Amelia Wattenberger spent eight years as a front-end developer before the title on her business card turned into "designer" — she's been at GitHub, now she's building Intent.

This conversation covers why developers are mourning their old flow state, the eras of AI coding tools from Copilot to CLI to the app era, why the spec is becoming the new source of truth, and what Amelia means when she says the work is shifting from implementation to intention.

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 - The moment the IDE stopped making sense

• 02:16 - The ladder of abstraction, and a career moving up and down it

• 07:35 - Where the abstraction stops: you can't automate eating ice cream

• 10:29 - Developers are mourning their flow state

• 16:02 - Eras of AI coding tools: Copilot → CLI → the app

• 22:43 - Living specs vs. static PRDs

• 29:38 - Inside Intent: workspaces as desks you pick up and put down

• 39:02 - Plan, implement, review — and where the medium goes next

• 42:46 - Advice for people too employed to pathfind

• 44:33 - Outro: where purpose lives when agents do the rest

LINKS

• Intent: https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent

• Amelia Wattenberger: https://x.com/Wattenberger

• Amelia's Musings: https://wattenberger.com/