Quinn Slack

Quinn Slack is CEO and Member of Technical Staff at Amp and a co-founder and former CEO of Sourcegraph. His work spans code search and frontier coding agents, with a technical emphasis on giving AI developers enough context to evaluate their own output and iterate. He uses the handle @sqs on X, Amp, and GitHub.[2][4][3]

On December 2, 2025, Slack and Dan Adler announced that Sourcegraph and Amp would become separate companies. Adler would succeed Slack as Sourcegraph CEO; Slack and fellow Sourcegraph co-founder Beyang Liu would remain on its board and found Amp Inc. with the other Amp team members. Slack was one of twenty co-founders who signed Amp’s accompanying announcement.[3][8]

Slack and Adler explained the decision through differences in audience and distribution. Sourcegraph served enterprises needing a consistent code-search experience across cloud and self-hosted environments. Amp needed room to explore new models, tools, and agents for developers seeking frontier capabilities. Their conclusion was that separate, focused companies would better serve those different needs. Amp’s co-founders described shipping software as their way to discover how AI would change development.[3][8]

In his March 16, 2024 “Context-first approach to code AI”, Slack argued that autonomous AI developers need an objective function, ƒ(code), that answers whether generated code accomplishes the intended task. Assuming equal access to capable, inexpensive, fast models, he proposed that the quality of this evaluator would distinguish the best AI developer. Context therefore mattered beyond filling a model’s input window: it could also test outputs and guide repeated attempts.[4]

His examples begin with typechecking and passing tests, then extend to a browser agent checking whether an application is broken. The information needed could include code symbols and call graphs, documentation, logs, execution results, screenshots, observability data, and usage analytics. Slack’s proposed evaluator would incorporate at least what a human needs to check whether code works as intended. He also argued that integrations across vendors’ tools would provide richer context than access limited to one vendor’s ecosystem.[4]

In a personal workflow account updated September 7, 2026, Slack described using Amp primarily through the web, followed by his phone and Slack, with terminal use a few times per week and no editor use. He reported dictating 90% of his prompts, usually choosing Medium mode and switching to Ultra for a large new feature.[5]

Verification remains explicit in that account. Slack described asking Amp with Orbs to obtain a macOS Safari performance profile, fix slowness, and demonstrate each step’s impact. He said he always at least spot-checks changes, uses additional agent-assisted review for larger changes, and requests video proof of new UI flows. A recurring instruction is: “Test it exhaustively in your local dev server and prove to me it works”.[5]

Slack appeared with Thorsten Ball on the September 25, 2025 Latent Space episode “Amp: The Emperor Has No Clothes”. Their discussion covered the transition from Cody to Amp, coding-agent tooling, workflow changes, and product evaluation, while Amp was still part of Sourcegraph.[1][3]

Before Sourcegraph and Amp, Slack learned programming through public web resources and online communities. In “Why I love code (and how I started coding)”, he recalls starting at age nine in 1997, when he knew no other programmers.[6]

His first project was a website for his older brother’s little league team, The Pirates. His father, the coach, paid him $10 to publish schedules and lineups so parents would not need to telephone the family for details. Slack recalls discovering that the payment also covered near-daily updates throughout the season: “This was a good lesson that all code written must be maintained.”[6]

Slack connects that experience to his desire to make coding accessible to more people. He identified Sourcegraph’s code search as a way to help people learn from existing code, and Hack Club as the kind of coding community he wished had existed when he was younger. He also acknowledged the advantages of supportive parents and home computer and internet access. Slack studied computer science at Stanford and serves on the boards of Amp, Sourcegraph, and Hack Club.[6][2]