Once In The Trenches

Hugo Santos

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A tech podcast that's actually about tech. Hosted by Namespace Founder Hugo Santos.

Oct 22

Thorsten Ball (Amp): All the Models Want is Tokens and Tools

Ten years ago, Thorsten Ball (Co-founder, Amp) published Writing an Interpreter in Go, a book that shows how to type out every line. Now Amp has ripped out tab completion, because nobody types code anymore. Today, Hugo Santos (Founder, Namespace) sits down with Thorsten to discuss what it’s like building from the frontier. 00:00 Intro 00:48 Thorsten's books on interpreters and compilers 02:00 Is it still worth learning how interpreters work? 05:09 Do drivers need to know the engine? 10:06 Three booleans vs. one enum 13:05 Sourcegraph, Zed, and back again 16:17 The bash-only prototype that became Amp 17:58 Spinning Amp out of Sourcegraph 21:51 Killing features people liked 24:22 Same team, much bigger product 25:33 Two meetings a week, no hiring 28:52 Building the new docs page with agents 29:51 "We thought it would be fun" 34:31 Cloudflare's 30-second timeout 37:35 Rebuilding on Rivet over a weekend 38:03 Agent threads that run for three weeks 39:23 When Google killed a FoundationDB node 40:39 Can the agent read the logs? 43:04 Features with no UI https://ampcode.com https://namespace.so

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A tech podcast that's actually about tech. Hosted by Namespace Founder Hugo Santos.

Creator

Hugo Santos
Years Active

2026
Episodes

1
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© 2026 Hugo Santos
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Once In The Trenches