Opinion
Slack: Local software development is dead
“So, you know, local dev, in our opinion, is dead, and that's been a huge change to, you know, how we all build.”
Disclosure
Slack says Amp eliminated mandatory pre-merge code reviews since day one
“Mandatory code review before it gets to main. Yeah, it's dead. It's been dead ever since we started working on AMP.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Slack predicts CLI coding agents could be dead within two months
“And that's the kind of thing that means that this transition, I think, is going to go a lot faster than people think. Because if security and devs both benefit from it, then, you know, I don't know, in two months, we could be seeing CLI coding agents as basica…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Slack predicts traditional CI's days are numbered due to AI
“Every time someone has said, oh, I don't trust the model to do X or Y. That doesn't last for that long. So it just feels like the days of CI as we know it are numbered”
Insight
Slack: AI agents eliminate the need to hire low-agency staff
“And compared to a few years ago, You do not have the need to go and hire people that you do not trust, that you do not trust to have high agency or the right skills, because you can use an agent to do those things.”
Insight
Slack says hiring early PMs or marketers is an outdated practice
“And I see some other companies that are around our size starting to go hire a PM or a marketer or something like that. And that just feels like the old way of building a software business. And ultimately that's gonna lead to something where 10% of the people a…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Slack: AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code will peak and decline
“A lot of these other tools that are great, like cloud code and codex and cursor and so on that they've forgotten what made them great and what made them grow so fast, which is building the very best product. And they built it in a way that's too overfit on the…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Slack: Top AI labs face a major customer stampede within two months
“I think we are one or two months away from a possible news cycle. That is the foundation model companies have spent billions of dollars in capex and hired like crazy. And now, you know, they're no longer the best in this realm and there's a huge stampede away …”
Opinion
Slack: AI prompt enhancers are a 'bullshit feature' that does not work
“Yeah, so prompt enhancer, that's a bullshit feature that doesn't actually work. The theory behind it is nuts, because what helps LLMs is not tricks and phrasing your prompt in a certain way. It's fundamentally information that you have in your head that you ca…”
Opinion
Slack: MCP as user-facing tech creates high token costs and bad UX
“As a user facing technology, it is such a common failure mode where a user will go and add in some MCP servers. Auth is a huge pain, but let's say they get over that hurdle. Then they have, I don't know, 50 tools exposed that often are too low level granularit…”
Insight
Slack: AI agents and code are the ultimate settings screen
“Really an agent is the ultimate settings screen for any software and code is the ultimate setting screen for any software.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Slack: No AI developer tool has retained developers past 12 months
“There's not been any tool that has stuck with devs for more than, Six or 12 months or something.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Slack: Asynchronous background agents will dominate AI inference and output
“That's going to be blown up with async agents when they're running 24, seven concurrently in the background, then you can have 10 or a hundred times as many, and that's going to dominate inference. That's going to dominate the output you get.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Slack: Competitors discounted products up to 100% to win deals against Amp
“So we've had one head to head loss with Amp where we lost against the usual players. And the reason why is one of them discounted their other product a hundred percent for two years. The other one discounted at 85% for two years, which is just crazy.”
Insight
Slack: Users will tolerate bugs for cheap, personalized AI-generated apps
“People assume that coding agents need to meet the bar of writing the exact same kinds of software to the exact same standard, and that is not necessarily an assumption that end users, consumers will apply. If they have software that's much faster, cheaper, muc…”
Insight
Slack: Maintaining legacy workflows creates negative value in fast AI cycles
“The value of keeping users on doing the old thing is, is actually negative. I mean, in the past, you would have a five or 10 year technology cycle, and you could acquire a user, and then they'd be with you for 10 years. But now, if you're not nudging them, yan…”
Disclosure
Slack says Amp abandoned GitHub issues and pull requests
“We're not using issues. We're not using pull requests. We're barely on GitHub actions, and we're looking to get off of that.”
Opinion
Slack: Big cloud sandboxes lack resumption and network access compared to E2B
“And I look at products from other companies like big cloud providers, and they call it a sandbox. They think that they're competing with E to B, but they like lack the ability to resume or like their sandboxes have no network access or something like that.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Slack: Two-to-three person teams reach six-figure run rates on Amp
“So we have teams with like two or three people that are on annual run rates of like hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Disclosure
Slack: Sourcegraph skips months-long compliance checklists for Amp using existing trust
“So there's a lot of things on AMP that we do, like no consistent pricing, no user model choice, no checking off all the boxes that security and compliance and legal want that, you know, takes nine months. We're able to get away without doing that stuff because…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Slack: In-editor UI fix buttons will not matter in 6 to 12 months
“I don't think that that interaction is a really important way that people are gonna be interacting with AI in six months or 12 months.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Slack: Users of cheaper, mid-tier AI coding tools will churn within months
“There's absolutely a market today, literally today, someone will pay a monthly fee for that cheaper AI product today. But they're not going to be paying that in six months. It's going to be a different product, or they're going to be paying for something else.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Slack: Amp only runs tests correctly 90-95% of the time
“Even with a good agents that MD guidance about how to run tests, I still see with AMP. And I think, you know, we've tried to make this really good. It only gets it right maybe 90, 95% of the time. Sometimes it'll run the wrong testing or it won't escape it cor…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Slack: Non-coding board member used Amp to replace $250,000 enterprise software
“And we've had non coders, including one of our board members who built something with AMP that replaced like 250 K a year piece of software that he used for a lot of their internal fund tracking.”
