Changelog Interviews – Episode #632
Reaching industrial economies of scale
with Beyang Liu, CTO of Sourcegraph
Beyang Liu, the CTO & Co-founder of Sourcegraph is back on the pod. Adam and Bryant go deep on the idea of “industrializing software development” using AI agents, using AI in general, using code generation. So much is happening in and around AI and Sourcegraph continues to innovate again and again. From their editor assistant called Cody, to Code Search, to AI agents, to Batch Changes, they’re really helping software teams to industrialize the process, the inner and the outer loop, of being a software developer on high performance teams with large codebases.
Featuring
Sponsors
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
Augment Code – Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates.
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Notes & Links
Chapters
| Chapter Number | Chapter Start Time | Chapter Title | Chapter Duration |
| 1 | 00:00 | This week on The Changelog | 01:26 |
| 2 | 01:26 | Sponsor: Retool | 03:01 |
| 3 | 04:31 | Start the show! | 05:59 |
| 4 | 10:30 | What does it mean to "industrialize" software development? | 05:28 |
| 5 | 15:58 | How did you know AI was coming? | 03:47 |
| 6 | 19:45 | AI Agents are here | 04:03 |
| 7 | 23:48 | Day in the life of an Engineer who uses Sourcegraph | 10:13 |
| 8 | 34:02 | Agent Code Review | 03:26 |
| 9 | 37:27 | Sponsor: Augment Code | 03:09 |
| 10 | 40:36 | Inner Loop vs Outer Loop | 03:33 |
| 11 | 44:10 | We have limited will power | 09:26 |
| 12 | 53:35 | Converting dumb Cron jobs to smart AI Agents | 07:28 |
| 13 | 1:01:03 | Innovating in trusted and controled loops | 01:56 |
| 14 | 1:02:59 | Sourcegraph for Enterprise and Government | 01:48 |
| 15 | 1:04:47 | Challenges building for self-hosted and cloud | 01:41 |
| 16 | 1:06:28 | VS Code is most popular for Cody | 00:57 |
| 17 | 1:07:25 | Just buy Zed? | 07:46 |
| 18 | 1:15:11 | Sponsor: Temporal | 02:21 |
| 19 | 1:17:33 | The state of Frontier AI models | 03:44 |
| 20 | 1:21:16 | How Sourcegraph interfaces with the various models | 02:30 |
| 21 | 1:23:46 | "We partner very closely" with the Frontier AI model developers | 04:03 |
| 22 | 1:27:49 | Speculating on what's to come (DM Beyang for access) | 04:25 |
| 23 | 1:32:14 | How popular is Cody? | 03:18 |
| 24 | 1:35:32 | It's all about the inner/outer loop | 02:44 |
| 25 | 1:38:16 | Achieving industrial economies of scale | 01:01 |
| 26 | 1:39:17 | Read The Mythical Man-Month | 00:39 |
| 27 | 1:39:57 | Closing thoughts and stuff | 03:21 |
| 28 | 1:43:18 | ++ Teaser | 01:29 |