Refactoring Podcast

What Comes After the IDE 🖥 — with Amelia Wattenberger

March 20, 2026·51 min
Episode Description from the Publisher

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 https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

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