Thorsten Ball, Amp lead at Sourcegraph, discusses how the Amp engineering team evaluates product quality without relying on formal automated benchmark evals.
“I think we don't have any set evals. We don't. And this was controversial up until a week ago, I think, when I think Boris from
Or two weeks ago from Anthropix that they don't have evals for the coding agent too.
But we don't, and we haven't had them.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
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More from Thorsten Ball
Disclosure
Ball: Amp core team has 8 people, ships 15 times daily without code reviews
“I think we're around eight people now on the AMP core team, and we still don't do formal code reviews. We still push to main. We still ship 15 times every day.”
Thorsten BallSep 25, 2025▶ 10:55Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Ball: Complex sub-agent workflows will result in user hangovers
“A lot of the features what we see, you know, where people build like elaborate workflows, like I have my custom slash commands and they trigger custom Custom sub-agents and they in turn trigger custom MCP tool calls behind which again another model is doing in…”
Thorsten BallSep 25, 2025▶ 35:22Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
Insight
Ball: AI coding tools must optimize harness and scaffolding per model
“And people are now also waking up to the fact that it's not just the model, it's the system prompt, it's the tools, it's the harness. The scaffolding around the model. So I can give you the choice to use Gemini 2.5 in, in AMP, but without the system prompting …”
Thorsten BallSep 25, 2025▶ 24:45Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Ball: Foundation models will become background implementation details in AI tools
“So I think we're going towards a future where the model will become an implementation detail to some sense, and we will end up on a different abstraction layer.”
Thorsten BallSep 25, 2025▶ 26:02Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
Insight
Ball: Coding agents should outsource typing, not engineering thinking
“The failure mode of outsourcing the thinking, but not the typing, which I think it should be the opposite. You still have to know engineering. You still have to know how to program. You still have to know your application and its architecture, how it's deploye…”
Thorsten BallSep 25, 2025▶ 37:47Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
Insight
Ball: Custom MCP tools fail if workflows diverge from frontier training
“If I give it this other custom-made MCP that we built internally, and our processes don't map to anything that OpenAI and Anthropic have seen or trained for, it won't be used, and you won't get good results.”
Thorsten BallSep 25, 2025▶ 49:15Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
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