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**Beyang Liu:** I will say for the folks listening, my personal best practice for using agents is, again -- the analogy that I draw when explaining this to people is the context window is sort of analogous to the human brain's working memory. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It makes sense now. |
**Beyang Liu:** \[01:19:48.08\] So there's the old adage, you can't think of more than five, or seven... I forget what the exact number is, but there's only a certain amount of distinct concepts that you can have in your brain's kind of L1 cache or working state, that are immediately, instantaneously accessible at a gi... |
And this is not something -- it's not just long-running threads where this is an issue, it's also an issue with things like MCP servers. MCP is very hot right now, and I think it's great that this protocol -- I mean, we partnered with Anthropic on the initial kind of versions of this. I think it's a great protocol, and... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Babysitting is getting harder, I'm telling you. I mean, this is all leaning back to -- I mean, it makes me rethink my agent flow model. Not in terms of changing it drastically, but more like "Okay, I have to be more efficient with props." I have to be more efficient with maybe a role definitio... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Take your to-do list, pull one off, focus on that. So that's analogous to thread, right? A new thread, focus, context, which role - in my case or in somebody else's case - which PEP, execute. Done. Rip it off, new thread, clear context. To me now that makes a lot more sense. I would love it if you c... |
**Beyang Liu:** \[laughs\] Yeah, we'll put out more material. Actually, just as you were saying that, another analogy that comes to mind... You know, beyond the human brain analogy, there's also an analogy that can be drawn between threads and functions. |
So if you're a developer and you're writing code, you know it's an antipattern to have a thousand-line-long main function. Or a 10,000-line-long main function. Because there's just too much to think about. There's too many ways in which those pieces could interact. So what do you do? You compose that long main function... |
\[01:24:09.13\] And so you can make agents do very powerful things with relatively short threads, using the flow that you describe. If you have a planning thread that generates a plan - well, to generate the plan often doesn't require filling up the entire context window to generate a high-quality plan. But once you ha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It stands alone, yeah. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, exactly. So maybe that's another analogy that could resonate with a developer audience. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure, for sure. Well, I've enjoyed that part of the conversation. I know that while I didn't plan to actually go this deep on how to actually babysit an agent, maybe we could talk about what it takes to raise an agent. I love this podcast y'all did. I think, if I understand too the way Amp came ... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What has it been like to go from there, if that part of the story is true, to raising an agent, building a podcast around it? How has this new journey for you all been? Because I feel like for me, something I've been preaching to a lot of the different brands we work with is that - you know, I love ... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, so the inception of Amp is basically as you described it. Thorsten rejoined the team, and he came in and was trying to figure out what to work on... And I think we'd been talking about wanting to do more agentic stuff for a while. I think the first week he was back, basically I told him "Hey, can ... |
So essentially, he and Quinn went off and basically spun this up. It was like "Let's just do a spike and see where it goes." And that first iteration - I think he's got insanely great taste and great intuition for how to build quality software, that wraps new technology in a way that is tasteful, but unleashes the powe... |
\[01:28:06.01\] And what we quickly realized is how many of the things that we had to kind of rethink from first principles. I think any time a new, amazing, disruptive technology comes online, you really have to force yourself to think from first principles. Because a lot of the rules of thumb and best practices that ... |
The workflow that you just described, the agent workflow - the agent flow workflow - that's something that we, or I at least, heard from some of our users for the first time. So that's not something that I came up with on my own. It's some of the users who were using it heavily reached out and said "Hey, we're using it... |
But a lot of those people, they reach out because they listen to this podcast and they see that we're kind of openly sharing what we're figuring out in real time. And it's a very raw, unadulterated podcast. It's literally like two, sometimes maybe three people on the Amp core team just riffing about some of the topics ... |
I don't know, I don't think we'll start our own channel around that, just because it's very ad hoc. It's like, we only put out an episode -- there's no regular release schedule. It's only when we've shipped something, or we've noticed something that's particularly interesting... Then we'll get together the relevant peo... |
So there's no regularly scheduled programming. It's more of just "Hey, if we learn something cool, let's share it with others and use that as a way to get more smart people who are very on the forefront to figure out what agents can do |
talking to us", because there's a ton to learn from out there. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Mm-hm. This most recent episode you're mentioning was episode eight, if I'm correct... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** 13 days ago. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You sat down with Camden, one of your core team members on the Amp team... Currently sitting at 674 views. I would call that not enough, in my opinion. And it's not your fault. I don't think it's your fault. I think if you keep doing this you'll see the dividends get paid, but... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think -- I look at what you are doing like this and I can't tell if it is or is not weekly, biweekly... I think by and large we've called a podcast - I think there's still this, what we do here. The Changelog is a podcast. There is a rhythm to it. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. There's a rhythm to it.... |
**Beyang Liu:** \[01:32:14.12\] Yeah, I know. I appreciate it. There's certainly things we're going to be doing better on the awareness front, for sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I think you're doing it right, though. So I don't think you should change much, aside from maybe give it more of a first-class citizen structure in terms of what you're doing, but don't feel like you have to be there on the weekly. Don't feel like you have to be there on some sort of ceremony.... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yes, yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The only cost to you is your time. The only cost to you is the literal cost to produce it. It is literally free to you to produce and publish content on YouTube. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Use it. |
**Beyang Liu:** I would say, if there's anyone listening to this that is good at just handling all the publishing stuff... It literally is basically just me, or Thorsten, or someone else on the Amp core team that's just recording and editing and pushing these things out... And so I feel like if we had a halfway decent ... |
For us, it's just a fun way to engage users, and people using coding agents at the moment. We could probably be getting more juice out of those conversations. I will say, though, for us the quality people who listen to it and then reach out and they're like "Oh, hey, I heard you guys talking about this", that in itself... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't think you should feel bad about that, really. My advice is not to shame you by any means, or make you feel -- like, you're doing great. Don't stop doing that. The reason why you show up and it's fun is what makes it enjoyable to watch. So don't change how you assemble the team to sit down an... |
I say keep doing it. I'm enjoying the pod. That's why I brought it up, because I think calling it Raising an Agent only shines a light on the fact that this is burgeoning, that we're all exploring together, and that you're kind of learning in real time and sharing almost in real time too, with the core team. And it beg... |
**Beyang Liu:** \[01:35:59.00\] Cool. I appreciate you saying that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, absolutely. I think even calling it Raising an Agent is just -- it's genius. I don't know who came up with that, but it's genius. |
**Beyang Liu:** I think Thorsten. Credit goes to him. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Something needs to be done with him, because he is the brainchild behind this... I think even the -- you might remember this, I emailed you... A few months back, when the Amp code website was, I would say, in its very, very infancy... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And the web copy, the copywriting on that page was stellar. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, I think I misspoke at the time. For whatever reason, I thought I had seen a Slack message where Quinn was like I wrote it, but it was actually Thorsten... And he's an amazing writer. He puts out a weekly newsletter too, called Joy and Curiosity, where he just talks about cool and delightful things... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I'm a big fan of Thorsten. We had him on the podcast GoTime a long time ago. That's where I first met him. He'd written a couple books since then.... And then whenever we were changing the cast members out to kind of invite more folks into the GoTime podcast world, he was on my list. And so I ... |
And this is way before this world we're in now. This is when it was code search, code intelligence, which is not something to be -- not a pejorative, but wow, how much progress. That's why I've been so enamored by you personally, and Quinn and Sourcegraph, because I've seen your story arc since 2014, when we interviewe... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, I remember that. |
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