Real Talk on Building Coding Agents: A Conversation with Amp's Builder-in-Residence, Ryan Carson

In this episode of Deployed, we sit down with Ryan Carson, Builder in Residence at Amp (Sourcegraph's coding agent) and founder of Treehouse, which taught over a million people to code. Ryan brings a rare dual perspective: he's both building his own company with AI tools and helping create enterprise-grade AI coding infrastructure.

Ryan gives us refreshingly honest insights into the hyper-competitive coding agent landscape, why traditional evals don't work for open-ended coding tasks, and the "dirty secret" that most quality decisions still come down to "dev vibes." We dive into the technical reality of competing with well-funded teams, his systematic framework for building with AI agents (which has 5,000+ GitHub stars), and why success isn't just about model capabilities — it's about solving real developer problems through obsessive attention to user experience.

Whether you're building AI products or trying to understand what it really takes to compete in this space, Ryan's grounded perspective cuts through the hype with practical lessons from the trenches.

Retry