Today's guest is Amelia Wattenberger, former principal research engineer at GitHub and now partner at Sutter Hill Ventures.

But she's also a product lead at Augment Code, where she developed Intent, a developer workspace for orchestrating AI coding agents and delivering complex work.

So this is a fascinating chat into the future and the present of software development with someone who has clearly been at the very frontier of this for many years.

(00:00) Preview

(01:11) Introduction

(03:26) What is "Intent"?

(09:56) Splitting agents for best performance

(12:32) Spec and subtasks

(17:46) Decision and generation

(22:15) Features, opinion and abstractions

(25:37) The note system

(27:41) Attitude is reflected in approach

(35:21) Engineers in the new era of crafting

(37:14) Managing skills applied to an agent environment

(39:46) Orchestrating agents

(45:50) The future of deep specialists

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Today’s sponsor is Intent by Augment. Intent is a developer workspace built for orchestrating agents: it starts with the living spec that updates as agents make progress, so every task stays aligned with no manual coordination. Try it for yourself at https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent

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You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm

• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw

• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club