Quinn Slack, CEO of Amp, explains why Amp aggressively deprecates features like code editor extensions rather than supporting backwards compatibility during rapid AI progress.
“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, yanking them to be on the frontier with you, then three months later, they're gonna say, hey, who are these fools in their product that's obsolete, and they're gonna think less of you for it.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Quinn Slack
PredictionNot 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…”
Quinn SlackSep 25, 2025▶ 22:29Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
PredictionNot 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 …”
Quinn SlackSep 25, 2025▶ 30:49Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
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…”
Quinn SlackSep 25, 2025▶ 40:46Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
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…”
Quinn SlackSep 25, 2025▶ 41:44Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes
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.”
This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.