Episode 7

In this episode, Beyang and Thorsten discuss strategies for effective agentic coding, including the 101 of how it's different from coding with chat LLMs, the key constraint of the context window, how and where subagents can help, and the new oracle subagent which combines multiple LLMs.
00:53 Intros 03:35 How coding with agents is very different from coding with prior AI tools that use chat LLMs 10:46 Example of an agentic coding run to fix a simple issue 14:28 Example of debugging an issue with an MCP server 22:05 Example of unifying two build scripts that share logic 25:24 How context window size has emerged as a key constraint on agentic automation 31:16 Why it's best to focus on one thing at a time per agentic thread 33:24 Subagents and how they help extend the effective context window 34:04 The Amp codebase search subagent 38:48 General-purpose subagents 44:20 When to use subagents 47:04 The oracle subagent and o3 51:47 Multi-model agents and using the best model for each job