined this product manager role, especially in this long-running PEP, I would have the product manager review the output from the other agents. So I had two agents going at once... |
**Beyang Liu:** Cool, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...in this case one of them was Amp and the other one was Claude Code, because that one's cheaper for me. You're really expensive, by the way. |
**Beyang Liu:** Well, we do the usage-based pricing thing... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I know, I know... But it's still -- it's costly. We can talk about that. I think it's costly, and that's okay. I'm not fouling you for it, but Amp is, I think - I'll pause here and just say I think Amp's one of the best, if not the best agent out there, and I think your cost is justified; I just don... |
**Beyang Liu:** \[56:12\] We wish we could offer intelligence at a cheaper rate. I think certain things are just dependent on the models, where they are, what size of model you need for a certain level of intelligence, and the cost of GPU inference. One of the things that we haven't done, that others have done, is pric... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's so easy, yeah. |
**Beyang Liu:** So I don't think it's a good business decision for us. And two, it also introduces a perverse incentive. So you brought up model quality degradation earlier in the conversation... And one of the things that we never want to be in a position of having to do is nerfing the models that we're using because ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I think my frame of reference - and maybe even me justifying my comment... So if I was a business who employed multiple people, with multiple salaries, and I can augment them or enhance them - then yeah, in that case... I'm already paying large salaries, and so this is a nominal additive to th... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, yeah. It's what they are. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:00:00.13\] Because you realize how much -- I've always harped on the idea of expectation and clarity. I can't foul you, Beyang, for not doing X if I haven't described X to you. I have to describe X to you, so that you have clarity on what I expect from you. And if we have an agreement on that c... |
So that's how I've been, I think, a better human in my life, is having the understanding. But I think it's gotten even more clear to me how important that is, how important context is... Because just like with framework reference here - I called you to expensive, necessarily you got defensive... It's good, you should d... |
I think it's taught me how important context is in all relationships, whether machine or not. In all aspects, how important is clarity. If something is not clear, how can you come back to me with frustration, anger, disappointment, if the expectation of what you wanted from me was not clear, and we didn't have some bas... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I'll kind of pause there, because I just feel like we kind of went on a little bit there... But the framework reference really is I think that Amp is -- the way I would leverage, the way I think of Amp in my own workflows, I don't have the cash flow or the cash to make you my daily driver. But... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm curious as to how you're prompting Amp, because -- so it's one thing if you're using Amp heavily and you're coding a full workday, every day of the week. In that case, if I look at my usage, I'm probably racking up maybe on the order of low hundreds of dollars per month... ... |
And so for me -- yeah, if you use it heavily, at some point the token cost will exceed whatever flat rate folks charge... But in terms of what you're getting out of it, I feel -- like, I'm using it. I use Amp on my personal credit card for personal side projects, and it's not really an issue for me. For the price of ea... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. |
**Beyang Liu:** \[01:03:48.06\] But I do see some users -- I will say this... The way that people prompt and the behavior patterns around when people start new threads is very different. And we almost want to put out a guide for how to use tokens more efficiently. Here's one thing I've noticed. If you talk to very seni... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I don't know that. |
**Beyang Liu:** If you're talking to very senior engineers on our team, you look at their threads, most of their threads err on the side of being very targeted, and short and sweet. Not trivially short. Not like one message and then you're done. But it's like "I want to do a very specific thing. Go and do it." Okay, on... |
What I've noticed among the people coming from non-technical backgrounds - so we have a ton of people on our go-to-market team, for instance, who are building side projects and games with Amp. I look at their threads, and you've got like 200 messages. It's a thread that's 200 messages long. You fill up the context wind... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I would concur, emphatically. Please teach people how to be more efficient... Because as you described before, it's a skill set you learn. So I'm learning. And the whole even reason why I'm even playing with it is not because I'm trying to really build a bunch of software... I'm just trying to... |
And then because we have a desire to keep the long life of these projects, we have a full system to do all this. And this goes back - I mean, more than a decade we've been doing this practice, an iterative version of what we're doing today. |
Every episode has its own directory, it's got its own workflows and statuses, etc. But when the show's done, by and large, it's done forever, for the most part. Unless we go back to it and remaster it, or unless we go back to it and reference content within it, which then we want to pull that original source and then e... |
\[01:07:39.08\] So I use a technology called 7Z. It's a pretty well-known archiving tool. It's an algorithmic format that I've been using. It generally shrinks things that we do around half. So if it's a 20, 25-gig thing, it's in the 10 to 12-gig artifact long-term. And I will compress the entire thing. |
For a while there, this thing was just a simple Bash script, to be a smarter thing on top of 7Z... Because I forgot how to use -- I wasn't going to keep going back to the documentation of 7Z on how to use it. And so I simplified it by writing a Bash script, like any hacker would, right? And then over time, that Bash sc... |
And I don't like to spend a lot of money on a hard drive, so I want to compress and store forever. So we have a TrueNAS server here on our LAN, all that goes over there, we have this whole entire flow... And so this Bash script really has been my itch. And so I've now developed a tool called 7zarch, or 7zarch, whicheve... |
And so because of these agents and what I'm doing, I'm able to now make that thing what it is. And so those are the things I'm using it for. It's not like I'm an everyday software developer. It's those kinds of things. |
Back to "Help me be more efficient", my gosh... Yes, I've shared with you my exhaustive workflow. I think I am using way too many tokens. I'm definitely not treating threads, especially with Amp, like throwaways. Because in my experience, when the context window collapses, the thing forgets everything. And so I thought... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. Shoot me some of your threads. I think one of the cool things about Amp is you can share your threads with other people. Oftentimes we'll get users sharing their threads and saying "Hey, this is how I built this." Or "Hey, can you help me improve and understand what I could do better?" I would lov... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. |
**Beyang Liu:** I will say, my intuitions are almost inverse from yours. If anything, starting fresh is great, because you know the context window is clean. The more things that you accrue in the context over time, the more possibility for confusing the model there is. And so the quality -- if anything, back when the c... |
\[01:12:20.13\] But I think maybe now we're at the point where we've seen enough where we will be offering some more visual indicators around how much of the context has been used, and where the sweet spot starts to end for some of these models. |
Now it's like you can go up to a million... And I think the quality has gotten better beyond 70k now, but it's still to the point where all things considered, I prefer the rip-off note, let's start a fresh thing. And it's almost like the context that you want it to remember hopefully is captured within the files that i... |
It's almost as a human, when you git commit, you're kind of saying "Okay, I'm committing this, this is one atomic change, and now let me start from a clean slate to do the next incremental thing, where I don't have to worry about all the other stuff, all of the other changes that I made to do the previous thing." It's ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, this is definitely something I think needs to be more clear, because obviously for me it was not... And here's me calling you on the podcast, telling you you're too expensive, and here's me, a user who does not understand how to use your thing... And so it's not really expensive, I was using i... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. And I would say, first of all, we're building the product... We need to build a product experience that makes sense to users. And so it's never the user's fault. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, this is definitely your fault. I would say this is definitely your fault. I was joking around. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, it's definitely our fault. At the same time, the tension that we notice is that - again, coding with agents is a high-ceiling skill. And so there are legitimate use cases that do involve filling up the context window. And so what we don't want to do is we don't want to be overly prescriptive. Beca... |
And there is this tension where the more things that you build into the agent, the more things you build into the UI that are prescriptive, like "You should do it this way, or that way", it runs in direct tension with the desire to create a power tool that lets people use it in the way that they want to use it. So it's... |
I think we'll put out some blog posts to say "Here are the general best practices that we consider are good." But we also don't want to overly constrain people, because one, there might be a power user out there that's getting value out of it in a way that we don't realize. And two, this is all still something that we'... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes... |
**Beyang Liu:** \[01:16:17.10\] The era of coding agents - I think we're six, seven months into it? And so the last thing we want to do is -- you know, guardrails are good, but guardrails can also yield blind spots as the technology evolves. And the last thing we want to do is obstruct the view of our user base and our... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, I think as a response to that, one thing I would suggest is definitely don't change the way Amp works. I would say, if anything, add maybe a slash command that is not so much buried, but enabled if a user wants to go and read documentation, and do an alternate version. So I would keep th... |
**Beyang Liu:** Totally. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...that context window and how to leverage threads is black box to me, personally. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. No, I totally get that, and it's something that we've been actively thinking about for a while now. I think we're one of the first to ship the context window meter... So just like showing you how much of the context window has been filled up; that's an important indicator. I think now I've seen it... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
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