In this episode, Beyang and Thorsten discuss strategies for effective agentic coding, including the 101 of how it's different from coding with chat LLMs, the key constraint of the context window, how and where subagents can help, and the new oracle subagent which combines multiple LLMs.
00:53 Intros
03:35 How coding with agents is very different from coding with prior AI tools that use chat LLMs
10:46 Example of an agentic coding run to fix a simple issue
14:28 Example of debugging an issue with an MCP server
22:05 Example of unifying two build scripts that share logic
25:24 How context window size has emerged as a key constraint on agentic automation
31:16 Why it's best to focus on one thing at a time per agentic thread
33:24 Subagents and how they help extend the effective context window
34:04 The Amp codebase search subagent
38:48 General-purpose subagents
44:20 When to use subagents
47:04 The oracle subagent and o3
51:47 Multi-model agents and using the best model for each job
