Quinn Slack puts ads in a coding agent to make AMP free — and it's already covering 80% of model costs

like it's not a sure thing but it's almost a sure thing that if you you know, a billion DAUs using your website for 30 minutes a day, you can advertise to them. Uh, it's it's it's very very proven. Um, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Our next guest is Quinn Slack, the CEO of AMP. How you doing?

What's happening?

Welcome to the show.

Hey guys, good to be here.

Great to have you.

Thanks so much for hopping on. I'm glad that we were able to get you on. We love ads. We were just talking about ads actually in the chat context.

No one likes ads more than us.

But uh but fascinating ads.

Exactly. That's why I'm excited to talk to you.

Uh so please uh introduce yourself and the company a little bit and then we'll get into it.

I am Quinn Slack. I'm the CEO and co-founder at Source Graph. We make AMP this coding agent.

Uh I love coding and I mean AI is just crazy for coding in Opus 45 today. It's mindblowing,

but it's also expensive and that sucks because a lot of people can't use it. And it also means that we don't learn fast enough about how people are using it because it's a tiny fraction of the world that's actually using AI to code in the kind of unconstrained way that you want to if if you're really going to learn. So, we took a look at these problems and that's how we ended up with this crazy idea of putting ads in a coding agent.

I love it. Okay. I I have like I want to understand what that exactly means. And I'm going to pitch you like five different instantiations of that. One is uh I go to the more the agentic commerce route. I go to your coding agent. I say, "Okay, I'm ready to deploy this and then it runs an auction to see, hey, there's a deal on Azure, so we're going to host it over there." As opposed to Amazon or it could be putting ads for Amazon or Azure or GCP and the comments of the actual code. So when I go review the code, I see ads. Or it could be while it's cooking, it's showing me ads in the terminal. Like what where are you actually surfacing these ads? So the interesting thing about coding is you are in this all day long. It's not like amazon.com ads where you go there right when you have that intent but you also use the coding agent when you have intent. So we kind of get both. We get those hey you're asking it I want to deploy where should I deploy? Should it be on uh you know cloudflare or whatever but you also are staring at it and AI coding agents are kind of slow. I'm not saying we make it slower so that we show more ads [laughter]

but it's up on the screen and it knows what your text stack is. So, if you're Cloudflare and you see that they're using S3 and they're doing a bunch of dumb stuff with it, well, that's a great place for you to show ads about not only Cloudflare, but specifically which of their products is better and how much better, and then you click a button and the agent can go and switch you to it. So, I mean, it feels like I I love this thesis because it worked for Uber and you've seen a bunch of companies where they've had a whole bunch of attention and they've just built big ad businesses and you know, Uber just shows you ads while you wait for your car. Basically, it's like it's not rocket science. It's like a pretty simple thing. Um, at the same time, a lot of it, a lot of times when this works, it works because someone's created this pool of attention that there's just, you know, millions of people opening open this app or they're using that. They're staring at this particular screen and there's real estate. And I see that real estate in the chat GPT app where people just open it up and there's a big blank screen. You can put an ad there or while while it's waiting. Um, but do you have to go and get people on board and and get them off of competitor uh coding agents and and competitive idees? Like how much do you have to do to replplatform the customer to you and then start showing them ads or can you partner with other pieces of the stack to just plug in quicker?

We're going to follow this where this goes. So yeah, we're open to partnering with others.

I think other people are kind of waiting and seeing because this idea was so crazy. um a free coding agent and ads make AMP free in this mode.

It's it's really compelling and that audience is growing a lot.

Sure.

Um we keep making the model better and better. Like initially we uh had it so ads were actually covering more than our cost. Then we made the model six times more expensive and now they're covering half. But now with Opus 4.5 I think it's going to be like you know probably covering 80% of the cost because it's it's actually cheaper. So, we got to keep making the model better and better that it uses and free AI. It's pretty compelling.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

I'm already I already know if TBPN run some ads in there. I know the copy. Develop an ear for TBPN.

Yeah.

What do you think?

I like it.

I mean, you can you can go. Why don't you try it? Just Yeah. But if you

Is it Is the ad platform self-s served yet or are you guys just doing it one like uh by by hand for now? You can go in and put the ads self-s serve. It feels like all of a sudden overnight we are building this new ads business. Um my wife works at Google. She sells ads. Uh you know they've seen the business but there's so much complexity and it's like a three-sided marketplace now. So

it's really doing God's work.

Truly.

Yeah. We love it. We love it.

Uh yeah. Yeah. I guess uh any any kind of like comps to this like that you've used to kind of like talk with advertisers about it like is there is there another kind of advertising that's sort of similar in the sense of like you know like like clearly have people's like very specific attention at a specific moment in time where they're making oftentimes making product and business decisions. Any any kind of areas that you've learned from or you just kind of freestyling?

We're freestyling. It's a different place to put ads and it's kind of hilarious that of AI products the first place you know I think we're we're the first or one of the first that it shows up in your terminal in your editor but I think the fact that it captures the intent and it's always up on your screen it's different so we're I would love it if there's more people doing this but there's so many other companies we went to and they said well we kind of want you to take all the flames first on the advertiser side though they were incredibly willing like we had a really high hit rate and uh some of them I you know other DevTools CEOs I would email them and say hey do you want to advertise and after a day when they hadn't gotten back to me I thought like oh they probably think we're total idiots but then they got back to me and they ended up doing this.

Yeah. No, it makes I mean it makes a lot of sense especially when you have the uh when you can show an ad and have one eventually maybe it's not that way today but basically oneshotting the implementation of certain products like that just like contextual advertising uh in in this context is going to be super powerful. Uh any any ad haters pushing back yet? Obviously, I'm sure you have an ability to get people to like opt you can opt out of ads, I'm I'm assuming, by just paying for the right tier.

Yeah. Well, we want to show ads in the more premium modes, too. So, got to figure [laughter] out that's when we're going to get the ads.

Actually, no. Actually, no. Actually, you can't opt out of the ads. You're getting ads no matter what. I love it.

Yeah. I think if you're not getting the haters, then you're not pushing the envelope enough. And so much of what we realized when we launched AM Free is we should have been like 10 times bolder about it because it was received surprisingly well and it's making a lot more money than we thought.

So we're going to push the envelope. But all of this just means it means more people can use code AI in a totally unconstrained way and see this thing that just blows our minds.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it seems really cool uh for just like Yeah. I can imagine so many people. This is what I would have used in college. I definitely would not be paying $200 a month or something for something. I'd probably be interning at a

at a at a startup that uh or at at a live show that pays for my AWS bills. Um [laughter] but uh uh can you can you just uh zoom out for us and give us a little bit of uh like what the corporate hierarchy is like AMP and Source Graph? Have you raised money? What are the shape of these companies and products? How everything fits together in your world? Yeah, we started source graph back in 2013 actually with this idea let's automate software development and uh we started out building code search at source graph and that's like Google for all the code. Yeah,

it's this especially now with AI AI is doing like a thousand times more code searches. Yeah,

it is this critical infrastructure. It's

we're the only ones doing it at that scale. And then we've also got AMP. So these two products under one roof, Code Search and AMP. Yeah. And AMP is the frontier coding agent. We're trying to make it a year ahead for 1% of devs out there. Y

and just be totally crazy. Yeah.

And you might say, well, ads is incompatible with that. Ads is all about getting a big audience.

But actually, what ads do, they're in service of the research objective for AMP. It lets us not have to go and jump if some customer says jump with this requirement that's going to hold us back. It gives us so much more freedom to just change the model, change how it works. So, you know, in that way ads, it actually does really nicely fund a kind of research lab for us with AMP. I guess in the same way that Google ads mean that it can do whatever the hell they want and they can, you know, fund a lot of experimentation internally.

Yeah.

So, we got these two products under one roof.

Well, what were some of the trade-offs uh you made when you were building the first uh coding agent? Um, obviously there were people that trained, you know, foundation models themselves. Other people just wrote harnesses and they're swapping out uh the different models from the big labs. Uh, how did you think about the different decisions that you made?

We decided let's see how far we can get without trying to train our own god model. Let's depend on anthropic or openai and Google. And ever since we we started with AMP, which is, you know, we started that in February, we honestly thought there was going to be a model competition a lot sooner. And it actually only started happening in a big way last week with Gemini 3. We switched AMP's model over to Gemini 3.

It was a huge leap forward. And then today, you know, back to loving Opus 4 5. I think [laughter] we're going to switch back to that.

Yeah. But I am I glad that we didn't go spend billions and billions of dollars training a model that was 1% worse and yet nobody used it. No, I'm really happy to be occupying, you know, this this uh place.

Yeah. So, you don't surface the you don't have a model picker in in the in the agent. I it's not like I can as a customer say I'm willing to watch all the ads and get all the ads, but I really prefer Gemini 3 or Codeex or Opus 45, for example. I I don't get to pick.

Yeah. No. No model picker.

Got it. Cool.

Um well,

last question. What uh what do you think about uh integrating other types of uh

products products in the IDE? We were talking about

Chad IDE, putting gambling in the product. Do you think that that do you think there's a world in the future like three years from now where people are have enough time between like running different tasks and agents that they just have time to like goof around in the in in these uh in in the IDE or or in various developer tools or is that kind of like an of the- moment uh kind of like problem solution? I think you should be able to bet, you know, get some Kashi Manifold Markets stuff in there. Uh, you should, you know, there should be

You should What ad are you going to You should let people bet on what ad they're going to get next.

Yeah.

Whichever one they want.

I think I I I I I don't know if you're joking, but I think you can go too far. We've seen people get uh, you know, uh, go viral, but be potentially flash in the pan over

Yeah. We'll see if I'm joking.

Okay. Yeah. I think gambling is is taking it too far, but there's a lot of stuff we can explore.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean that the ads business, I mean Google made a hundred billion dollars from ads in Q3. I think uh there might be enough opportunity there.

One last question. Are you hyperactive in Slack?

Yes, of course.

Are you,

you know, my great-grandfather started it,

invented it back in the 1800s.

Yes. Yes.

I'm proud to see what it's become.

Yes.

Amazing.

Like Microsoft Teams guy. Uh yeah, great great to meet very very cool very very cool product. Um and uh yeah,

thanks to have you back soon.

Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon.

See you.

Have a good one. Bye.

Um [applause]

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