Thorsten Ball (Amp): All the Models Want is Tokens and Tools

Hugo Santos — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:14:44 GMT

Ten years ago, Thorsten Ball (Co-founder, Amp) published Writing an Interpreter in Go, a book that shows how to type out every line. Now Amp has ripped out tab completion, because nobody types code anymore.

Today, Hugo Santos (Founder, Namespace) sits down with Thorsten to discuss what it’s like building from the frontier.

00:00 Intro
00:48 Thorsten's books on interpreters and compilers
02:00 Is it still worth learning how interpreters work?
05:09 Do drivers need to know the engine?
10:06 Three booleans vs. one enum
13:05 Sourcegraph, Zed, and back again
16:17 The bash-only prototype that became Amp
17:58 Spinning Amp out of Sourcegraph
21:51 Killing features people liked
24:22 Same team, much bigger product
25:33 Two meetings a week, no hiring
28:52 Building the new docs page with agents
29:51 "We thought it would be fun"
34:31 Cloudflare's 30-second timeout
37:35 Rebuilding on Rivet over a weekend
38:03 Agent threads that run for three weeks
39:23 When Google killed a FoundationDB node
40:39 Can the agent read the logs?
43:04 Features with no UI

https://ampcode.com
https://namespace.so

Once In The Trenches

Thorsten Ball (Amp): All the Models Want is Tokens and Tools