What Comes After the IDE 🖥 — with Amelia Wattenberger

What Comes After the IDE 🖥 — with Amelia Wattenberger

From Refactoring Podcast by Luca Rossi

March 20, 2026 · 52 min · Episode 59

About this episode

Amelia Wattenberger discusses the future of software development and AI coding agents.

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 — 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…

People in this episode

Host: Luca Rossi

Guest: Amelia Wattenberger

Topics covered

  • software development
  • AI coding agents
  • developer workspace
  • orchestrating agents
  • future of engineering

Keywords

  • software development
  • AI
  • Intent
  • orchestrating agents
  • developer workspace

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: GitHub, Sutter Hill Ventures, Augment Code

Products: Intent

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