Today on the show I’m talking with Amelia Wattenberger — designer, data-viz veteran, ex-GitHub Next, and now designing Intent at Augment Code. What if the last 30% of any software project is about to become the hardest part you’ve ever done? That’s the argument Amelia is making today. We discuss the identity crisis developers are having as agents take over the keyboard, the epic redesign of developer tooling in this agent-first world, the arc from autocomplete to chat to CLI back to UI, why Intent treats a workspace as their core primitive not a chat thread, the tradeoffs between one-worktree-per-agent vs. one-worktree-per-task, and why she thinks prototyping just got easier but finishing got harder.

Changelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

WorkOS – Auth for CLI with AuthKit from WorkOS — Bring secure browser-based login to your terminal apps using the OAuth Device Flow, with the same polished AuthKit experience plus SSO, MFA, and passkeys. Learn more at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.com
NordLayer – Toggle-ready network security for modern businesses. Get an exclusive offer: up to 22% off NordLayer yearly plans plus 10% on top with the coupon code changelog-10-NORDLAYER. Try it risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee at nordlayer.com/thechangelog
RWX – CI/CD platform for high velocity teams. When agents help developers write code in minutes, validation becomes your bottleneck. RWX gives agents programmatic control, sub-second cached builds, and semantic outputs they can act on. No commit required. Just iterate until CI passes, then push.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.

Featuring:

Amelia Wattenberger – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

GitHub Copilot — the launch that kicked off this era (mentioned ~12×)
GitHub Next — GitHub’s R&D team; where Amelia worked
GitHub Actions
Intent — Augment Code’s new workspace-first agent app that Amelia is building (the core product discussion)
Augie — Augment’s agent
Claude Code
Codex
Notion AI
VS Code
Incus — system-level containers/VMs; the Canonical LXD fork
Proxmox — Adam’s hypervisor platform for the sandbox
ZFS — storage layer Incus is built on
Bun — JavaScript runtime
Rust
Go
Ruby on Rails
SvelteKit
Svelte
TypeScript
TanStack Start

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Exploring with agents (Changelog Interviews #680)