Exploring with agents with Amelia Wattenberger (Changelog Interviews #680)
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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.
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97 minutes
Recorded Mar 3, 2026
Published Apr 24, 2026
Download (140MB)
Transcript
Amelia Wattenberger – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
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.
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
Chapter Number<br>Chapter Start Time<br>Chapter Title<br>Chapter Duration
00:00
Welcome to The Changelog
01:50
01:50
Sponsor: WorkOS
02:59
04:50
Start the show!
02:22
07:11
Copilot and GitHub Next
07:53
15:04
70/30 flip and software hoarders
05:44
20:48
Open source in the agent age
05:00
25:48
Agent Flow and personal software
04:29
30:17
Sponsor: RWX
02:42
33:00
Gauntlet side quest
02:32
10
35:31
Intent and workspaces before PRs
03:17
11
38:48
Intent and the workspace primitive
03:57
12
42:45
One worktree per task
04:04
13
46:49
Coordinator, implementer, verifier
05:53
14
52:42
Your work is too important to do the work
02:35
15
55:18
Trust the model
05:53
16
1:01:11
Sponsor: NordLayer
01:51
17
1:03:02
The enhance-prompt dance
04:35
18
1:07:36
Developer identity crisis
06:30
19
1:14:06
AI as tool: restraint and what not to build
05:50
20
1:19:56
Reinventing primitives and zoomable maps
06:54
21
1:26:50
Language choices and delivery
04:28
22
1:31:17
Getting started with Intent and where to find Amelia
01:46
23
1:33:03
Wrapping up
01:27
24
1:34:31
Closing thoughts and stuff
02:20
Changelog
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