Amelia Wattenberger, designer at Augment Code and former GitHub Next researcher, argues that AI agents are inverting the difficulty curve of software development: prototyping is getting faster, but the last 30% of any project is getting harder. Her product, Intent, rejects the chat thread as a core primitive and replaces it with a workspace, a deliberate architectural choice that shapes how agents and developers share context across tasks.
The conversation covers real tradeoffs: one worktree per agent versus one worktree per task, the full arc from GitHub Copilot autocomplete to chat to CLI and back to UI, and why the identity of the developer is under pressure as agents take over the keyboard. These are not abstract questions. Wattenberger is building the interface that has to answer them right now, in production, at Augment Code.
Read the full transcript or listen to the episode for her breakdown of why finishing software in an agent-first world requires rethinking tooling from scratch, not just adding a chat box to VS Code. The workspace-as-primitive argument alone is worth the full runtime.
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